Versioning

Maybe you have already noticed that my stories have individual version numbers.

I am a professional software developer, so my stories have version numbers of course! 😉

I see it as a big advantage of publishing on a website. Books are rather static. Once they have been printed, changes can only be published with a new edition, if the costs are economically viable.

On a website, the new version is just copied to the server, and you’re done.

The version numbers I use consist of two numbers, separated by a period. Which of the numbers is incremented depends on the changes.

If the number after the period is incremented, it’s a minor release. Only small corrections were made to sentence structure or spelling, statements were clarified or ambiguous passages improved. If you have read the story already, it’s usually not worth to read it again because of that.

If the number before the period is incremented (and the other number is reset to zero), it’s a major release. It affects the actual core of the story. This could be, for example, the fix of a serious logical error in the plot that escaped the test reading unnoticed. On a major release, it makes sense to re-read the story. However, I hope that major releases will be extremely rare.

The main language of the stories is German. For translations, there can be a third number, which is incremented only when errors in the translation have been corrected. This way you always know which German and translated stories are related. For example, the English “V1.3.2” is related to the German “V1.3”, with two additional corrections to the translation.

In contrast to a software, a story should be “sufficiently complete” at some point, so it won’t need further improvements. As an author, you’d prefer to tell new stories instead of polishing existing stories endlessly.

By the way: If there have been updates to a story, you will find a box called “Changelog” to the right of the story. Usually this box is collapsed, so it won’t spoil your reading experience with inside knowledge. If you expand this box, you will find each change with a version number, a date, and a short summary of the change. If you click on the version number, you will reach a so-called diff view, which shows exactly what parts of the story have been changed. This is an easy way to catch up with the latest version of the story if you don’t want to re-read it.