I'm preparing to post my own story, but I don't think it's refined enough yet. I was curious how much revision and planning everyone does for their works, or if they just publish it then change it later on if necessary. I'm still new to this whole thing, so any and all advice is appreciated!

I don't do a ton of content editing. Just line editing with grammarly or prowritingaid should be good. And before posting I would build up a back log of chapters. Somewhere like ten to twenty chapters before releasing as a minimum. 

Honestly, I'm a pantser. I develop the world, plot and characters on the fly. My chapter releases are basically my first draft and I'm not far enough ahead in my production schedule to do any serious amount of editing. I make changes as readers point them out, mostly.

Now that I've finished the first book though I already went through and plotted out the revisions and now between chapter releases I'm slowly working my way through them. I haven't decided yet if I'm going to post the second draft by replacing the first draft, posting it as an entirely new fiction, or simply pulling the whole thing and waiting until I'm completely done with the book and sending it straight to Amazon.

The alternative is to simply write the entire series out and wait until I'm completely done with it to do the revisions etc, which is something another writer I talked to is doing. That is also a possibility as given the high focus on content production here there is very little time for me to actually do any editing. Once you start posting and especially once you make the decision to monetize there as so many other things that will eat away at your available writing time.

If I were to do it all again, and I probably will with the next web serial, I would definitely write much, much further in advance than I did. It's very stressful trying to keep up even on a slow release schedule (which I am defining as my current 2x a week chapter releases) with no buffer. I started out with a backlog that was much too small, blew through it within two months of my initial launch, and am only just now starting to pull ahead again 4 months later, just in time to launch my Patreon and use all of that backlog for advance content so I still have no buffer. I planned, but not nearly enough. Do more planning that I did, plan at least 6 months out with your monetization options already lined up and ready to go.

I am currently working on my 2nd edition.
While hired 2nd editor to work on my 3rd edition.
I'd worked on Teleios for 2 years now.
First draft is about 50k words.
Now the 2nd drafts is about 80k words.
I need to work on sensitivity issue and filling plot holes for 3rd drafts.
Prepare to release by march next year.
I put a lot of effort on a single story, working it like a trad pub instead of web serial.
Probably web serial will have different plan. 
for an indie hobbyist author, I want to work on the process of getting a piece of work done as good as possible (as according to myself)

I know I'm in a bit of a minority for this platform but I completely finish my works before I start posting them!

I have a full writing process and it takes me about 2-3 years to complete a novel (shorter time for novellas) before I publish it here. I work in a way that alternates projects (so I'll write draft 1 of one project, leave it for a few months while I edit draft 1 of another book, and round it goes).

I'm an outliner so before I start drafting I develop the characters, do some brainstorming and development about the world, and then when I have enough info locked in I write an outline. Once that's done I'll eventually write draft 1. I expect a minimum of the following for every project, though sometimes it differs:

3 drafts, 1-2 beta reading rounds, a final copyedit, a final proofread.

I know I wouldn't at all be suited to active, ongoing serial writing xD but I can respect those who are! I'd much rather plan and refine my work until I'm satisfied first and then be able to preschedule the posts for the whole thing in one go and let it roll while I work on the next thing.

judoaj Wrote: I'm preparing to post my own story, but I don't think it's refined enough yet. I was curious how much revision and planning everyone does for their works, or if they just publish it then change it later on if necessary. I'm still new to this whole thing, so any and all advice is appreciated!

what's planning?  

I just do an edit in Grammarly since I am an ESL and am done with it. a lot of my readers commented on my grammar so I fixed them after. I can't keep readers waiting just to squash one little bug that I can't find with my ESL skills.

Haven't read my own stuff yet. The planning I did was an outline prep. After the words have been put down, they're staying there.

I wrote my first novel off the top of my head so it ended up as a 120,000 word mess (which admittedly I'm proud of). Which is why this time I tried to prepare.

Didn't work. I'm half writing out of my ass again.

Don't bother with planning if you feel like you're forcing yourself. Draw events A, B, and C but not necessarily how they go down or how the reader gets there.

But if you do like planning out then go ahead. Neither is good nor bad as long as you edit well.

ONE THING I WILL SAY is that beware because when you publish chapter by chapter there are no take backs of events without a significant loss of readership.

I write short stories in a sort of continuous setting, so it may a little different from how I would handle one huge storyline.

The story ideas just come to me, so I write down the rough idea in a few words. These aren't full novels, so generally it boils down to Setting, Problem, Solution. The whole idea can start with one of those, like a solution without a problem or a situation I don't yet know how to get my character out of. Then the basic outline forms in my head without sitting down for it, so within a few days (while writing other stories) I'll have the rough details down.
Often, I'll deviate from that plan when I'm actually writing, so I'll leave it be and think about it for a while. The new path isn't always complete as I write it, so I let my mind conjure up a solution.

When it's all written, I let it be for at least a day before going over it again, hoping to catch errors in the storytelling itself. It can be tough to figure out what makes sense in a world of sorcery, and my currently publishing story deals with a time loop so that's especially mind boggling.
Once I believe the story is done, I use Grammarly and Pro Writing Aid to smooth it all out. I find myself repeating certain phrases a lot, so it helps to catch those things more easily. Edge's Read Aloud function has somewhat natural sounding voices, so that's the final step for me.

Some of these steps are faster than others, but they're all significant enough for me that I won't skip them. Right now I have well over a month of releases scheduled on Royal Road, so I'm not in a hurry to cut on the process, either.

I had a very vague outline on where the grand story would go, and then I had a very micro scale outline on the first few scenes. Everything in the middle was pretty much undeveloped when I started writing. But progress went much better when I developed the entire synopsis of book 1. Sure, it can still change, but having a roadmap is still very helpful in getting to where you want to go instead of getting lost in the weeds. 

I used to get a couple of chapters done before the need for attention struck me and I would post online. It would always end in me burning out and not getting far in the work before I hated it and had to start over or gave up on the idea entirely.

Nowadays, I want to be sure with myself that I can finish the project before I start trying to show it to others. With that in mind, I want a good chunk of the story done and a sort of timeline of when I expect to complete the work by. Works a lot better and people don't get disappointed lol

As for any kind of editing, I'm editing the work as I go anyhow, and I give it another pass or two before I decide to post the chapter online. I've caught plenty of mistakes this way and means readers have a cleaner copy.

I also come into the category of discovery writers. I don't even know what I am going to write next when I sit down to write. So for a while, as I kept writing, a fear of whether I will even be able to write the next words kept gnawing at me...

It was only after I had written over 750,000 words, around three volumes in my story, and edited them, that I finally managed to iron out all the kinks in my story, and magic system. But I might be an extreme example, so you don't have to follow that.

Still, I would say you should, at the very least, know three things about your story.

1. A vision for your story--> What is the end goal of your story? This is very important. Because only if your know this, will you be able to enjoy the process of writing, as you watch yourself progress towards that goal.

2. Smaller check points in your story--> Treat writing a story like a marathon, not a race. Set a check point for your story, and imagine yourself reaching that point. In the path, you may wander a bit, and may even have to end up changing those posts, but that does not matter as long as you keep progressing.

3. The theme, and tone of your story--> As in how you are going to present your story, how you are going to pace your story, how much interval you should keep in between thrilling parts of your story, and just normal grinding parts, things like that.

As long as you have these three things checked out, then in my opinion, you should be able to start releasing with even just 1 or 2 backlog of chapters.

(Ps- I am hypocrite... I will not feel safe, unless I have more than a hundred chapters in backlog. After all, things are easier said than done. So do take my advice with a grain of salt, and design your model of writing, and publishing that suits you... Just keep it in a way that you can enjoy writing, or you might not be able to last long. Remember, writing is a marathon, not a race.)

MS Edge has a pretty goo text-to-voice thing.

So I use it to review my text. It's a lot easier to find mistakes when you're following someone reading your text.