The following is a chapter from Business for Breakfast, Volume 2: The Beginning Professional Publisher.
The ebook is available from Amazon, Kobo Books, Barnes & Noble, iBookstore, and the paper version is available from Createspace.
However, if you’re like most publisher (unwilling to spend money unless absolutely necessary) I will also be posting a chapter a week, so you’ll merely have to have patience to read all twelve chapters.
Chapter Three
File Organization 101
When you first start publishing, you might have your books scattered in different folders, and your blurbs someplace else, as well as a separate folder for reviews, and links, and keywords, and…
This sort of organic organization works when you only have a few books.
What happens when you have ten? Or twenty? Or more?
It is better to start with some level of organization, and to move your files now, because having them scattered and not being sure where to find something will make any updates to those books time consuming later.
This chapter will cover basic organization for your publishing. I assume that you have a completely separate computer, or at the very least, a separate file system for your writing.
NOTE: Do not mix the two! Keep the writing files separate from the publishing files! You have your publishing hat on, not your writing hat!
File Structure—Top Level
I know, I know. File Structure. Scary words. But I would advise starting at the top, with the highest level of things that need to be organized, then working down from there.
And the top level for most people and computers is files. (I am going to assume that you understand what a file is on a computer system. If you don’t, go and look it up. However, the rest of this chapter may be beyond you.)
What do you tend to write? Do you write in series? Do you tend to write all stand–alone books? Or something in between?
I’m going to propose a few different organization structures for your files. You get to choose the one that works for you.
I tend to write stand–alone novels, as well as stand–alone short stories. The top of my file structure looks like this:
- Collections
- Non_Fiction
- Novels
- Stories
I also have other folders, such as zz_Guidelines, zz_Icons, zz_Graphics. Note that these all start with zz, so that they’ll appear at the bottom of the list of my files.
NOTE: I do not use spaces when creating folder or file names. I would advise to NEVER use spaces for either folder or file names. While modern computers can find items that have spaces in the names, they still sometimes mess up.
Suppose you write primarily in series. All your short stories, collections, as well as your novels are in one or more series.
You might instead want a different structure, named by series title. For example:
- Clockwork_Kingdom
- Franklin_Chronicles
- Shadow_Wars
- When_The_Moon
What if you write a combination of the two? Some series, some standalones? Maybe you want to organize then by both series name, as well as by character names. For example:
- Alexandria_Station
- Brak
- Doyle
- Kaleph
- Suren
Really, you just need to pick a structure that works for you, that will help you find things easily.
And remember, you can always switch your structure around. It takes some time, but a new structure that’s easier to navigate will save you time in the long run.
File Structure—Lower Levels
So you have your top level structure. I have intermediate structures under the top level, because again, I write mostly stand–alone pieces. For example, under the big category of “Stories” I have an alphabet system:
- A–H
- I–M
- N–S
- T–Z
It’s up to you if you decide you’re going to start with an alphabet system, or if you’ll move to one later when you start having screen after screen filled with stories. I actually started with merely three divisions of the alphabet and had to change over to four because each list was getting too long. At some point, I may have to it change to five.
Underneath that, I list items by title, and frequently, an abbreviated title—just the first word. I tend to leave out the “The” or “A” and just go with the regular title.
For example:
- Black_Pearl
- Cold_Comfort
- Curious_Case
- Doom
- Golden_Charms
Curious_Case is actually The Curious Case of Rabbit and the Temple Goddess, but I don’t need all of that for a file name. Just Curious_Case is enough for me to know what that story is.
Instead of story titles, you may want to organize by character name, if that isn’t at the upper level. Again, it’s up to you.
Pick a structure, though, and implement it.
After you have that basic top–level structure, what goes into each of those folders tends to be similar. I tend to have the following folders, where Title is the name of the story or book, under each of the folders:
- Title_Cover—contains the cover files. This file may contain a second file, Covers_Old, if I’ve been playing around with a lot of art.
- Title_Epub—contains all the files for doing the ebook, including the final versions of the .epub and .mobi files.
- Title_Print—contains all the files for doing the print edition
In addition, I have the following files at that level:
- Info_Title
- Title_Master
The master file is the final version of the story. (Remember, your writing versions of the file are located someplace else.)
Then there’s that mysterious info file. This is where the magic happens.
Info File
What kind of information goes into the info file? All kinds of things.
I cannot stress this enough—having an info file for every story (novel, piece) will save you so much time in the long run as you build up stock.
I put the following into the info file:
- Book tag line (such as, “A post–apocalyptic fairy tale” or “Sometimes it takes more than eyes to see.”)
- Short blurb
- Long blurb
- Keywords
- Title’s ISBN numbers
- Number of pages of print book
- Pull–quotes from reviews
- ISBN numbers of similar books (for something like LibraryThing reviews)
- Date published (if you don’t track it elsewhere)
Building this file before you publish a book can save you an immense amount of time when you fill out the information on each distributor’s website. Particularly if you then expand to another platform, later. You’ll have all the information in one, dependable, recurring place.
If you end up making changes to a blurb (because some platforms need a shorter blurb, and maybe your original went over the limit) be sure to update the info file with the final version.
But wait! There’s one more important structure to build.
Links File
I have another folder at the top level of my computer that I call Writing_Biz. In that folder, I have additional folders for all the reports I pull down from distributors, contracts I’ve signed, my bios, etc.
In addition, I have a spreadsheet that contains links to where I’ve published every single book.
I have a separate, duplicate sheet for each author.
The first column contains the title of the work. Again, I tend to drop the “The” and “A” from the title.
The second column contains the date I published the title. If there’s a second edition of a book, I have a second date.
In the following columns, I list distributors, one for each column, such as Amazon, Kobo, Book View Café, Draft2Digital, CreateSpace, etc. In that column for that title, I copy and paste the direct link to that book on that platform.
The spreadsheet is pretty big at this point—under my name alone, I have close to seventy titles.
But it saves me time when I need to find a link to a book because I always know where those links are.
I find it much easier to keep those links together, in a single file, rather than separate them out into the info file.
Your Mileage May Vary (YMMV). Find a structure that works for you.
In Conclusion
Here are the three things to remember about file organization:
- Keep your publishing files separate from your writing files.
- Organizing now will save you so much time in the long run.
- Develop a link file to keep track of all your titles.
The ebook is available from Amazon, Kobo Books, Barnes & Noble, iBookstore, and the paper version is available from Createspace.