@Vincent Berg
There are also many cases, where an initial story is rewritten/restructured so it no longer fits in the same structure (i.e. instead of five books, it's now five, or instead of three, it's now twelve). In those cases, it's more common to delete the story in its entirety, rewrite the entire thing, and then repost it as several books in a series. Thus you've physically deleted multiple books and removed them from view for an indefinite period.
CW, there are three situation you can have in this.
1. Which I do a lot of. I revise the story and re-post it , and it has the same story number, just some different text.
2. I revise the story and post it as five chapters in stead of four chapters. I can do this and it keeps the same story number, they just add an extra chapter to the story file.
3. I want to totally revise how the story was done and break it up differently. I can delete the story and post all new stories, and thus lose the stats as well. Or I can change the title and post the revised part that this now relates to, and then post the new parts as new stories.
In all three I can keep the old story number if I do a re-post of that story number. but I lose it if I totally delete and post as if a new story.