Hey Dr Ron Pol,

I think I see something that may make your process easier, but I’m not sure if I can explain it well enough for you to see what I see. It’s also just speculation at this point until you or someone else who’s writing a “book” on Medium can confirm or deny. Please bear with me.

I point out in the Illumination Submission Guidelines that sometimes a typo in a title remains even after the author edited the article again to fix the typo. This is because the external display title is different from the headline within the article.

When you first create and publish a draft, Medium will take the written display title and save it. But when you go and change the title of an already published article, Medium will still keep the original display title. To change this, you’d have to go into the editor and then select the three dots next to the publish button. There you’ll find an option to “Change Display Title / Subtitle”

This is the title Medium uses to display on links, publication pages etc.

So I assume that when you name an article “Chapter 2” first, then link it in your Index and edit it to have a more explained title than “Chapter 2", this is because you edit the title within the article, but not through the “Change Display Title / Subtitle” option.

So when you open “Chapter 2”, it will have whatever title you wrote within the file, but on external sites and links, it will still show “Chapter 2”.

So you could theoretically save yourself the effort of naming it “Chapter 2”, linking it and then editing it again, by simply writing the article with the title of your choice, then go into “Change Display Title / Subtitle” and there name it “Chapter 2”. Then it should show as “Chapter 2” in links, but still carry the title you want to use within that chapter.

That’s my theory based on my current understanding.

Please let me know if I’m right or wrong. I hope it helps 😁