Signing up
Sign up using this link! https://fictionfilters.wpengine.com/sign-up/ You should get an activation email. Once you’ve activated your account, you’ll be able to get started.
Books and tagsets
There are two things you can add to the site: books, which are available to everyone, and tagsets, which represent your own grouping of tags for a particular book and are visible only to you and the research team.
In order to tag a book, it needs to be in our database, so you’ll probably want to start by adding some books. You can do this by importing a file from Goodreads or StoryGraph, or by adding one book at a time.
Adding books
To add books individually, select “Add New” under the “Books” section on the left toolbar and enter the relevant information to the title bar and the “Book Metadata” section.
To import books, select “Import Books” towards the bottom of the left toolbar. When you export your library from either of those sites, you will receive a CSV file. The importer on Fiction Filters is set to recognize the columns present in each export file, so you’ll want to avoid modifying the file too much before uploading it here.
Though you don’t want to modify the columns, you can delete rows without getting an error from the importer. The Fiction Filters importer will only take 20 books at a time, but you can run the it as many times as you want if you find that you want to tag more books.
A draft tagset will be created for each book you import. When the importer is done, you should see entries in the Tagsets section with a status of “pending review.” As you finish tagging, you can hit the “publish” button to finish contributing your tags to the book.
Using tags
Using tags is pretty straightforward! If you just added the book yourself, you will click the “Tag This Book” button in the bottom right corner. Otherwise, under “TagSets” on the left toolbar, you will select “Add New” and choose a book to tag. From there, you’ll be able to add as many or as few tags as you would like in “Genres”, “Tropes”, “Character Traits”, “Setting – Place”, “Setting – Time Period”, “Endings”, “Content Notes”, and “Appeal”. You can also choose ratings from the selection menu.
To find tags, you can type in words to see if anything pops up or manually scroll through the drop down to see the options. If you don’t find what you’re looking for or just want to add tags in your own words, check the “Adding tags” instructions section below. If you want more information about the tagging categories, feel free to visit our explanation of our vocabulary.
If you have any problems, please contact us!
Adding tags
If you’re not finding what you’re looking for in the already-existing tags, you’re more than welcome to create your own! Rather than choosing a tag from the drop-down menu, hovering over the entry field for the tag category you’re working on will show a plus sign on the right side of the field. Click on the plus sign and a pop-up box will open. In the “Name” entry field, type in the tag you want to create. If you want to place that tag within a specific section of the hierarchy for that category, you can click on the drop-down menu under “Parent” and click on the tag you want to organize your tag under.
What happens after you’ve tagged books
As part of our research project, we are building a vocabulary for fiction. We will link up related terms and create synonyms to make it easier to search for the exact kind of book you like, while allowing you to use the phrasing that seems right to you as you’re tagging.
Your tags are combined with other users’ tags for the same book. The other users can’t see whose tags are whose, and your comments are visible only to you and the research team.