Series

[SkyBubble]

How does the automated system determine what is and isn't a series? For example, I have one series of four C/FF stories, same title with different subtitles (after a colon.) Lit's system identified the first three as a series, but not the fourth one.

I know I'm going to have to fix this manually and once I do that, I'll have to do all my series manually, which is a bother, but how did it decide the first three are a series but the fourth one isn't?

 

[TheWritingGroup]

Which series? Rebecca St. James has way more than four parts, Homecoming has four exactly.

 

[SkyBubble]

The "Boning Libby" series. It lists the first three stories as a series, but not the fourth and last one.

 

[SkyBubble]

Which series? Rebecca St. James has way more than four parts, Homecoming has four exactly.

Homecoming has 5 parts, 4 of which it put in a series. Looking at that one and Boning Libby, I noticed somethign which might be part of the answer.

Boning Libby (in series, yes or no?):

Boning Libby (Yes)
Boning Libby Ch. 02 -- After Dark (Yes)
Boning Libby Ch. 03 (Yes)
Boning Libby: Endgame (No)

Homecoming series (in series, yes or no?):

Homecoming (Yes)
Homecoming: Morning Has Broken (No)
Homecoming ch. 02: Same Time Next Year (Yes)
Homecoming Ch. 02 Part 2 (Yes)
Homecoming Ch. 03 (Yes)

 

[IWroteThis]

It seems obvious to me. The ones that have "Ch. 0#" are included, while those that don't aren't. If you put a colon in the same place on all of them, it might pick up the two oddities as series members, but it's not likely.

 

[AlinaX]

I think I’ve noticed colons breaking the detection before.

 

[TheLobster]

The way the automatic series algorithm works seems to be by looking for a pattern like:

TITLE ((Ch|Bk|Vol|Pt)[.]?)? NUMBER

and then grouping stories by TITLE matches. There almost certainly has to be a NUMBER it; if merely sharing the same title fragment counted, you’d see prolific authors with nonsensical series created solely because a few of their story titles begin with the same word (“Mom” comes to mind).

Also, as indicated above, prefixes like Ch./etc. are optional. I have a series where I omitted it due to lack of space and it works just fine.

 

[BobbyBrandt]

When I did publish chapter stories serially, I had finished each story entirely before submitting. Thus, the chapter titles were established and organized so that there was never any problem for the system to distinguish their association or order.

Now that I have been publishing true series, the titling still needs to clearly indicate the association, but the order isn't always as critical. For example, in my "Before They Were Stars" series, there is no sequence order for the stories:



However, with my "Uncle Sugar Daddy" series, even though each is a stand alone episode, the correct sequence does make a difference:


The automated serializing system works for me in both instances based upon the chosen titles for each episode and the order in which they were submitted.