Hi, everyone. We have some awesome new 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 this list and who scans books, 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 five tips, any of which will help to speed up the approval time for your book. Doo all five and you'll race through like a Nascar driver. (grin) If you have questions about how to do any of this, please either ask on the lists or write to Bookshare. You can also 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 over 2 years.
1. Before you submit your book, take a few minutes to make sure all the pages are there and that there is a copyright notice in the book. This step is the most important because this is where roughly half of the books that are rejected fall down. So if you ace this one, you're way ahead of the pack.
2. 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. Just scan your book as usual and then save it as rtf once you've finished scanning.
3. 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.
4. 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) If we can't contact you, we have to reject books with missing pages. We don't like rejecting books and do all we can to make sure every book is approved.
5. 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 since we work as a team.
So make sure your book is complete, 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. If you do this, your book will be on the fast track for approval, and you'll see it in the Bookshare collection soon. If you need help with any of this, there are a lot of people ready and willing to help you. Thanks for your time reading this and for your time scanning books for us.
-- Monica Willyard Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/plumlipstick Visit my blog at http://www.scannersguild.com