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 |   Tales from real life |
| Well, if they're not true, they oughta be! |
As we enter the new year, many resolutions will pass through people's minds. Some will be mentioned aloud, a few will be written down, and one or two might even be accomplished. With that cheerful prospect in mind, here are some thoughts on portfolio organization: Free Account: Folders aren't available to free accounts since they're allowed only 10 items. And they aren't allowed to create books, so that point is moot. There's little to be done in the way of organizing, but you can create separate items for poetry, short stories, non-fiction, horror, romance, etc. More than one piece can be saved in an item, but the size limit for each is 50 Kb. That's about 25 pages of text, so you can't really write a novel. Still, a collection of two dozen poems or a few short stories could be presented in a single item. Basic Account: A basic membership allows a portfolio of 50 items, and each can be up to 100 Kb in size (about 50 pages of text). A list that long is probably too much for our modern-day attention span. It may be better to use folders to direct the reader. Some authors name their folders for the year the items were written. This is easy, but most readers don't care, they're looking for something more specific. Love poems, for example, or horror stories. I'd suggest that an author start by collecting their items into folders of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, recipes, lyrics, etc., and then further organizing them by genre. Then the reader can find all the mushy stuff by clicking once on 'Poetry' and then again on 'Love Poems'. And they won't have to scroll past horror stories that could spoil the mood. Upgraded Account: An upgraded membership allows 250 items and each can be up to 250 Kb in size (about 125 pages). At this level, it becomes imperative to organize one's portfolio. Using folders is a good start, and 250 items may seem like a lot, but it's easier than you might think for an author to bump up against the limit. It took me less than three years to get there. One obvious option is to simply delete the lesser works, but vanity precludes that. A better solution is to learn how to use books. An upgraded membership allows the author to create up to 10 books of up to 5Mb each (about 2500 pages). That is truly a lot of pages! So, if you're short on portfolio space, then I recommend putting similar items into a book. This seems especially obvious for poetry collections, where individual entries tend to be short. Another good use for a book is to hold items that are in-work. Have you ever felt frustrated by all the 'save and view' clicking just to try out different formatting? A book entry has a 'preview' feature that allows you to quickly see how the finished item will look without leaving the edit pane. Once the story or poem looks 'right' you can copy and paste it into an individual item and make it public. A book is also useful for storing ideas. You can easily jot a few notes into a book entry, set it to private and save it for later. And, of course, a blog (what you're reading now) is just a special book format that's automagically linked to the blog tab of your portfolio. Oh, I almost forgot, you could even use a book to write the Great American Novel with each entry being a separate chapter. I haven't been ambitious enough to try that yet. A drawback of using a book is that you can't attach a cover image to individual entries. I feel that an appropriate image can be a big help in setting the mood for a piece. I'd like to be able to add a cover image to my book entries, but that's not an option. Another drawback is that awardicons can't be attached to individual entries within a book. An awardicon is attached to the book rather than the entry within the book. They can, however, be referenced within the entry itself. My method is to create a drop note and show the awardicon there. The ML code shown below will create the drop note shown further below. {dropnote:"Author's note:"} 20 lines of free verse Second place in the September 2022 round of {i}Second Time Around{/i} contest Prompt: Help celebrate WDC's 22nd birthday. Just for this month, all entries must be previously written pieces that did not win a contest, and that have a birthday or a party theme. {award:155262} {b-item:2164876} {/dropnote} Author's note: ▼ Premium Accounts: I haven't tried these levels, but they allow even more individual items and even more books. I won't give any further advice except to say that portfolio organization only grows more important as the number of items increase. |
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