I noticed that my progress and mnemonic stories do not carry over for some characters that are in different lists. Some times they do but mostly they do not? The list I am adding stories to and studying is older than the list I published so I am wondering if that may have something to do with the reason. Anyone else experienced this?

Are the characters/progress you are referring to part of words rather than individual characters? Maybe that has something to do with it?

Are you looking perhaps at simplified vs. traditional versions of the characters?

I am studying Japanese and most recently been working on the textbook "remembering the kanji" by James Heisig found in the official lists. I also published a list called "A Guide to Writing Kanji and Kana" after a textbook by Wolfgang Hadamisky and Mark Spahn. Both of these texts are kanji only and both contain the 1945 Joyō Kanji but in different order. When I look at the Hadamitzky/Spahn list some of the kanji show my learning progress and mnemonics stories but most do not. Since Heisig's text is focussed on learning to write, I thought I would use the Hadamitzky/Spahn text to study readings and meanings. I think I uploaded this list before the Heisig feature was added to the site so I wondered if that might be why only some of the Kanji are carrying over my progress and stories. Although it's not critical, it would be nice if all the progress stats would carry over, especially since it takes a large investment of time to input the stories. Any ideas?

This has to do with the difference between characters and words for Japanese in the Skritter system. You can read about them here:

http://www.skritter.com/faq#progress_words_vs_chars

The official Remembering the Kanji list uses characters exclusively. Your list has a mix of words and characters. If you study those words, the characters and all the information relating to those characters will show up (word on the upper part of the prompt, character on the lower) so you shouldn't need to do anything to still access your mnemonics while you study. Your progress is not carried over though, I'm afraid, since they are considered separately, and you don't study the readings or definitions for characters. Alternatively you could change your list to have all characters instead of a mix, but I think it should work fine for you the way it is, if you don't mind studying the readings and definitions in addition to the writings.

Since the list I published was meant to be a list of characters I would like to change them from words into characters but I see no way to specify this. I tried to import them again and the system automatically chose words. Also,I was not able to find a character only option anywhere. Is there an easy way to do this?

What was the text you entered in when you imported? If you just enter the character by itself, it should come up with multiple options. It does choose the vocab by default; to change it you click the blue 'All Results' link and pick the vocab that says '(comp)' next to it. That marker wasn't showing up before due to a bug I just noticed but am uploading a fix for right now, but that should help you to distinguish which choices are components and which are full on vocabs. Unfortunately there's no really quick way of choosing all components built in.