Tom Benson

‘Hello IASD members!’

We gathered a couple of new members over the weekend, so for the benefit of all, I’d like to set out our stall before we move on with today’s update.

I realise constant explanations irritate some, but I ask you to bear with us for a while longer until we’re established in the next phase of this lengthy process.

It would be beneficial not to invite any more new members until we have the site restructured, because every new author in our membership sets back the sequence. I don’t mean that to sound harsh or uncaring, but it’s difficult to collate information if a new name appears and takes us back a step.

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Who is doing what?

Paul is on a shift system, so is giving his free time when he can. At present he is putting together ideas for the Resources for Writers topic, plus a few other ideas that he and Ian discussed at a recent meeting.

Ian is also working long hours, and has recently produced some stunning results in 3D covers for our titles. Again, please be patient. Ian is working steadily on that aspect of the project, and we have quite a few titles. If you haven’t seen his efforts – check them out.

I will continue to tackle the data input, general presentation, navigation and user-friendliness of our site. It’s coming along and as I said recently – we are listening, so if you have any ideas, suggestions, issues or general comments – get it out of your system.

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Where are we now?

1 – As I said above, the covers are being converted into 3D, which is ongoing.

2 – We have a new theme, a new colour scheme, and a main menu which has been amended several times to reduce the number of general headings. To accomplish this I’ve produced several headings with sub-menus.

3 – I have now amended genres into four groups to reduce the size of the main menu, and make the site manageable for hand-held devices. We may add one or two genres later, but for now I believe we can accommodate everybody’s work.

4 – As a stand-by measure I’ve added ‘Awaiting Classification’ to the Genre – 4 menu. If we have any authors who decide their work does not fit comfortably into one of the genres, then the authors and their titles will be listed under Awaiting Classification, until we establish another category. Those authors’ contact details will be listed with their work, temporarily.

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I have set up four main Genre groups, which are the locations for books. If a book is suited to more than one genre, it will in time be repeated where appropriate. The genre groups are for books, and links to books.

I have also set up three Author Contact groups. These are intended for setting up author names (by genre), and in alphabetical order. A visitor will be able to find out who the authors are, and also the social contact information: website, blog, Facebook, Amazon Author page, etc.

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As things stand now, (Monday 16th Nov 2015), we have a substantial number of authors listed in the ‘multi-genre author’ menu. I will continue to take details from those authors as and when they are posted for my attention on Facebook.

With effect from today, I will get to Facebook as often as possible and nominate a specific genre. For example, I might say, ‘I’d like to have the social contact details of any author who writes ‘Humour’.’ (or some other individual genre)

This exercise will be to locate those authors who only write Humour. If you write Humour and something else – please do not respond; you are a multi-genre author.

As the three of us in Admin continue to work behind the scenes, the site is available and we invite any of you guys to visit with a view to seeing progress, locating your details and your work, and to offer opinions / suggestions.

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Explanations again?

Yes, until we all understand the difference.
Multi-genre authors – are those authors who write separate books or stories in different genres.
Multi-genre books – are those books which could be posted in more than one genre.
The two things are not exclusive. You could be a multi-genre author who writes multi-genre books. (Examples: Lesley Hayes, Patrick (Max) Power, me).

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Due to the massive amount of graphic data involved which slows down performance, I am going to experiment with the following idea:

In the genre groups (where the titles will appear in 3D), I’d like to have the layout as a full page – with no large display of thumbnails to the right-hand side.

In the Author Contact menus, where it is essentially data in the centre of the screen, we could have the thumbnails showing.

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I’d like to finish off this update with a thank you from the three of us for all the kind comments and valuable feedback we each receive in the various threads. I know I’m speaking on behalf of the other two guys when I say it is all appreciated.

A good example is finding out which ideas work when used by those of you who have tablets or smart-phones. The only smart thing about my phone is it rings when somebody calls.

Thank you for your ongoing patience. I’ve now set myself a target of 31st December 2015, to get the site to a standard good enough for us to be posting and linking to it all over the place.

In the last two weeks while we’ve been working on the site, we’ve welcomed 15 new followers.

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