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alexandraerinOkay, so for forever and a day now I've been talking about doing the following things:
1. Fixing up the MU archives a bit (better proofing of the chapters, spotting and fixing the continuity hiccups/redundancies).
and
2. Producing better e-books and books of the first five books of volume one and then moving on up through the "unranked" chapters until all of volume 1 has been book-ized.
One reason I have yet to make much progress on this goal is that it seems like such a daunting task. But you know, learning how easy it is to format a "book"-worth of text for a reflowable format (Amazon's Kindle format, EPUB, MOBI, etc.)... it doesn't seem daunting at all. And once I've done that, I'll have a word processor-editable version of all of the text broken up into chapters that I can then format as a PDF, for print, or whatever. And while I'm in the process of looking at MU chapter by chapter to do that, I can also do the improved category/tagging that I've had my eye on. Imagine if you wanted to see all the chapters that are a dream, or the ones where Mackenzie's in class, or the ones that are long conversations that take place while people are walking slowly from one place to another (I call this category "default")? Or if for some reason somebody wanted to review all the chapters involving the use of magic, or BDSM, or anything else.
(Down the line I might have a user-driven tagging system but that will be down the line. This is something I'm actually set to embark upon.)
I confess that as a trailblazing pioneer in the field of weblit, I've completely overlooked how good and how easy the e-book formats are for authors. If we think of content as our product rather than books... words, not paper... then this is the perfect vehicle. The most portable formats (and Amazon's proprietary one) don't support a lot of bells and whistles, but that means they don't require a lot of them. Plain text (embellished with the usual emphasis tricks) will work on any device and any screen size. Typesetting? No need, just break up the paragraphs and chapters appropriately.
It not only makes the work immediately accessible to a wide range of readers (readers who live First Worldly-enough lives to have a computer, smartphone, or e-reader), it breaks down barriers between their money and us.
1. Fixing up the MU archives a bit (better proofing of the chapters, spotting and fixing the continuity hiccups/redundancies).
and
2. Producing better e-books and books of the first five books of volume one and then moving on up through the "unranked" chapters until all of volume 1 has been book-ized.
One reason I have yet to make much progress on this goal is that it seems like such a daunting task. But you know, learning how easy it is to format a "book"-worth of text for a reflowable format (Amazon's Kindle format, EPUB, MOBI, etc.)... it doesn't seem daunting at all. And once I've done that, I'll have a word processor-editable version of all of the text broken up into chapters that I can then format as a PDF, for print, or whatever. And while I'm in the process of looking at MU chapter by chapter to do that, I can also do the improved category/tagging that I've had my eye on. Imagine if you wanted to see all the chapters that are a dream, or the ones where Mackenzie's in class, or the ones that are long conversations that take place while people are walking slowly from one place to another (I call this category "default")? Or if for some reason somebody wanted to review all the chapters involving the use of magic, or BDSM, or anything else.
(Down the line I might have a user-driven tagging system but that will be down the line. This is something I'm actually set to embark upon.)
I confess that as a trailblazing pioneer in the field of weblit, I've completely overlooked how good and how easy the e-book formats are for authors. If we think of content as our product rather than books... words, not paper... then this is the perfect vehicle. The most portable formats (and Amazon's proprietary one) don't support a lot of bells and whistles, but that means they don't require a lot of them. Plain text (embellished with the usual emphasis tricks) will work on any device and any screen size. Typesetting? No need, just break up the paragraphs and chapters appropriately.
It not only makes the work immediately accessible to a wide range of readers (readers who live First Worldly-enough lives to have a computer, smartphone, or e-reader), it breaks down barriers between their money and us.