Here is a rundown on the new features for publishing a story:
When you write a story, the Save button does just that: it saves where you are as a Draft and the story will show up in your Stories>Drafts area. Your editing session will remain on the Write panel so you can keep saving as you go.
The arrow alongside the Save button offers further resources that may help during the writing process: tips and links to forum threads to ask for advice/help, or to read about how others have approached storytelling.
Once you have added all the necessary fields, information at the bottom tells you the benefits of adding optional fields. Up to you if you choose to follow the advice.
When your story is ready, hit the Preview button. That will take you to a screen showing you what your story will look like on the site when published. This step helps because, sometimes, copy and paste from word processors or text editors can have unintended consequences in published material. For example:
1. Indenting lines can sometimes render an entire paragraph indented as a block quote.
2. Newlines / hard returns can creep in, which gives the text random line and paragraph breaks.
3. Hidden control characters copied from a word processor can sometimes render chunks of the story in bold or italics or in an odd paragraph style.
Etc...
So scroll/read through your story preview and check it looks good. It's your opportunity to make sure the cover looks fine, the one-liner reads right, the title and tags are spelled correctly, the story body text is formatted nicely, and so forth. If there's anything not quite right, you can go back to the draft and fix it prior to final submission.
Once you're happy with your work, hit the Submit button from the Preview panel and the story will be sent to the moderation queue.
That's it for editing/submitting, but there are a few peripheral extras now too:
A) Your draft stories are linked to the Edit step from your profile, allowing you to jump right back into editing mode.
B) If your story has not yet been locked by a moderator (i.e. it is still in the general queue) you can recall it back to your drafts and make changes. Handy if you spot something like a typo or incorrect quote mark/punctuation you missed the first time round. Once a story is locked by a moderator, it cannot be recalled. Edits can only be made after publication or after it has been returned for further work.
C) If you send a link to any of your draft stories to someone else, they can access it. Handy for getting assistance from editors.
That pretty much sums up the changes. Hope it helps.
