Help:Converting a NOVEL publication to a CHAPTERBOOK/Conversion-draft

Converting a NOVEL publication to a CHAPTERBOOK

If an editor determines that an existing publication recorded as a novel is in fact a work of short fiction, and should be converted to a chapterbook record, the following changes should be made:

• The publication record must be edited and its type changed from NOVEL to CHAPTERBOOK.
• A CHAPTERBOOK title record must be added to the publication. This will usually have the same title and author(s) as the publication. This is done by adding a record to the content section of the publication record with a type of CHAPTERBOOK.
• The title record for the novel must have its type changed from NOVEL to SHORTFICTION. If the novel has only one publication on record, this can be done from the same Publication Editor dialog where the other changes are made; otherwise the editor must click on the link from the publication record to the title record and click "Edit Title Data" to get the Title Editor dialog and make the change there.
• Once these changes have been accepted, When a user edits this publication record, and looks at the "Contents", s/he should see at least two content items there (very possibly with the same title): One as a "Chapterbook", and one as "ShortFiction".
• In addition, you can add content records for INTERIORART, and introductions or afterwords (as ESSAY types) if they're not already there.
• After all of these changes have been made and approved, it is good practice to go to the author's page and run "Check for Duplicates" in case the fiction work was also recorded separately as a work of short fiction, perhaps in an anthology or collection. If so, it should probably be merged—but be careful in case the work was published in two or more significantly different versions.

Example

We will take the (imaginary) short novel, Spaceship to the Stars by J Random Author. There is only one publication, and shown by the title record (bibliography) display.

• Note that the novel has only 87 pages, which may indicate that it is less than the standard novel length, although this alone is not definitive. But we will assume here that the decision has been made to convert this record to a work of SHORTFICTION published as a CHAPTERBOOK, for whatever reasons the editor thinks good.

• We now click on the link to the publication record, showing the publication details.

• Notice that this shows the publication to be of type NOVEL and to have a page count of 87. It also has various additional data about the publication, including the date, price, binding, cover artist, and catalog number. We will not be changing these fields.

• We now click on the link "Edit this Pub" in the navigation bar at the left. This will enable us to make the required changes in the publication record.

• We will then see the Publication editor display, showing the information about this pub and the title(s) it contains, as shown in the screen shot below. (The fields with a green background and with labels circled in red are the ones we will be changing.)

• We will now change the type of the publication record from NOVEL to CHAPTERBOOK.

• The screen shots above show the pull-down menu for the publication type field, and how it is changed to the value CHAPTERBOOK. This change will change the type of the record for the individual publication.

• Next we scroll down to the "Content" section of the form and change the type of the title record. (Note that we can only do that here because this title has only a single publication. If there were multiple publications, a separate edit of the title record would be needed.) This change is shown in the screen shots below

• After this, we click the "Add Title button" to add an additional set of fields for the new SHORTFICTION content item. We then fill in those fields with the data for the new item. The screen shot below shows the resulting content section. Altered fields are outlined in pink and circled in red. Note that most of the fields of the SHORTFICTION item duplicate the corresponding fields for the CHAPTERBOOK item. In some cases this will not be the case, but it is most usually true.

• If there are any INTERIORART or ESSAY (Introduction, Afterword, or the like) records to add, this can be done at the same time. Also if any of the other publication data needs to be corrected or added, this can also be done in the same edit.

• After the above changes have been made, click on the "Submit Data" button at the bottom of the form.

• Once the changes have been accepted, the publication record will look like the screen shot below.

• And the new SHORTFICTION title record will look like the following screen shot.