@Vincent Berg
Cover images are handled as a file submission. When you first post your story, include your cover image as the first file, then leave a note to the Moderator that your posting a cover image as your first file. The file limit is 267 x 400 pixels at 72 dpi (pretty small in today's HD world, but not unreasonable considering that this is a story and not a picture site).
Actually, there is no specific limit. Since our bandwidth is limited, we try to keep images under 25 KB and we process covers and images in general in a subjective way.
If the image contains a lot of details that may get lost, we don't shrink it as much. We shrink images as much as possible without ruining them.
If you have a cast list, you should also submit this in a similar manner, ahead of any actual chapters when you first post the story. You can update it whenever you like, but it's easier for the Moderator to set everything up correctly the first time.
Correct.
One important tag to remember is the { t } { /t } tags, as they flag section breaks, rather than the normal chapter breaks. If you don't use these, then don't sweat it.
Correction, the {t} tag, which creates a section header doesn't need a closing {/t} tag.
Also, you don't have to label your chapters as "Chapter ##". The system will take whichever the first line is and make it the chapter title. I typically define mine as H1 definitions, so it looks nice as I'm working on it, and the SOL system automatically converts it to the correct chapter titles.
That's not correct.
You should label your chapters properly with the word 'Chapter' or optionally 'part' or 'episode' with a number like Chapter 1, or Part 1 or Episode 1. Optionally with an additional title like 'Chapter 1: Here we go again' etc.
The system doesn't pick any lines automatically for titling if they don't include the 'Chapter' word. The word 'Chapter' at the beginning of a paragraph is the only default that the system looks for. Anything else is done manually by moderators.
If the first line looks like a chapter title, we'll treat it as such by manually adding 'Chapter xx' before it and then processing it.
The list of officially supported parts is:
'Prologue', 'Glossary', 'Preface', 'Prelude', 'Foreword', 'Cast', 'Intro', 'Epilogue', 'Postlude', 'Preamble', 'Afterword', 'Postscript', 'TOC', 'Chapter xx', 'Part xx', 'Episode xx'.
The chapters' numbers are always numerical. If you use the verbose annoying notation of 'Chapter Twenty Three - More wordy title' for example, we run a script that converts it to numeric 'Chapter 23: More wordy title'. This is important as it makes many things more convenient on our end and it's programatically more manageable.
All the above keywords (except 'Chapter') still require manual intervention from the moderator to show up as separate files on their own.
I'll let you in on some of the inner working of moderation on the site. When we encounter the above keywords and the story is long enough to need division or is submitted 'in progress' we tag the above keywords on their own lines with the {p} tag.
So to create a prologue files before chapter 1 we do this:
{p}Prologue
text for prologues....
{p}Chapter 1
text for chapter 1...
{p}Chapter 2: Optional Title here
text for chapter 2...
Then we run a script that converts to html, splits the submission into separate files and sends them off to the server to be inserted into a proprietary filing system that feeds the story delivery script.
Also, the posting scripts always, always work on a single file only. If you submit 10 chapters in 10 different files, the first step we do is to concatenate them into a single file with chapters separated by the keyword 'chapter' if you don't have it at the beginning of each of your files, we add them during concatenation.
So if your text in a single file, don't split it to post it. You would be doing something that we will need to undo. So save yourself and us the effort. On the other hand, if you work on your system with multiple files, then don't worry about joining them before submission, the effort on our end is minimal.
