Serial

Webnovels are written in public, one chapter at a time, often for years — and most tools around them ignore that lifecycle. I built Serial to treat a long story as a living thing: for authors, somewhere to grow it chapter by chapter; for readers, somewhere to follow it without ever losing their place.

What it is

Authors create novels with descriptions, genres, tags, and covers; manage chapters through a dashboard; write in a rich editor; and reorder contents as the story evolves. Existing works can be imported in bulk. Readers get a personal library with saved progress that resumes exactly where they stopped, plus notifications when followed stories publish something new. Discovery works through search and suggestions — similar reads, popular in a genre, new from followed authors. Comments, moderation, and an admin area keep the community side healthy.

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What it taught me

• Two homes for data means a synchronization job. Search and recommendations need their own copy of the catalog, kept honest against the source of truth. Invisible in the feature list, constant in the maintenance.
• Progress is a promise. Readers forgive many things; they don't forgive losing their place in a six-hundred-chapter story.
• Recommendations begin with emptiness. "Because you read" needs history, "from authors you follow" needs follows — every suggestion feature is also a cold-start problem.
• Import is a form of respect. Creators arrive with years of work in formats I didn't invent. Careful, forgiving ingestion turned out to be one of the most human parts of the platform.
• An editor is a product inside a product. Rich text, ordering, drafts, previews — writing comfortably is its own domain.

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Where it stands

Built and working end to end — the code is public on GitHub.