Long Tale Press Help

Table of Contents:

  1. Site Layout -- what's where
  2. For Everybody -- things all users can do
  3. For Readers -- things readers can do
  4. For Writers -- things writers can do

Site Layout -- What (and where) is all this stuff?

  • Home -- the main area of our site. Most of the time you'll probably be in this section.
    • Submissions -- This is where you can find and read material writers have submitted. You can search for things you might like by keywords, by genres, by author's name, and content rating. Alternately, you can also visit the browse page to see what's new and what other readers have said they like.
    • Community -- This is where you go to find other users, to tell people about yourself, subscribe to (or unsubscribe from) other people's recommendations, and get a quick view of your points and community status.
    • Discussion Forums -- This is where you go to talk about the excerpts and books in the system, to discuss writing techniques, get book recommendations, tell us how we can make our website better, or just chat.
    • About -- This is where we keep the boring legal stuff that we have to have (our site terms of service, our standard author contract, et cetera), and contact information.
  • Bookstore -- this is where you go to buy the books we have for sale. But you knew that already, right? If you've ever bought anything online, our bookstore should feel familiar: you can add and remove books from your shopping cart, get details about the books, and check out with a credit card when you're done shopping.
  • Writer Zone -- this is where you go to submit your novels to our system and manage any submissions you've uploaded.
    • Your Excerpts -- this is where you go to access any active submissions you may have. If you have only one submission in the system, the site automatically takes you to the details page for it. Otherwise, you get a list and you can choose.
    • New Excerpt -- this takes you to the New Excerpt wizard, which walks you through the process of creating a new submission.
    • Resources -- a list of helpful resources for writers; books on creative writing that we think are good, links to a variety of professional writers' associations, and so forth.
  • My Account -- This is where you can go to download (or re-download) books you have bought, send messages to other users and read their messages to you, and to change your password if need be.
  • Help -- This is where we keep our User's Guide and other information about how to use our website. Oh, look, you're in this section now!

For Everybody

Creating or updating your profile
To create or update your profile:
  1. Go to the Home, Community area
  2. Click the "Edit your profile" link.
  3. On the Profile Edit page, fill out a description, set your genre preferences, subscribe (or unsubscribe) from our newsletter, set a signature for your posts in the Forums, and indicate whether you are eighteen.
  4. Click the Save button
All of this information is optional; you can leave any of it blank that you like.
Note: your profile includes an age check so that our system can filter out adult content for our younger community members, pursuant to the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). If you leave this box blank, our software assumes you are under eighteen and automatically filters out material that is not rated for a general audience. Although online identity technology has not progressed to the point where we can verify your age independently, we do ask that you be honest. Thank you.
Adding an avatar image to your profile
To add an avatar image to your profile (an icon that identifies you on the site):
  1. Go to the Edit Profile page, as described in the previous procedure
  2. click the "Add or change your avatar" link
  3. Click the Browse button to locate an image file on your computer that you would like to use.
  4. click the Save button
Note You will have better results if you create an image file to use as your avatar ahead of time and make sure that it is 100x150 pixels in size. You can upload an avatar of any size you like (within reason), and the system will resize it to 100x150 for you. However, if you upload an image that has different proportions than that, your avatar may appear distorted when displayed.
Viewing someone else's profile
To see someone else's profile, click on their username anywhere that it appears on site.
Finding other users
You can find other users on the site by searching their profiles for keywords, or searching by genre for people who may like similar kinds of fiction as you. Why do this? To help you find people whose recommendations you may want to subscribe to. To find other users:
  1. Go the Home, Community area
  2. Enter your search terms in the Find People area
  3. Click the Search button
When the search completes, you will see a results page where you can click to see individual people's profiles.
Sending messages to other users
You can send messages to other users on the site, and receive messages from other users. Think of it like a site-wide e-mail system. To access the messaging system:
  1. Go to the Home, My Account section.
  2. Click the "Messages" menu.
  3. To read a message someone has sent you, click on it in the inbox.
  4. To send a message, click the Compose tab, write your message, and click the Send button (you may use Markdown for formatting). If you need to, you can save a message as a draft instead of sending it right away; you can access draft messages in order to finish and send or delete them by clicking the Drafts tab.
  5. To view messages you have sent, click the Sent tab.
Subscribing to other people's recommendations
When someone reviews a submission in our system, they have the option to recommend it to others. In order for you to see other people's recommendations, you need to subscribe to that person. To subscribe:
  1. View the person's profile by clicking on their name anywhere it appears on the site.
  2. If the person has recommended any excerpts, then you will see them listed on the person's profile page along with a Subscribe button. Click the Subscribe button to subscribe.
You will be sent back to the Home, Community area where that person's recommendations will appear in the Community Recommendations section.
Unsubscribing from other people's recommendations
If you decide you no longer want to see a particular person's recommendations:
  1. Go to the Home, Community section
  2. Click the "Manage your subscriptions" link
  3. Click the Unsubscribe button next to the name of the person you want to unsubscribe from
Starting a forum discussion
To start a new discussion in the forum:
  1. Go to the Home, Discussion Forum area.
  2. Find the forum that best matches what you want to discuss.
    • Book Talk: discuss excerpts in the Submissions area.
    • Writing Techniques: discuss general writing skills or ask for help with your writing issues
    • Chat Room: general chat about anything.
    • Recommendations: suggest other books (any books, not just stuff in our bookstore) or ask others for suggestions as to books you might like.
    • Back Talk: tell us how we can make our site better
  3. Click the New Topic button for that forum.
  4. Enter a descriptive subject line for your discussion, and write some body text to get the discussion started
  5. Click the Create button.
Note: you cannot create new discussions in the Book Talk forum; those discussions are automatically created by the system when an excerpt or a book is added to our website.
Replying to a forum discussion
To add your thoughts to an existing discussion:
  1. View the discussion thread
  2. Enter your text in the Respond form at the bottom of the thread
  3. Click the Post Comment button.

For Readers

Finding excerpts
There are three ways to find excerpts you might like to read. You can search for them, browse for them, or stumble across them.
To search for excerpts:
  1. Go to the Home, Submissions area
  2. Enter search terms. Put whatever keywords you like in the Keyword field, and check the boxes underneath to indicate which data to match your keywords against. You can limit the results to particular genres by clicking the ones you want. If your user profile indicates that you are eighteen or older, you can also filter by the content rating (users who are not eighteen will only see G-rated material). Finally, you can limit your results by the number of reviews that an excerpt has already received.
  3. Click the Search button
To browse for excerpts:
  1. Go to the Home, Submissions area
  2. Click the Browse tab
To stumble across excerpts:
  • Subscribe to people's recommendations and then wait for recommendations to appear on your Home, Community page
  • Look for them in the sidebars on various pages.
Reading, rating, reviewing and recommending submissions.
Giving our community members the ability to read, rate, review, and recommend submissions is the fundamental purpose of our website. To read a submission:
  1. Find the submission through one of the methods described above.
  2. Click the submission's title.
  3. Read the text.
The default reading view is paged, so look for the "Previous" and "Next" page links at the top and bottom of the reading panel. You can switch between paged and scrolling views by clicking the Paged and Scroll buttons.
To rate and review a submission:
  1. When you have finished reading a submission, click the Review tab or the "Review" link at the end of the submission's text.
  2. On the New Review page, rate the excerpt from 1 to 5 stars for its story concept, the quality of the writing, the believability of the characters, and how likely you feel you would be to buy the full story if it were published.
  3. If you particularly liked an excerpt and would like to help it get published faster, you can give the excerpt extra points by entering an amount in the Extra Points box underneath the ratings area; excerpts need to earn 100 points in order to get a publication offer. You earn points for doing reviews, so you must have completed at least one review before you will have any points to spend.
  4. Enter some text in the Review box. This is your area to provide feedback to the writer about what you liked, disliked, or thought could have been better. Serious writers know that their work benefits from honest feedback, so while you should keep your feedback polite and focused on the excerpt itself (not on the writer himself or herself), don't pull your punches.
  5. Check the excerpt's content rating, and indicate whether you feel the excerpt was appropriately tagged as being "G", "R", or "X" rated. This is an important mechanism for our community to police itself and to protect our younger community members, so please exercise your best judgment; indicating that an excerpt has the wrong rating will not change the rating directly, but it will flag the excerpt so one of our managing editors can take a look.
  6. If you are one of the first few people to rate and review the excerpt, you have the option of joining the excerpt's Manuscript Pool. This is a select group of no more than five volunteers who will be the first to see the full manuscript when the excerpt reaches 100 points. The Manuscript Pool will have the opportunity to point out flaws and errors of all types--from simple typos to deep story and plot issues-- so the writer can fix them before the manuscript is published. In fact, after revisions to address the Manuscript Pool's comments, the final draft of the story must gain the Pool's approval before we will actually publish it. This is how we ensure that our books live up to our community's standards. It is an honor (and it earns you a bunch of points) to participate in a submission's Manuscript Pool, but it is also a fair amount of work so don't volunteer unless you really have the time and inclination to follow through.
  7. When you are finished, click the Publish button; if you want to switch between the excerpt and your review, use the Save and Continue Reading button instead. You will not be able to alter your review after you click Publish.
To recommend a submission:
  1. After you post your review, you will be taken to a page that shows your review as it will appear to others.
  2. At the bottom you will see a "Recommend this excerpt?" area.
  3. Enter a short recommendation (up to 500 characters)
  4. Click the "Recommend" button.
Users who have subscribed to you will see your recommendation the next time they visit the Home, Community area.
Checking back on an excerpt you read before
If you're like most people, you'll be curious from time to time about how the excerpts you have previously read and rated are doing, or how your opinions stack up against the opinions of other readers. To see how those excerpts are doing and what other people think of them:
  1. Go to the Home, Submissions area.
  2. Click the "Your Review History" link in the sidebar
You'll be taken to a page that shows each excerpt you've rated, how many points it has accumulated, and your ratings for it side-by-side with the average of everyone's ratings.
Viewing all of an excerpt's reviews
To read all the reviews that an excerpt has received:
  1. Find a link to the excerpt through one of the previous methods (search, browse, et cetera)
  2. Click the link (the excerpt's title) to go to its reading view
  3. click the All Reviews tab.
Note: you cannot see everyone else's reviews of a given excerpt until you have submitted one of your own; this is to ensure that your review is your own unbiased opinion, not colored by what others may already have said.

For Writers

Creating a submission
To submit your work so others can read, rate, and review it, you must create a submission. This means uploading a representative excerpt from your manuscript, applying genres and descriptive tags to it, providing a "back cover" paragraph about it, and (if you have some) uploading cover art. To create a submission:
  1. Go to the Writer Zone, New Excerpt area.
  2. Read the Submission Guidelines, if you have not done so before. Note: failing to follow the submission guidelines can result in your submission being removed from the system and/or your user account being suspended.
  3. Click the Accept button to indicate that you have read and understand the submission guidelines
  4. On the New Excerpt page, enter your manuscript's title, what category your manuscript is (novel, novella, or short story collection), and up to 5000 words from it. Try to keep your title short (if your title has a subtitle, leave it out). Do not include anything in your title except for the title (we've had people include stuff like "written and illustrated by John Doe" in their title). Your 5000 words can be any chunk out of your manuscript you feel will best represent your work and make people excited about reading the rest. Most authors choose to start at the beginning, but this is not required. If you enter more than 5000 words, our system will brutally clip your excerpt at exactly 5000, whether this falls at a logical stopping place or not. It's better for you to choose a logical stopping point that is as close to (but not over) 5000 words as possible.
  5. Click the Continue to Excerpt Details button.
  6. On the Excerpt Details page:
    • Click the check-boxes for any genres that your manuscript fits.
    • Enter some descriptive tags that will help people understand better what your story is about. For example, you might have a genre of "thriller" and tags of "crime, murder".
    • Select a content rating for your work: G for General Audience, R for Mature Content, or X for Explicit Content (graphic descriptions of sex or violence, drug use).
    • Enter an optional "back cover blurb" (a brief teaser paragraph for your story of the kind you'd expect to find on the back of a paperback novel), and an author's note.
    • Click the Save Your Excerpt button
You will be taken back to the Writer Zone area, showing your new excerpt in Draft status. Your excerpt will not appear anywhere in the Submissions section until you click the "Submit" button. Before you submit it "for real", you should look at it in the read view to make sure that you have formatted it correctly (see Formatting a submission, below). Click the Read button to see your submission in the reading view. You can also click the "Edit" button to go back and make any changes, apply new tags, upload cover art, et cetera. When you are satisfied with your excerpt, click the Submit button to make it "live" in the Submission area.
Formatting a submission
Formatting your submission means encoding your submission's paragraph marks, italics, chapter heads, and so forth so that they appear correctly in the reading view. If you are having trouble getting your submission to appear as it should:
  1. Go to the Writer Zone area
  2. Click the Edit button
  3. On the Edit Excerpt page, click the "excerpt formatting guidelines" link
This will open a new browser window (or tab, depending on your browser) which contains detailed instructions on how our formatting conventions work.
Updating a submission
To update a submission:
  1. Go to the Writer Zone, Your Excerpts area
  2. Click the Edit button
  3. use the Edit Excerpt, Edit Details, and Edit Cover tabs to make the necessary changes
  4. Click the Save Changes button when you are finished.
  5. Look at your excerpt again in the reading view to make sure everything is as you want it; edit again if not.
Seeing a submission's reviews
To see all the reviews for a submission:
  1. Go to the Writer Zone, Your Excerpts area.
  2. Click the Read button for your excerpt
  3. Click the All Reviews tab
Seeing a submission's status
To see how your submissions are faring--how many reviews they have, how many points they have earned, their average review scores, et cetera:
  1. Go to the Writer Zone, Your Excerpts area.
  2. Look for summary statistics in the sidebar
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