RE: Any advice on how this site works?
The best way to promote your content is to create more content. Blog about anything and everything you can think of, and link them back to your stories. Insert linkbacks to previous chapters with every new chapter. Participate in discussions on other posts that excite you. Look for the most popular tags and use them whenever you can.
As for your novel, it is technically excellent -- but too few people here will want to read it. Steemians are used to posts that run from 500 to 1500 words and boast colourful images. The long chapters you're posting on Steemit will be quickly skipped over.
Steemit favours serial fiction with short chapters. It's probably going to be hard to break up your existing work if it doesn't fit this format. But at the least, Steemians will be more inclined to enjoy the story if you break up the text walls with images.
Inserting images on Steemit is easy. Copy an image, paste it in the text, editor and Steemit will take care of the rest. But this is something I discovered through trial and error.
Steemit doesn't offer a native way to schedule posts. You'll need a third-party platform like Steemauto to do it.
There used to be notifications for comments. It's been removed now. Unfortunately, you'll have to monitor comments and replies manually.
The dirty little secret about Steemit is that it is successful in spite of its UX and UI shortcomings. Success here requires working around its flaws...and bugging the devs to improve the platform.
Thank you, that helps. Personally, I tend to stop reading a post at the second inline picture or the first animated gif. I'm thinking Steemit is probably not the platform for me.
I grew up with early 90s Internet. Gaudy backgrounds and walls of text. When I see a picture or a gif my first instinct is to skip it over unless it's somehow relevant to the article.
But this market has its peculiar demands, and to make money from it, I need to adapt to the market's tastes.
"In my day, video games were called 'books'."