User talk:Seemsea

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Welcome!

Hello, Seemsea, and welcome to the ISFDB Wiki! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

Note: Image uploading isn't entirely automated. You're uploading the files to the wiki which will then have to be linked to the database by editing the publication record.

Please be careful in editing publications that have been primary verified by other editors. See Help:How to verify data#Making changes to verified pubs. But if you have a copy of an unverified publication, verifying it can be quite helpful. See Help:How to verify data for detailed information.

I hope you enjoy editing here! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will insert your name and the date. If you need help, check out the community portal, or ask me on my talk page. Again, welcome! -- JLaTondre (talk) 10:01, 27 June 2020 (EDT)

This Dreaming Isle

I accepted you additions to This Dreaming Isle. For generic titles like "Introduction", "Preface", or "Foreword", we add the title of the book in parenthesis. This is allow them to be distinguished on the author's summary page. I made that change. We appreciate your submission & hope you will continue to contribute. ISFDB has some conventions that need learning so please check out the help links in the welcome message above. And let us know if you have any questions (ISFDB:Help desk is a good resource for asking). -- JLaTondre (talk) 10:01, 27 June 2020 (EDT)

Thanks! I read through a lot of the help pages to figure out how to enter the contents of the book, but I don’t recall seeing anything mentioning having the title of the book in an introduction. Makes sense, but maybe it should be noted somewhere? (Unless it is, and I missed it, of course.)
I’ve been using ISFDB a lot lately, so I hope I’ll be able to help out on some other entries!
— Seemsea 18:01, 27 June 2020 (EDT)
Our documentation could always be improved so feel free to recommend changes on this or anything else you run across. The relevant section is the "Standard Title" portion on the content title's help. This appears as part of Help:Screen:NewPub (linked at the top of the add pub screen) and Help:Screen:EditPub (linked at the top of the edit pub screen). However, these are both walls of text and there are two separate title sections (one for the publication title and one for the content titles) so it is easy to overlook. Plus the help link on the edit publication screen is not all that obvious. It will also come up if you click the question mark next to the Title label in the content section of either screen. This standard is something most new editors miss so we're used to having to explain it. If you have any suggestions on making it clearer, we'd welcome them. Thanks. -- JLaTondre (talk) 09:06, 28 June 2020 (EDT)

Hooting Grange

There are a couple of issues with my submission for Jeffrey E. Barlough's [Hooting Grange], but I can't edit the submission to fix them.

First, the publisher is spelled wrong; it should be "Gresham & Doyle" rather than "Greshan & Doyle".

Second, the correct ISBN is 978-0-9787634-7-3. Not sure how I got that wrong; maybe pasted into the wrong field?

Third, as noted in the notes to moderator field, while the official publication date from [the publisher's page for the book] is 2021-03-23, my copy shipped from Amazon on 2021-02-23 and arrived on 2021-02-25. Amazon lists the same publication date as the publisher's page. – Seemsea 05:39, 25 February 2021 (EST)

I've fixed the publisher spelling and ISBN. Additionally, I changed the cover image URL to point to the one from Amazon.com. Any URLs that link to places outside ISFDB need to be only to this places on this list (they've all given permission to us to do that). The website westernlightsbooks.com has not given us permission to do that. Please let me know if you have any questions. Thanks! ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 15:08, 25 February 2021 (EST)
Regarding the Amazon ship date: we never use that for the publication date. Amazon very often ships books on a date different than the official release date. In order of preference, we use the date on the copyright page, on the publisher website, on another reliable source (like Locus), or on Amazon.com. Hope that helps! ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 15:11, 25 February 2021 (EST)

Carnacki: Starry Wisdom and Other Stories submission

Hi. I am processing your Carnacki #3 submission, and I have some questions/comments:

1) Is the price $7.00 (note: we'd include the decimal and cents) correct and, if so, what is its origin? Amazon gives the digital list price as $6.99 (and the Kindle price as $2.99).

2) It's fine to include the "About the Author". Deeming it significant enough is a subjective decision on your part. This is one of those "generic" titles where we disambiguate by adding the book name in parentheses (so, "About the Author (Carnacki: Starry Wisdom and Other Stories"). I will add that. Question about the authorship credit, though: Does something attribute it to Meikle? If not, we would use "uncredited" on that (which I can also take care of).

3) For ebooks that are unpaginated, we leave the Pages field blank and record the print-equivalent page count in the pub notes. I will do that and move some of the explanation from your note-to-the-moderator there. I'll probably also note that Amazon states the print length is 214 pp, just so that no one sees that and wonders if the 292 is accurate.

4) There's no requirement/policy for this, but where the title on the cover (... Wisdom & Other ...) differs from the title page/official title (... Wisdom and Other ...), it's a good idea to record that inconsistency in the notes as well. It can help some future editor/researcher feel confident that the recorded information is accurate despite the cover's disagreeing. This sort of thing goes for other discrepancies (a fairly common one is differing forms of the author's name). If you have no objection to such a note, I can add it while moving the pricing information.

I have your submission on hold pending responses to the above. There's no need for you to cancel or redo it; all of the above can be taken care of when I process it. Thanks. --MartyD 12:14, 20 April 2021 (EDT)


Hi, Marty,

1. I paid US$7.00 for the ebook directly from the publisher. Their page for the book still lists that price.

2. I'm pretty sure that the "about the author" bit is equivalent to what you'd get on the jacket flap with a physical book; it's certainly formatted the same way. There is no particular attribution; probably just dropping it is fine (especially if you're not going to include the (as mentioned) inapplicable colophon).

3. Ebooks just screw everything up, right? Maybe they should list the number of words or something that would be the same between formats and individual settings. (Presumably the Kindle page length is based on their default settings, as the ones I provided were for Apple's default settings. (On my Kobo, it comes out as 271 pages with my preferred font and font size, and 247 with the publisher's default font, so really it's all just hopeless.))

There is supposed to be a limited hardcover edition of the book, but I didn't order it; maybe someone else will.

4. It looks like the title on the title page is Carnacki: Starry Wisdom and Other Stories, but set as

CARNACKI:

STARRY WISDOM

AND OTHER STORIES

but the cover art, the publisher's page, and the name of the book the file has encoded in all have the ampersand. There's no entry in WorldCat, but it seems likely that it should be "and" rather than "&".

I hope that helps, and, if not, ping me again! Thanks! --Seemsea 21:48, 21 April 2021 (EDT)

Yes, very helpful, thanks. I'm going to have to ask around to see what we want to do about the differing prices. Maybe the Amazon/Kindle information will need a separate record just to record that properly. Otherwise, some of the differences will need to go into the notes. I will use some of the information you've given here to fill out the notes when processing the submission. I'll let you know when I've done that so you can review and fix up. --MartyD 07:52, 22 April 2021 (EDT)
Just to follow up: Recommendation is to have just the one ebook record and document the details from the different vendors in the notes. So I'll accept your submission, do the moving around, and add some more about what Amazon has to say about the Kindle edition. I probably won't get to that until tomorrow or Sunday; apologies for the delay, but work is being, well, work.... --MartyD 10:07, 23 April 2021 (EDT)
Ok, done! Here is the result. I tried to incorporate the information you provide both here and in the submission's notes to the moderator. Two notes:
  1. I opted to keep the "About the Author" and just added the book title into it and changed the author to "uncredited". You are welcome to delete it if you wish ("Remove titles from this pub").
  2. Where there are no printed page numbers and no physical pages, we don't provide page numbers. BUT... There's a handy trick for ebooks. The Page Number field supports a pair of numbers, separated by a vertical bar: <visible number>|<sorting number>. If sorting numbers are provided, the content entries are ordered by those, regardless of the visible numbers. This is mainly to allow proper ordering of multiple pieces that appear on the same numbered page (so we might have Piece 1 with page number 10|10.1 and Piece 2 with page number 10|10.2, each displayed as being on page "10"). But we can (ab)use it with ebooks by omitting the visible number and making the sorting number be the equivalent page number (either as counted, or from a physical version of the book). This causes the contents to be ordered correctly and gives us a way to document the approximate page-equivalent location. So I converted the visible page numbers you provided to invisible sorting numbers (added "|" to the front of each).
I hope that makes sense. Please review and make any changes you feel are appropriate. Thanks for your patience. --MartyD 13:07, 24 April 2021 (EDT)

Youthful Folly and Other Lost Stories

I accepted your addition of Youthful Folly and Other Lost Stories, but made two changes:

  • Price: I removed the price since your publication note states this was a bonus piece not available for individual sale.
  • Cover Image: We can only link to images on sites which have given us permission. I uploaded a copy of the image locally and used that.

Thanks. -- JLaTondre (talk) 08:59, 6 March 2022 (EST)

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