I've noticed a few authors like G. Younger put the cover of their story on the story details page, but I can't figure out how to do that. In the system, I can see how to edit the story name, the details, the copyright info, and the author name, but I don't see how to make any other changes to this first page like adding a cover image.
Can someone point me to how they're doing this?
The answer is in the crazy section known as 'Help'
https://storiesonline.net/sol-secure/user/help.php#cat-Authors
https://storiesonline.net/h/41/how-do-i-submit-a-story-or-chapter-with-images
edit to add:
I submit my files as html and I can send you a copy of the code I use for including an image, if you want it.
Yea, I saw that help section, but while it mentioned story images, all of the explanation was for images inside the chapter. I wasn't sure if you just submitted the image with the first post and put in the moderator note that the image was for the cover, or if there was another way to do it.
I've never tried it, but if you look at the author section of the FAC, there's one where it talks about setting up the chapter structure and mentions that if you put a blurb or author note in between the byline and the chapter 1 tag it will show up on the index page.
I imagine that would work on an image as well given I have seen images on the index page of some stories.
And I imagine with a single chapter (or more properly a chapterless) story if you put the image link above the text you will get the image above the text when it loads.
Yes.
I've had images included at the start of single chapter stories and multi-chapter stories, and I've also had images placed within chapter in a story. It's all a matter of making a suitable notation as to where you want the image to appear, attach the image as a separate file when you upload your story file, and putting a Moderator's note in the upload about how you've designated the location of the images.
how you've designated the location of the images.
Meaning location in the story or file location?
Meaning location in the story or file location?
In the moderator's note you tell them how you've designated the place for the image to be placed within the story.
I do this all the time (i.e. once for each of my 34 SOL stories), so I can provide some real-world examples, though mine are only in html, since I like to get fancy with my usage:
< p class=Center>< span align="center">< img src=">image located on disk< "
alt=">Text to be read aloud for visually impaired readers< ">< /span>< /p>
Again, virtually no one ever gets this detailed, but:
The center command places the image in the center of the page,
the span command is exclusively for Apple devices, which are too dumb to recognize a plain html center command by itself
The 'image source' command, which tells the html code where to locate the image from so it can add it to the resulting html file
and the following alt= command allows blind readers to tell what your image details. Feel free to drop any of these you don't need (only the center and img src="" are needed for SOL posted files, but this is a pretty fool-proof usage, which hasn't failed me yet (i.e. the only time is has is when I either screw up the location, or a move the required files before posting!).
since I like to get fancy with my usage:
class="center", you forgot the quotes.
(For someone who wants to copy/paste the line).
class="center", you forgot the quotes.
Sorry. I cheat, by defining "center" and "centered" span-styles, which allows me to use those statements to duplicate their name. Sadly, I didn't remember to explain what I was doing. The shortcut is handy, but it's certainly not intuitive. :(
Simply attach two files - the text of your story or first chapter and a jpeg for the book cover. Laz and the gang can figure it out from there. They optimize the cover so that it fits different platforms.
FYI - I get my book covers from Fiver. They run me about twelve bucks.
G Younger