Selfhosted

I don't have a direct answer to your question. But I advise caution in putting your creative works online in the way you are planning. Between people plagiarizing it (either word for word or just the broader concepts) and AIs doing similar things, you could find that your work gets stolen.

Self-publishing might at least give you a bit of inherent copyright protection. Then at least you will have an ISBN associated to it, and you can always host your stories somewhere (WordPress, Medium, etc.).

If you want to self-publish your stories a free service like Smash Words would work.

Just find a static host for free instead of dealing with it yourself. Million out there.

Wordpress or some of its alternatives would probably work well for this. Another alternative would be static site generators, where you pretty much just write the content in Markdown.

It's also a pretty simple project, it would be a great project to learn basic web development as well.

If you want a fancy multi-user site, the source code for archiveofourown.org is on github or gitlab (idr which). But for a small single user site I'd just go static. You could go full nerdy and write in texinfo then run an html converter. Texinfo is actually for computer manuals so it has chapters, sections, cross references, indexes, link navigation between pages, the whole bit. It is a markup language which I think is better than a wysiwyg formatter for documents that will be read in more than one way. I think there is a way to make epubs from texinfo docs.

In a sort of similar spirit there is Org mode (org-mode.org) but you have to be or become an Emacs zealot to use it.

Look also at pandoc.org which converts between lots of formats.

For something like this, I think I would use Hugo to generate a static site. You write the post using markdown then tell Hugo to regenerate the site.

If you want to publish and receive comments or feedback via the fediverse, you might take a look at WriteFreely. Simpler to use but more complicated to setup.

Wordpress is also an option, but I personally don’t like it much. I spend all my time playing with all the knobs and never actually publish anything.

https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#blogging-platforms

https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted?tab=readme-ov-file#content-management-systems-cms

I haven't used an out-of-the-box self-hosted solution for this, but I agree with others that blog or static site generator software could work. I think the main challenges you'll find though are: 1. Formatting the content/site for long-form readability, and 2. Adding a table of contents and previous/next chapter links without a bunch of manual work.

Fortunately blog and static site software have plugins that can add missing functionality like this. Here's one for WordPress (that I have no first-hand experience with): https://wordpress.org/plugins/book-press/

I also want to ask: What's your plan for discovery/marketing? Because one of the benefits of the non-self-hosted web novel sites is that readers can theoretically discover your story there. But if you instead just post it on your own site, how will readers ever find it?

It sounds like you want a blog that lets you categorize or tag your entries to keep them together.

https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ If it’s just text, you can probably make a static HTML website and accomplish your goals. I’m not sure what format it’s in now but Markdown is what I use and then just export to HTML.

If you just want to host epub (or equivalent files), you can still make a static page and link to them with Cloudflare Pages, GitHub.io, or one of many free static page hosting sites.

The other day I saw someone hosting their blog on a GitHub repository.

Just using markdown files and folders to organise it to their liking.

If you are writing stories you could use a similar approach. A folder per story then subfolders for chapters. Then having the main page have links each story’s folder with links to each chapter inside.

I see some comments recommending wordpress but wordpress is a security problem, especially if you're using 3rd party plugins. It is such a bad problem that their are 'wordpress security' applications but even then wordpress sites get hacked all the time. If you are going to use it, it is best to let some other host handle it for you if you don't know a whole lot about what you're doing.

There are many, many other content management systems out there. Some are lighter than wordpress and some heavier. They are all about posting and managing content. Most of them have some sort of user and authoring system. Once you're webserver is set up, many are written in a mixture of php and python so setting them up is generally drag and drop with either minor configuration file edits or wizards. Many of them have sections that you can set up using a labeling/tagging system. Most of them allow you to have the 'stories' as private or draft where you have to actually click publish before people can view them. Some have user roles systems where you can limit viewing and even editing between different roles for sections.

Generally, once their setup is done, they are point and click to do everything.

Here's a nice list of FOSS CMS' (which includes Wordpress of course).

There is also writefreely. It is fairly basic, but says it supports "publish[ing] to multiple blogs from one account". Haven't really used it, but it looks kinda cool imo

https://github.com/writefreely/writefreely

You can probably throw together a pretty simple wordpress website without much knowledge. Just keep it mostly out of the box, maybe change the theme.

Others have suggested Markdown formats, if you're willing to do that you might want to look at Silverbullet.

A static site generator (Hugo would be great for your needs) and host the files on a CDN like bunny.net. It costs $1/month for 100 GB transfer included and you pay 1 cent/GB above that. But I sincerely doubt a small personal website that's mostly text will serve more than 100 GB/month.

Hosting on a CDN is amazing because they have dozens of redundant distribution points all over the world, can easily scale to traffic spikes, you never have to worry about consuming too much CPU or RAM or about security issues etc.

https://ghost.org/ would probably work pretty well for you.

If I understand correctly, you want a self hosted version of Wattpad or Inkitt for posting stories. I don't know if there is a 1:1 software that can do exactly that.

As a starting point, you could try building a static website. They easiest ones follow a blog format and store the text on a markdown file. Many have recommended Hugo on this thread, but I'd like to recommend Zola instead. Paired with the well documented tabi theme, you could spawn a new "blog" for each story and use the archive view to have the chapter selection.

It's not exactly the best solution, but I think it's a good starting point to try it out.

P.S. Zola is inspired in Hugo. The creator thought Hugo was too complicated.

Not aware of a FOSS 1:1, but that sounds like Ghost or your blogging platform of choice.

Except WP, if self hosting, IMHO. Wordpress == PHP == trouble and risk. I don’t mean to malign WP specifically, but if you’re a noob, you want to avoid exposing PHP to the public internet - especially if there’s any possibility you’ll eventually forget about maintaining and upgrading.

Just too damn easy for some threat actor to come along and exploit a vuln you missed, in the software or the web server or WP.

That said, years of WP taught me that, roughly, you want “pages” linking to “posts” ( == chapters). In theory, the former is a permanent reference and the latter is dynamic to some degree.

In reality, the existence of search engines before enshittification means the two have been conflated frequently.

Pages would often get links in a sidebar or menu. Posts might get buried much farther down, but can also be linked to. They’re often, but not always, time—specific.

“2023 NY [financial product] Guide” (page) might well link to a years-old post about subrogation regarding an attempted BBQ of a random wild animal that went wrong and caused a fire, because it’s a positively classic example of the same that makes a great deal of sense to most people, even if they don’t understand terms like subrogation.

Post/page are distinctions that WP makes, but are abstractly relevant to setting up abs any CMS (which is what you want, Content Management System) so that you (ideally) never have to figure out how or where to link something, its just native. Changing the structure means changing the URLs which is annoying at best, and fraught with peril at worst.

Above 2023 xxxx Guide page, would be https://example.org/NY-Xxxx-Guide and that way you DGAF about the sidebar links, for instance. Link it once, and then you only have to update 50 posts with the year and/or some change in the data, which can be done programmatically in the db as a trivial exercise. “UPDATE page SET title = (SELECT title FROM… WHERE ‘2022’ in title TO ‘2023’;”

Disclaimer: do not run that query as copypasta, it’s meant to illustrate a point and not to exhibit valid SQL on any db (Not least because I intentionally left out at least one closing paren and simplified a bit. I’m a PG guy, and I am 100% certain it would fail as written, but fully expect anything approaching the standard to reject it. But you get the idea, update 50 states at once with a fairly simple query, once a year.

Lots going on here, but go for a modern CMS and repeatable updates, not a legacy product with a bunch of tech debt accumulated. Build it clean, plan it out first, and know whatever DB is backing it fairly well.

Apart from all the online tools there are also offline website builders like blocs (macOS/iPad - but there are similar tools for Windows as well) that let you design your website and will spit out the files you then just need to upload to any provider of your liking. It's basically a WYSIWYG static site generator.

https://obsidian.md/publish

Obsidian is awesome, and obsidian publish costs money but it's very easy to use.

I cannot reply to everyone, but genuinely thank you all so much for the help. I'll be going with a simplistic zola setup suggested by one of the commentors. I barely expected a handful, let alone all these comments. It really means a lot, especially to a noob who felt like this was a really dumb question.

Grav.

I am currently using this to do exactly what you are doing. I moved from Ghost cause of many reasons. Can share links in PM if you want.