Writing.Com 101

After you have created your Book item and added the book content to individual entries, you can create a custom format for your table of contents and/or manage the order of the entries in the table of contents.

The Book's Item Tools menu contains additional tools for dealing with the main page of the Book item and with other aspects of the Book as a whole. The Book's Item Tools menu is opened by clicking on the gear icon at the upper right of the item page or at the right side of the item's information in your portfolio listing.


The Manage Book Page
After you have created entries, you can then manage the Book item and its entries using the Manage Book page, which is linked in the Book's Item Tools menu (click the item's gear icon either from your portfolio listing or within the item itself).

A book's Manage Book page gives you complete control over the layout and management of your book. Edit links for the individual entries are available from this page, as well.

Additional Information
The Manage area of a book holds all the information about the book itself, including:


SYSTEM FORMATS: Order the Entries
If you have chosen your book's Entry Format to be set to anything other than Custom: No Entry Listing, the system will automatically order your entries in the chronological order that they are created with the newest entry at the top and the oldest entry at the bottom.

To reset the ordering to something different, enter a number from 0 to 10,000 into the small text box next to each entry. Higher numbers will be displayed first when viewed under the "Default Order". We suggest jumping 100 with each entry so that you can easily insert new entries in the order if you wish. For example: Use 500, 400 and 300 instead of 5, 4 and 3. It's easier to input 350 for an additional entry in the middle than to have to re-order all entries.


CUSTOM FORMAT: Create a Table of Contents (TOC)
If you have chosen your book's Entry Format to be Custom: No Entry Listing, you have complete control over your book's Table of Contents and the order in which you would like your entries. Instead of letting the system order your books for you, this option allows you to tell it exactly how you want those entries to display. This feature can be used on existing books with existing entries. To use it for a new book, create the entries first.

To create the custom format, open up the book's Item Body or the FS edit screen and lay out your TOC just like you would any other item on Writing.Com. It helps to open your Book to the Manage Book page in another window to facilitate copying and pasting the entry ID numbers. Then list your entries using the WritingML entry tag in the order that you would like them to appear in your TOC (WritingML Help for entry).

For example, typing this into the item body of your book:



will produce this when you view your Table of Contents:


Reorder Your Entries: After you save your work on this area, view the book's Table of Contents to be sure that you have listed all of your entries correctly and then head back to your Manage window to click Reset Order. Verify that the list of book entries while in Manage is also in the order that you'd like them to be; they should mirror your TOC now and click Process Order. Your entries now match the order that you have specified in your TOC.

If you change your mind and wish to move an entry from one place to another, or add a newly created entry to the TOC, just open Edit or the FS Edit screen for your book, make your changes to the book's Item Body and click Reset Order again from Manage. The system will once more reorder the entries to match your updates.

The Writing.Com system scans your Table of Contents and finds all of your entries in the order that you have placed them using WritingML {entry:#######}. If you skip an entry number and do not use one of your book's entries in your TOC layout, the system automatically places any ignored entries at the end of your book's rotation, making them the last chapters in the book. The rest of your entries will page through in the order that you have listed them from beginning to end of your TOC. The additional unlisted entries will be accessible via paging from the last listed entry.1