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As a registered member, you're at liberty to post, comment, create new pages of your own, and maintain them. There are very few "rules and regulations," but before you get started, please take a few minutes to scan the Terms of Service ... which is NOT a legal document!  

Help is available in the form of tutorials, User Forums and The Guide ... enjoy!  

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How To Wrangle The Reading Room, and your place in it!

Want to appear in The Reading Room, but wondering how to make it go? Stay on this page for instructions ... because we'd love to see you there.

You'll need four things at the ready:

• An excerpt from your book;
• The URL of a cover image not larger than 400 x 300 pixels;
• The prepared text of your "descriptor line;" (WTF?!! See below ... all is explained)
• About ten spare minutes

Now, the excerpt from your book doesn't have to be the first chapter or three. It can be a choice segment from anywhere except the end (for obvious reasons). Two out of three people (according to the panel that's been running on the pilot page) would rather read the first chapter(s), but some of us aren't all that bothered where the excerpt is from. To see everyone's arguments on this subject, open the page and check out the wealth of comments. There are great arguments to be made for putting up the first segment of your book. There are also fine arguments to be made for choosing another segment. The choice is up to you.

The cover image used to illustrate your listing in The Reading Room will be "called" by putting its address into the "add image" dialog box on the wiki here. The actual image lives elsewhere -- on your blog, or on your publisher's website. We ask you to make sure the original image is no larger than 400 x 300 pixels, because even though the "visible size" of the picture (the size it appears on your computer screen) will be set to 250 pixels high, the browser has to download the whole image. If ten of us use big images (say, 700 pixels high), and just "set the size" here on the wiki to 250 pixels -- we're going to have a page that'll take till 2010 to load! So do make sure you're "calling" a reasonably-sized image.

The "descriptor line" is a line which properly describes the book and/or the excerpt people are going to read. It has the TITLE, and then the BYLINE, and the CATEGORY, followed by the WORD COUNT of the excerpt, and then -- as a courtesy -- what we call "Author Warnings." For example, a good descriptor line would be, "AUNT GRACE UNDER FIRE by CHESTERTON X. DALHOUSIE-JONES. Romantic Comedy. 3500 word excerpt; ADULT CONTENT: sex, strong language."

With these materials to hand, you're ready to go! Having covered the ingredients, here's how you shake-'n-bake...

• Log in. (If you're not registered, set up an account, because you can't upload or edit before you're logged in.)
• Look for your floating toolbar; notice where it says NEW. Click this!
• A dialog opens, asking you to name the page. This sets the filename, not the page title, so make sure you use no spaces...
• Your new page appears in your editing window. First -- let's change its page title to something sensible. See the top field?
• Overtype it to something like My New Book  by My Name - Chapter One.
• Have your excerpt open in your word processor. Select all and copy. Change back to the wiki editing screen --
• You guessed! Hit PASTE (see the icons in your toolbox?) and voilà!
• Not quite done yet. once again, select all ... Drop down the FONT FAMILY menu and change to Verdana or Georgia.
• Almost there. Select all again. Drop down the FONT SIZE menu and set the whole thing to 3(12pt).
• Now, you can mess about with bolds, larger sizes and colors for the chapter headings.
• Want to add your cover at the top? Notice the ADD IMAGE icon in your toolbox?
• Click this, and paste in the URL, where your cover lives.
• To get the text to appear beside the picture, click to select it, then click ADD IMAGE again...
• The dialog box reopens; see the middle tab? Click on this, and then --
• Aha! The top field is ALIGNMENT. Choose LEFT.
• Want some "whitespace" for padding between the image and the text? Welllll...
• Return to the ADD IMAGE dialog ... middle tab again. Notice where it says BORDER...
• Type in 10. Then click inside the PROPERTIES field (bottom box) and where it says black, overtype to say WHITE.
• Last thing here: put links to your wiki homepage and the book's own page at the foot of the excerpt.
• To do this, scroll down to the bottom and type in some text which will become the links.
• Highlight Visit My Homepage (or whatever you typed here) by dragging the mouse over...
• Click the MAKE LINK icon in the toolbox.
• See the Link URL field? Open your wiki homepage in another tab --
• Yes! Copy the URL out of the browser's address field, paste into the Link URL field --
• SAVE & CLOSE.

This creates the page, and now you want to link it into The Reading Room. Here's how:

That's it -- done! You can add as many excerpts as you like. When we pass by about 15, Admin will separate them into pages, maybe 10 or so to a page, always being alphabetical. So, if you see only A-G on Page 1 of The Reading Room list (high duh factor here), go to page 2 for H-N and ... so forth!

Need more help? Please do use the comment form at the foot of this page to leave questions.