Getting started

A verified email address is the only thing standing between you and a published novel. There is no application, no invite, no writing sample and no role to be granted.

1. Create a SkyDemonOrder account. The same free account readers use. If you already read here, you already have one.
2. Click the link in the verification email. Until you do, opening your author dashboard sends you straight back to the verification screen.
3. Open your author dashboard (Loom). The Start writing button anywhere on this site takes you there.

A project is the novel itself: the title readers browse, the blurb they read, and the shelf your chapters live on. In Loom, go to Projects and pick New project.

The form asks for two things. The basics come first — your title, your description, and a status (Work in progress, Ongoing, Complete or Hiatus) you can change whenever the story changes. Line breaks in the description render exactly as you type them, so paragraphing a blurb needs no markup.

Then comes classification, which is how readers find you. Pick your genres, then a main genre: only the genres you picked are offered there, so choose your genres first. Tags are searchable and generous, a demographic is optional, and you can attach up to three content warnings.

A small panel under those pickers shows whether your selection reads as 18+. You do not set that yourself — an adult genre, an 18+ tag or a sensitive content warning marks the project on its own. The first time one of your projects computes to 18+, the Save button stays disabled until you confirm, in one click, that you are 18 or older.

How Mature content is classified

Saving drops you on the project itself, with a default cover already in place. Nothing here is permanent: every field on this form is editable for as long as the project exists.

Open your project, go to the Chapters tab, and pick New chapter. A chapter is a title and a body, and the body is a proper editor — you write in it, you do not paste markup into it.

The toolbar covers bold, italic and underline, left, centre and right alignment, and one-click inserts for the pieces web novels actually use: a spoiler block, a system box, an image, or a horizontal rule. A formatting-marks toggle reveals paragraph and line breaks when the spacing is not behaving.

Every chapter you save is a draft, no matter how finished it is. Drafts are invisible to readers: they do not show on your project page, they do not appear in feeds, and nobody can open one by guessing its address.

That makes the editor safe to work in over days. When you want to see the real thing, the Preview button opens the chapter in the reader exactly as a reader would meet it, draft or not. And once you have a few chapters, the Chapters tab lets you drag them into the order you want — drafts and published chapters share one running order.

Publishing is a deliberate act, and it lives in the Chapters tab. Open the menu on a chapter row, choose Publish, and confirm — the chapter is live the moment you confirm it, readable by anyone who visits your project.

There is no scheduler for Originals yet, so nothing goes out while you sleep and nothing releases on a timer. You publish each chapter yourself, when it is ready.

• Changed your mind? Revert to draft on the same menu hides the chapter from readers again and clears its posted date.
• Deleted something you needed? Deleting a chapter is recoverable — ask staff and it can be restored.

Every new project starts on the default SDO Originals cover, so a missing cover never blocks you from publishing. Replace it whenever the art is ready.

Upload from the project itself. Covers are portrait, 3:4, in JPEG, PNG or WebP, up to 2 MB and at least 150×200 pixels. An off-ratio image is not rejected — it is cropped into the 3:4 frame readers see, so check the result rather than the file.

An upload does not go live on its own: it goes into the staff moderation queue and sits as Pending until someone reviews it. Approved covers replace the live one immediately. Rejected ones come back with a reason so you know what to change, and you can upload another straight away. Uploading a replacement while one is still pending simply cancels the earlier upload.

This page is the mechanics. Two other pages cover the rules around them, and both are short.

• Content guidelines — what every SDO Original has to follow: writing with AI, what is never allowed, how Mature work is classified, and where else you may publish.
• Competition rules — the timeline, the prizes, and everything an entry in the first SDO Originals writing competition has to satisfy.