‍Note: Authors need to connect a Stripe account to their Laterpress account in order to monetize their books. How to do this is covered in a separate help article. This process can be completed after uploading or creating your first book and before publishing it.

There are two paths to creating and publishing your book through Laterpress.

Option #1 - The full Add Story flow assumes you are creating a new book from scratch and offers a guided workflow of our story tools to help get you started.

Option #2 - Importing an existing book. If you already have a finished book to publish, or a work-in-progress story you intend to serialize, the story flow can be skipped. Scroll down for more information on this process.

Option #1 - The Add Story Flow

Right after creating your account, or any time you want to add another story, you will go through the Add Story flow, to create a new story from scratch. You must enter the story's title and if it is a standalone book or if you wish to create a series home for it. Both of these options can be changed later, so do not feel pressure to have the perfect title already chosen.

Click Save & Continue.

Next, choose to start from scratch and enter an idea prompt for the AI, or click use existing notes. That option will allow you to copy / paste in notes about your story, or upload a .docx file.

With the story concept provided, you’ll now move through the four tabs you’ll later see in the text editor’s Storybook tab. Review the generated idea and modify, edit, or rewrite it as you desire, then move on to characters.

It is not mandatory to create characters, but we recommend making at least one or two to help give the outline more direction. Click the “Add character” button, specify if it’s a protagonist, antagonist, or supporting character, enter some information about them, then click generate. Feel free to edit or revise the results and save. Repeat as desired. You can create more characters later in the editor, so it’s not necessary to have the whole cast in place at this stage.

Lore items may include locations, organizations, creatures, and more that populate your story. Again, enter a seed phrase to give the AI and idea of what you’re looking for, and modify the results as needed.

The last step is the outline. Select a template that matches your genre of choice. Enter a seed phrase to give the AI some direction on anything you want to emphasize or consider most important, and then click generate. The beats can be edited and modified here, or click “Get started writing!” to move on to the text editor. All of the beats can be modified, regenerated, rewritten, etc. from the text editor, so it is not required to have all the beats perfect at this point.

You’re now free to work on your book within the text editor. When you’re ready to publish, review the Publishing a Book section below.

Option #2 - Importing an existing book

On the Add Story screen, provide the book's title, choose between a book or a script, and if it’s a standalone or belongs to a series.

On the next screen, click “Not interested? Skip this step” at the bottom of the screen to skip the story creation flow.

In the text editor, click the “Import epub” button on the top of the screen to import an entire manuscript at once. Alternatively, you could copy and paste chapters one at a time into the editor, though this is less efficient.

When you have the manuscript formatted to your satisfaction, review the Publishing a Book section below. (The steps in that section are also shown in this video.)

Publishing a Book

When you want to publish a book so people can read it, click the “Publish” button on the top of the screen in the editor.

You will see a screen prompting you to confirm the title of your story, upload a cover, select your genre, and enter a description of the book. Text in the description can be highlighted to add formatting like bold text, italics, or underlines. These details can be changed as needed from the Settings page in the text editor. When done, click "continue to publication settings."

Enter the URL you want for your book. This is the address readers would enter into their browsers to find your book. THIS CANNOT BE CHANGED after publication, so choose carefully. Most use the title of their book or an acronym for it as the URL.

Decide if the book is available for anyone, or only people who subscribe.

Enter the price, and if that’s for the whole book, or only a selection of chapters. If choosing a chapter bundle, readers will need to pay again after reading the number of chapters set in the bundle. Chapter bundles are discussed further in a separate help article.

The preview determines how many chapters someone can read for free before hitting your paywall. The default is 1, but this can be moved up or down. We recommend offering at least the first chapter to give readers a sample of the book. If you have copyright pages, dedications, or other front matter in the book, our system does count those as chapters. Make the free preview larger to compensate. For example, a preview of 3 would let someone see a copyright page, dedication, and Chapter 1 if a book has all of those in it.

By default, books publish immediately. If you wish to schedule when the book goes live, select that option and use the calendar to select a date and time. Times are displayed in your local time, not time zone conversion necessary.

The Email Notification option, when on (default) will send an email notification to all readers who want to receive updates from you, letting them know you have a new book out.

When everything is set up to your satisfaction, click “Publish.”

Remember, the URL cannot be changed after publication. Prices can be changed.