So I'm new to Royal Road. My brother, Macronomicon, told me this was a great community to interact with readers, and so far, that's definitely been the case. I started this story 3 years ago and put most of my chapters down over the course of a month or so back then, and only recently have come back to work on it. In the meantime, though, I've added a bunch of stuff (including whole new chapters!) to the previously-published work. I literally don't know how to fix that. I noticed I'm dropping readers, probably because some things aren't adding up, and I'd really love to know the best way to update (and add) chapters in the past without freaking everyone out or causing a fatal error in the system. This is probably super basic to most Royal Roaders, but I've only been back a couple weeks and even when I was working on it 3 years ago, I wasn't on for very long. Do you just delete a chapter and replace it? What about adding chapters to the middle of the book? Is that even possible?

Basically, I want to change Shannon's name to Bonnie in the early chapters, update the chapters in general, and add some new chapters to the middle, but I don't want to lose comments or have Chapter 22 (for instance) end up showing up after Chapter 101 in the lineup. Any experienced Royal Roaders out there? How do you guys handle something like this? And then, once you DO make changes, how do you tell people about it? Or is that like super bad form and you just leave it up the way it was, flaws and all?? Any help is appreciated!

Also, does anyone have any ideas why this story has been shedding readers and lost almost a full star rating? Was changing Shannon's name to Bonnie really that egregious?? I'm confuzzled...