Author Sites get better story browsing
We made larger Author Sites easier to explore with stronger browsing controls, smoother incremental loading and clearer story cards.
An Author Site should feel like a writer's home on Short Story Lovers, not a long archive that becomes harder to use as more stories are published.
In August, we reworked how readers browse stories on Author Sites, especially for authors who have built up a larger body of work.
Latest, Popular and category browsing
Readers can move through an author's stories using clearer browsing controls instead of treating every story as one undifferentiated list.
The Author Stories experience now keeps Latest and Popular browsing distinct, while category selection makes it easier to narrow a larger collection.
Those choices are also reflected in the page state, so moving between views behaves more predictably instead of losing the reader's context.
More stories load as you keep reading
We also changed the way larger collections load.
Author Sites now use stable pagination underneath and can progressively load more stories as a reader moves through the page. That gives us the convenience of an infinite-scroll experience without asking the browser to load an author's entire catalogue at once.
When a later batch cannot load, the page can offer a retry rather than silently stopping.
For a new author with three stories this may not feel dramatic. For someone with twenty, fifty or one hundred stories, it changes the experience considerably.
Story cards carry more useful context
The cards themselves were tightened up as part of the same work.
Story metadata is presented more consistently, multi-chapter stories can show a chapter-count badge directly on the cover, and the final row behaves more deliberately when only one or two cards remain.
The goal was not to make the page busier. It was to help a reader understand the story before clicking it.
Why Author Sites matter to us
A reader may discover a writer through a single story, a search result, a shared link or a Featured Story.
The Author Site is what comes next.
It is where that one discovery can turn into reading another story, subscribing, following the author's work or simply understanding what kind of writer they are.
That is why we keep investing in these pages even when the improvements are not headline features. As authors publish more, their space on Short Story Lovers should become more useful, not more difficult to navigate.
This August update was one step in that direction.