It turns out that I tend to do a lot of small tweaks, which results in publishing the same notebook very often with minor updates. I noticed that this might cause my notebook to be bumped in date, which worries me that I might end up hogging the “Latest Releases” queue this way. Is that true? And if so, is there a way to avoid it?
(other than not publishing the small fixes all the time I mean)
Your notebook is only put into public feeds (such as the recently published feed and your profile) the first time it is published. That said, for you specifically, notebooks on your profile are sorted by the last-modified date rather than the first-published date. If you open your profile in incognito mode you’ll see the order everyone else sees.
Thanks! That’s a relief 
One thing that might be nice is an ability to (maybe limited to a single time per notebook to avoid spam/abuse) republish the notebook in a way that gets it to show up in public feeds again, or alternately a way to publish it up front in a way that doesn’t, with the ability to push it to public feeds later. The alternative is something like forking and then publishing the fork, which seems like a misuse of the forking feature.