A release schedule for a web serial

If you post a story a chapter at a time (on Royal Road, Substack, Wattpad, AO3 or anywhere else), Rescriptus can keep the schedule: which chapter goes out on which day, which are already out, which is next, and how many are ready to go after it. That last number is your buffer. Nothing is sent anywhere and nobody is reminded: the dates are yours, in your own files, and Rescriptus never posts for you.

Give a chapter a date

In a chapter, open the Details tab. Release date is the day the chapter is meant to go out. Released on is the day it did go out, and a chapter with a day there counts as released. Both are your browser's date boxes, and Clear empties one. Press Save details. You can also set dates on the plan (see below).

Days are your own calendar days, with no time and no time zone: a chapter due on the 3rd is due on the 3rd wherever you are.

These two are about the real world. The time a chapter happens in the story is a different detail, When in the story, and has nothing to do with the schedule: see Planning, goals and progress.

The Schedule view

On a book's Plan page, choose Schedule, beside Cards, Outline and Grid. At the top:

• Next up is the chapter due next, and when. A chapter that is past its day and not released comes first.
• Ready ahead is your buffer: how many chapters are ready to go one after another, counted after the last chapter you released. It stops at the first chapter that is not ready. Fewer than three is flagged as running low.
• Late is how many chapters are past their day and not released. It shows only when there are some.

Under that, Coming up lists the chapters that have a date, the earliest first. Where the wait to the next one is much longer than your usual wait, a dashed line says so, so a hole in the plan is easy to see. Not scheduled yet lists the chapters with no date. Released is folded away until you open it.

A chapter is ready when it has words and none of them is Raw or Draft (your book's own names for the statuses are used), which is how the chapter list and the counts above the page see it. The Ready check is stricter: it also wants every word marked, a title, no undecided alternates and a minimum length.

A chapter's date is a button. It opens a small box: Save (or Enter) keeps the date, Cancel (or Escape) leaves it, and Remove date takes it away. Mark released writes today's date as the day the chapter went out; Not released, in the Released list, takes the mark off again.

From the Ready check

After a copy in the Ready check's Copy for a web serial has worked, the window offers Mark as released on today's date. It adds that day to the chapter's details and changes nothing else.

Released and Published

Marking a chapter released does not change its status, and a status does not change what is released, except that a chapter whose text is all Published already counts as released, with no day. Published has always meant "already released" for a web serial, so a serial that used it all along has nothing to mark. If you use Published to mean "final" for a book that is not a serial, the schedule is simply something you do not use: with no dates, it only lists your chapters.

A note when the buffer runs low

If a book has release dates and fewer than three chapters are ready after the last one you released, the book's page says so in a short note, with the chapter due next and a link to the schedule. There is nothing to switch on or off: with no dates there is no note.

In the files

A chapter's dates are two lines in its own details, so they travel with the chapter when you move it:

release: 2026-11-03
released: 2026-11-04

Other tools can read them. Saving changes only those lines; the rest of the file stays exactly as it was. A date written some other way, such as next Tuesday, is not read as a date and is left alone.