When e-readers came out, it seemed that choose your own
adventure style books would be an obvious choice. Rather than having to go to a certain page
that corresponds with your choice, you simply press a button. It would be the book version of a video game.
It turns out, it wasn’t that easy. Since there are no page numbers in e-readers,
one cannot program the book to go to a certain page. It has to be programmed in.
I met some people online who were making a program for
this, and I joined them in creating content to go into their application. Since I’m building on the Relic Worlds
universe, I made three books that followed Lancaster and Little Jack. The program turned out to be a failure for
several reasons, but I had put so much time and effort into these, I didn’t
want it all to go to waste. So I set
about finding a way to make them work with e-readers.
At first it was beyond me. Their program had been quite complicated; an
entire app dedicated to choose your own adventure style books. I needed a programmer, or at least a pre-made
template. I looked high and low and
couldn’t find anything. The answer
seemed so close, yet so far away.
Then I was talking with a friend of mine, Brent McKibbin,
who’s a bit of a tech genius, and he said it was pretty simple. All it took was making the various pages you
needed to go to into chapter numbers.
You see, all e-readers have a table of contents
page. Each entry has a link to its
corresponding chapter. So you already
have linking pages from there. In a
choose your own adventure style book, all you need to do is put those links in
the choices readers make.
The first step, of course, was to create the choose your
own adventure. (I call mine Pick Your
Path to avoid copyright infringement.) I
will be posting a blog with a link here at a later time going into detail about
how I lay out and create a choose your own adventure style book.
Second, I lay it all out on the pages. After every list of choices I have a page
break. At the start of every segment, I
have a new page number. I do not put
page numbers on every page. This makes
finding them easier. After writing the
segment, I place the choices, providing the page numbers they correspond
with. This will, of course, become the
paperback version, as the page numbers and choices with the page numbers will
correspond correctly to a physical version of the book. (Note, only place page breaks after
choices. Never place page breaks
anywhere else.
Third, I select the first sentence of every segment and
make it a chapter heading. (I’ll put the
technical aspects of this in another blog and connect it here.) I title each chapter heading after its
corresponding page number. (Leave the
page numbers there for now.)
Fourth, at every choice, I select the choice and link it
to the page number it’s supposed to go to.
I then delete the page number listed after the choice. (But I still leave the page numbers at the
tops of every page.)
Fifth, When I have gone through and linked every choice
with a page, I then delete every page number from the tops of every page. Now, when a reader reads my book, they’ll go
through the beginning, then reach the point where there are choices and it’ll
stop. The choices will be highlighted,
and when the reader touches one of them, it’ll take them to that choice.
At this point, readers will be able to swipe to the next
page past the choices. This can be left
there with an explanation at the beginning that readers aren’t supposed to do
this. However, it can be blocked through
technical means. This is a bit more
complicated, which I’ll go into in the technical entry.
