Ninetailed_Furball
Well-known member
- Joined
- Apr 12, 2019
- Messages
- 137
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A thread made me think of a feature that would be incredibly useful, yet I hadn't seen, yet many authors here use a workaround for already. That is, the division of a series into subsets.
What I mean is that a story can be divided into volumes (or whatever you want to call it. It would be even better if the name was customizable). These divisions would separate the chapters into groupings that help delineate things like major arcs, or even published books. In addition, if tags could be listed separately to each grouping, then the tags could evolve as the story does.
Gender Bender is a common one that stops being relevant after the first arc or two. Get rid of the MtF or FtM tag when it stops playing an active role in the story. Childhood trauma? If it gets resolved, then drop it! Love interest breaks up? Remove the tag! The setting changed? Change the setting tag!
The use of this feature would be immense, and I bet not just for the tags, but readers would love knowing useful division points in the stories they read.
Once a story grows past 50 chapters, the chapter directory becomes quite a mess, and readers would have trouble keeping track if they didn't diligently bookmark the chapters they finished all the time (something even more difficult on mobile). Having the story broken up into arcs would not only make it much easier to find the rough area they were at, but if a person hated cliffhangers or had a limited time to read, they find out how many chapters were left in an arc and plan out their time accordingly!
I know I'd certainly take advantage of this feature both as an author and a reader.
On a surface level, I think it would be easy to implement on a basic level (though the tags bit would be much harder). Worst case, you could encapsulate the entire series into a larger framework and make the divisions just copies of the series? Dunno, I don't know how your back end works, and I'm not a professional programmer.
I hope it'll at least be considered though.
What I mean is that a story can be divided into volumes (or whatever you want to call it. It would be even better if the name was customizable). These divisions would separate the chapters into groupings that help delineate things like major arcs, or even published books. In addition, if tags could be listed separately to each grouping, then the tags could evolve as the story does.
Gender Bender is a common one that stops being relevant after the first arc or two. Get rid of the MtF or FtM tag when it stops playing an active role in the story. Childhood trauma? If it gets resolved, then drop it! Love interest breaks up? Remove the tag! The setting changed? Change the setting tag!
The use of this feature would be immense, and I bet not just for the tags, but readers would love knowing useful division points in the stories they read.
Once a story grows past 50 chapters, the chapter directory becomes quite a mess, and readers would have trouble keeping track if they didn't diligently bookmark the chapters they finished all the time (something even more difficult on mobile). Having the story broken up into arcs would not only make it much easier to find the rough area they were at, but if a person hated cliffhangers or had a limited time to read, they find out how many chapters were left in an arc and plan out their time accordingly!
I know I'd certainly take advantage of this feature both as an author and a reader.
On a surface level, I think it would be easy to implement on a basic level (though the tags bit would be much harder). Worst case, you could encapsulate the entire series into a larger framework and make the divisions just copies of the series? Dunno, I don't know how your back end works, and I'm not a professional programmer.
I hope it'll at least be considered though.
