Hi, everyone. We have some awesome new members and volunteers, and I thought I'd post this to let people know how they can get their book submissions processed more quickly. Also, if you have a friend who isn't on either of the Bookshare lists and who scans books for us, would you please send this along? It will help your friend and us as a community too.
Fast-tracking your book submission is pretty easy. Here are 4 tips, any of which will help to speed up the approval time for your book. Doo all 4 and you'll rocket through like a Nascar driver. (grin) If you have questions about how to do any of this, please either ask on the lists or email me directly at rhyami@xxxxxxxxx if you're not part of the Bookshare lists. I'm not a staff member. I'm a volunteer who has been around on Bookshare for a year and a half.
1. Submit your book in rtf format. If you do this, your books will have the best chance of finding an interested validater who has the ability to open your file. If you submit a book in ark, wyn, or kes formats, only some of our volunteers have software that can handle these files. Almost every volunteer can handle rtf, and there are well over a hundred active volunteers. Openbook, Kurzweil, and Wyn Wizard can all save scans as rtf files.
2. Include at least a short synopsis when you upload your book. Volunteers are just like anyone else. We want to know what a book is about before we decide to dedicate our time to processing it. You don't have to be fancy. Just tell us a little bit about the book to capture our attention.
3. Consider putting either your email address or some other contact info such as which Bookshare list people can find you on in the comments section of the upload form. This is only visible to volunteers and the site administrator and won't be made public when your book is added to the Bookshare collection. Why should you do this? Sometimes books are rejected for simple things like 1 missing page, a missing copyright date, or confusion over the correct title of the book. If the person working on your book can contact you, he/she can resolve the problem quickly and get your book into the system. No dreary rejection notices and resubmissions. (smile)
4. Send a post about your book submission to the Bookshare Volunteers mailing list. People don't always check the website for new books each day, but an email from you will interest at least one person from the list. As you make friends and build up a reputation for submitting good books, people will begin to look out for your work and will help you get your book approved even if it's not necessarily their normal genre of reading material. We're a community of people who help each other and work as a big family. We do care about your success as a submitter, and it makes Bookshare a better place.
So submit in rtf, give us a synopsis, provide some contact info, and speak up when you've got a new book posted to the system. Thanks for your time in reading this and for your time scanning books for us.
Monica Willyard To unsubscribe from this list send a blank Email to bksvol-discuss-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx put the word 'unsubscribe' by itself in the subject line. To get a list of available commands, put the word 'help' by itself in the subject line.
