To import an existing web serial onto a new platform, you export your chapters into files the new platform can read, upload them in one pass so the site rebuilds the story instead of making you retype it, and then repair the few things that never survive a move cleanly: chapter order, italics and scene breaks, images, and the cover. The mechanics matter more than authors expect, because a back catalog of eighty chapters is where migrations quietly die from copy-paste fatigue rather than from any real technical barrier. The fastest route is to get your chapters out as Markdown or .docx files, one file per chapter, feed them to an importer that handles ordering and formatting automatically, and then spend your energy re-engaging the readers you already have rather than reformatting text you already wrote.
I think the reason so many authors stay on a platform they have outgrown is not loyalty and not fear of the new place; it is the sheer dread of moving a hundred chapters by hand, and I want to take that dread apart, because the logistics are far more manageable than they look from the outside. This piece is for the author who already has a real serial and a real readership somewhere, the hundred-to-a-thousand-reader range on Royal Road, Wattpad, Scribble Hub, or Substack, and has decided to move but keeps stalling at the practical question of how the actual text gets from there to here without eating a week of writing time. I am not going to relitigate whether you should move, since I wrote about the timing and reader-graph strategy of that in how to move your serial off Wattpad; this is the mechanics guide, the one about files and formatting and chapter order, written from the vantage of someone who has watched a lot of authors do this and seen exactly where it goes smoothly and where it snags.
What does it actually mean to import a web serial?
Importing a web serial means handing the new platform your chapters as files it can read and letting it rebuild the story on its side, rather than opening a hundred blank editors and pasting text into each one. That distinction is the whole game. A manual migration treats every chapter as a separate act of labor, so a long serial becomes a hundred small chores that you abandon somewhere around chapter forty when the tedium wins. A real import treats the whole back catalog as one operation: you point the platform at a set of files, it converts each one into a chapter, assigns the reading order, and preserves the paragraph structure, and you are left with a mostly-finished story to tidy rather than a mountain of typing to climb.
The mental shift I try to get authors to make is to stop thinking of their published pages as the master copy and start thinking of their own draft files that way. The chapters sitting in your Word folder or your Markdown editor are the clean source; the versions on Royal Road or Wattpad are downstream copies wrapped in that platform's formatting. When you import, you want to feed the importer the clean upstream files, because they carry the least platform-specific cruft and the most standard, machine-readable structure. My feeling is that half of a smooth migration is just deciding, up front, that you are moving your manuscript and not scraping your published pages, and then working from the manuscript.
How do you get your chapters out of the old platform?
The reliable source for your chapters is almost always your own drafts, because most web fiction platforms give you no clean export of your own work, which is one of the quieter costs of the audience-ownership problem I laid out in do you own your audience. Royal Road, as of this writing, has the best discovery engine in progression fantasy and a genuinely large reader base, and Wattpad has a social and comment culture that few sites match, and both of those are real strengths worth crediting; but neither is built to help you take your library and leave, so do not expect a tidy download button. What you almost certainly do have is the place you drafted the chapters in the first place, and that is where the export should come from.
In practice this means saving one file per chapter, as either Markdown (.md) or a modern Word document (.docx), from wherever you write. If you draft in Google Docs, you can download each chapter as .docx; if you write in a Markdown editor, you already have .md files; if your whole serial lives in one giant document, split it at the chapter breaks so each chapter is its own file, because most importers treat one file as one chapter. If the only surviving copy of some chapters is the published page itself, you can copy the text into a document, and that is fine, just keep the one-file-per-chapter discipline so the tool can rebuild your chapter list without you numbering everything by hand later. Authors who cross-post at scale, the Matt Dinniman of Dungeon Crawler Carl, the Will Wight of Cradle, the Andrew Rowe of Sufficiently Advanced Magic, all of whom have talked publicly about the friction of posting to many places at once, tend to keep exactly this kind of clean per-chapter file library precisely because it makes every future move cheap.
Which parts of the formatting survive, and which break?
The structural formatting survives an import well and the decorative formatting is where you should expect to do a little repair. This is the honest split, and knowing it in advance saves a lot of frustration. Paragraph breaks, italics, and bold come across cleanly from Markdown or .docx because they are standard and unambiguous, so your emphasized fireball and your italicized book-within-the-book stay intact without any intervention. What tends to break is anything the old platform rendered in its own special way: custom scene-break dividers, those little author-note boxes some sites style automatically, and inline images embedded in the chapter body, all of which are platform-specific and do not travel inside plain text.
So the workflow that actually works is to import the text first and treat perfection as a second pass rather than a precondition. Trying to hand-clean every source file before you upload is a trap, because you end up doing detailed formatting work on files you are about to run through a converter anyway. Far better to get all the chapters in, then walk through the imported story once with a light touch, reinserting scene-break markers where they vanished and dropping images back into the two or three chapters that had them. I think authors overestimate this cleanup enormously; for a typical serial it is minutes per chapter of scanning, not rewriting, and most chapters need no touch at all. On IlorisNovel the import path is built around this exact assumption: you drop in your .md or .docx files, or a whole folder at once, and the background importer converts each into a formatted chapter and assigns the order, so what you are left with is a real story to polish rather than a blank editor to fill.
How do you keep chapter order and move the cover?
Chapter order is the one thing worth getting right before you upload, and the fix is almost embarrassingly simple: name your files in reading order. Most importers assign chapter sequence from the order of the files, so a folder of chapters named 01, 02, 03 and onward lands in the correct order on its own, while an unnamed jumble leaves you dragging chapters around by hand afterward, which is precisely the manual tedium the whole import was meant to spare you. Two minutes of numbering at the start removes an hour of reordering at the end, and it is the single highest-return habit in the entire process, so do it first and never skip it.
The cover and the story-level metadata are a separate, smaller task that lives outside the chapter files. Your cover is a single image you upload once when you create the story on the new platform, and your title, description, and tags are fields you fill in on the story page, so none of that belongs in the per-chapter files. Set those once at the top, let the chapters flow in underneath, and the story is structurally complete. If you are still deciding which platform to send all of this to, I compared what each one is actually best at in the best web fiction platforms for 2026, and the practical filter for a migrating author is which of them will take your library in one pass and which will make you paste it in chapter by chapter.
What about your readers, your comments, and your progress bars?
This is the part where I have to be straight with you: the story moves, but the reader relationship does not travel inside the files, and pretending otherwise sets authors up for disappointment. Reading position, comment threads, follower counts, and reader ratings all live inside the platform you are leaving, and they cannot be exported with your text because they were never yours to move in the first place; the platform owned that layer of the relationship, which is exactly why owning your audience matters so much once you start to monetize. What you carry across is the manuscript itself, whole and intact, and that is genuinely most of what you built. The readers are the other half, and you move them the way every durable author eventually learns to, by holding a direct line to them.
So the reader side of a migration is not a technical import at all; it is re-engagement. You point your author bio and your end-of-chapter notes at the new home for a release cycle or two, you drop the next chapter on the new platform first so there is a reason to follow you there, and you accept that some fraction of passive readers will not make the jump while the true fans will. pirateaba built The Wandering Inn into a years-long readership that lives across the author's own site, Royal Road, and Patreon at once, and the through-line in stories like that is always that the loyal, paying core followed the author and the story rather than a progress bar. The reason I built IlorisNovel the way I did is to make that owned relationship the default rather than an afterthought: readers follow the author instead of a feed, coins go straight to the author, authors keep 93% of what readers spend with the remaining 7% among the lowest cuts in the space, and cashout runs directly through Stripe. Getting the chapters in is the easy, mechanical part; the migration that actually pays off is the one where the readers you already earned end up somewhere you own.
My advice, then, is to treat the import as two separate jobs and not let the hard-feeling one block the easy one. The text is a solved problem: export clean per-chapter files, number them, upload the batch, and do one light formatting pass. The readers are a slower, human problem you solve by giving them a direct reason to follow the story to its new home over a couple of release cycles. Authors freeze because they conflate the two and imagine the whole thing is a hundred hours of retyping, when the retyping is the one part that no longer has to happen at all. Move the manuscript in an afternoon, and spend the real energy where it counts, on the readers. If you want to feel how the import and the editor work before you commit a single chapter, you can try the editor with no account.
Common questions about importing a web serial
How do I export my chapters from Royal Road or Wattpad?
Most platforms do not offer a clean one-click export of your own work, which is one of the quiet costs of not owning your audience, so the reliable source is usually your own drafts. If you write in Word, Google Docs, or a Markdown editor, you already hold the master copy, and exporting one .docx or .md file per chapter from there is cleaner than scraping the published pages. If your only copy lives on the platform, you can copy each chapter's text into a document, but keep the files split one-per-chapter so the importer can rebuild your chapter list automatically.
Will my formatting survive the import?
The structural things survive well and the decorative things sometimes do not. Paragraph breaks, italics, and bold generally carry across cleanly when you import from Markdown or .docx, because those are standard and machine-readable. What tends to break is anything platform-specific: custom scene-break dividers, embedded author-note boxes, and inline images, which often need a quick pass to reinsert. A good rule is to import the text first, then scan each chapter once for scene breaks and images rather than trying to make the source file perfect before you upload.
Can I keep my chapter order when I import a back catalog?
Yes, and this is the part worth getting right before you upload rather than after. The simplest method is to name or number your files in reading order, because most importers assign chapter order from the file sequence, so a folder of files named 01, 02, 03 and so on lands in the correct order without any manual reordering. If you upload out of order, you will be dragging chapters around by hand, which is exactly the tedium a bulk import is supposed to remove, so spend two minutes numbering the files first.
Do my readers' reading progress and comments come with me?
No, and it is better to be honest about this than to expect otherwise. Reading position, comment histories, and follower lists live inside the platform you are leaving and cannot be exported with the text, because they were never yours to move; the platform owned that relationship. What you can do is carry the story itself intact and then re-engage your existing readers directly, by pointing your author notes and bio at the new home and releasing a new chapter there first, so the readers who care follow the story rather than the read-position they lost.
How long does it take to import a full web serial?
The upload itself is fast; the honest time cost is the cleanup. If you already have your chapters as files, uploading a hundred of them and letting a background importer convert and order them takes minutes rather than hours. Budget most of your time for the once-through afterward, checking scene breaks, reinserting any inline images, and setting the cover, which for a long back catalog might be an evening's work spread over a couple of sittings. That is still a fraction of the days it takes to copy and paste a long serial chapter by chapter.
by Jacob Tam · August 17, 2026
I run IlorisNovel. If you want to see what importing a serial and writing here feels like, you can try the editor with no account.