How can I organize a long and messy fanfic so I can post it on AO3?

May 24, 2015 8:39 PM

I have a fanfic that's currently in a bunch of bits and pieces in Google Docs, and I'd like to be able to consolidate them at some point, do a thorough spell-and-grammar check and decide where to make chapter breaks. Eventually the work is to be posted on Archive of Our Own. What's the best way to go about this?

In the past, with shorter works, I've cut and pasted the text from Google Docs into MS Word, run the spell/grammar check in MS Word, and then cut and pasted the text from MS Word into Archive of Our Own. For some reason, when I do that, I lose the line breaks between paragraphs, and have to reinsert them by hand. This is slightly annoying for smaller works, and would be too much for me to handle in this much larger work.

The fanfic is for an event, and must be posted on Archive of Our Own in its entirety by late August.

Any tips about software I should use, or how to post a larger multi-chapter fic on Archive of Our Own would be appreciated.

posted by SockISalmon to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

I think the only way to upload to AO3 without copy/pasting from a different document is their Import from URL option. I haven't tried that, but I uploaded a 12 chapter 40K+ word story one chapter at a time without too much of a problem. It was all uploaded one right after the other since it was finished. The thing that would be frustrating is that reformatting you're talking about, which I'm not sure how to address. I don't recall having that problem. I did use just a basic text editor for my writing, not word or pages or google docs, so that may have been why.
posted by awesomelyglorious at 8:48 PM on May 24, 2015

Best answer: Save your MS Word document as .rtf (rich text format), then copy and paste from the .rtf file into the "Work Text" box on the AO3 page. Make sure you've selected "rich text" and not html. That should preserve your paragraphs and other formatting.
posted by betweenthebars at 10:09 PM on May 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

Came in to say what betweenthebars did. Stay away from the html editor!
posted by mymbleth at 1:38 AM on May 25, 2015

I'm going to put in a vote for the HTML editor, actually; if you're conversant with basic HTML and have minimal formatting needs (just things like italics and bold and scene breaks) it's pretty easy and you don't run into any of those paragraph-chomping problems.

What I do (for long stories, anyway) is copy my final file from my word processor of choice into OpenOffice and then run Astolat's OpenOffice fanfic conversion macros (there were once Word versions but they may not work with current Word) to get a file where all the text markup has been changed into HTML, then I copy and paste that into AO3's HTML editor. (Usually I have to make sure my scene breaks aren't weird, but that's a 10-second copy/paste job.)

(For short stories I just write directly with HTML as I'm writing.)

If you've never posted a chaptered story to AO3 before, you should be aware that (as far as I know) AO3 doesn't let you keep entire chaptered stories as drafts and post the whole thing in one go. You have to upload chapter one, post, add chapter two, post, and so on and so forth. (This shouldn't spam any of your AO3 subscribers with too many emails because all the notifications will come in one subscription email as long as you post it all relatively fast.)
posted by sineala at 4:00 PM on May 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

I've posted chaptered fanfic to AO3 that I've written using Googledocs. Paragraph formatting along with any other formatting is preserved when using the "rich text" box.

For the purposes of using the spelling/grammar check in Word, it's possible to download your Googledoc as a .doc file directly without having to copy/paste the text. It's also possible to upload a .doc file to Googledocs once you've finished editing. The formatting will be preserved in both directions.

(Slightly off-topic - in addition to using the Word spelling/grammar function, I would strongly suggest asking a betareader to cast an eye over your story before you post it. A computer spellchecker is going to miss mistakes such as a misspelling that produces a valid but incorrect word.)
posted by talitha_kumi at 8:02 AM on May 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks, all. I'm going to try using the methods suggested with a test doc and see which one seems to be the easiest to work with.

talitha_kumi, I'm planning on having a beta look at it, but would like to have it as clean as I can get it before I show it to the beta.
posted by SockISalmon at 5:23 PM on May 29, 2015