24.3. How interactive fiction is published

| Chapter 24: Publishing |

| 24.3. How interactive fiction is published

If we take the eleven novel-publishing stages of the previous section in order, we find that pretty well the same business goes on for works of IF.

(a) Editing. Working with a small number of trusted play-testers, and taking their responses seriously even when inconvenient, will almost always produce an immeasurably better work: not just better functionally, but better artistically, and more enjoyable. Play-testers can usually be recruited by placing an ad on www.intfiction.org/forum.

(b) Copy-editing. Play-testers will also pick up small stuff - spelling mistakes, and punctuation errors - but note that Inform for OS X will spell-check our source text on request.

(c) Bibliographic data is added.

(d) Printing. Clicking Inform's Release button is the equivalent the-die-is-cast moment.

(e) Cover art is added. As we saw in the previous chapter, Inform can add a cover image as part of the Release process, though it will not itself draw and design that image - like a printer, it expects to be supplied with the original.

(f) A back cover blurb is added. Inform does indeed allow us to compose such a piece of text and include it with the work's bibliographic data.

(g) Binding. The story file, which is akin to the inside pages of a book, is combined with its cover art, bibliographic data, and also with other non-textual materials provided by the author (booklets, sound samples, images, etc.). Inform does much of this automatically, producing a composite object called a "blorb".

(h) Legal deposit. The work is uploaded to the IF Archive (www.if-archive.org), whose librarians shelve it in the appropriate section. More on this later.

(i) Shipping. A work of IF is electronic rather than physical, so nothing is actually moved, but many authors like to put their works on their own websites as well as placing them in the Archive.

(j) Publicity. Authors often announce a new work on IFDB (ifdb.tads.org). Authors often also set up a personal web page about the work. Inform can generate such a web page automatically, as we saw in the chapter about releasing new works.

(k) Reviews and awards. The IF community has competitions and awards in abundance, and several websites gather reviews. It is usually safe to say that a well-written work will not go unnoticed if it is sensibly publicised.

Previous | Contents | Next