Advanced covers for your fanfic library
A guide for FanFicFare + Calibre users
You're already using FanFicFare to download fic and Calibre to manage it. This guide is about making your library look good and give you useful information at a glance: automatically, per fandom, with metadata that actually matters to you.
This is not a guide to setting up FanFicFare from scratch. If you need a more general, but advanced guide without emphasis on covers, I strongly recommend Stormy Crossroads' Calibre + Fanficfare tutorial. For thorough documentation there's the FFF wiki.
This is a sample of what my covers look like. I have per-fandom cover designs (even per-ship in some cases!) and I’ve set it up so I can see at a glance all the information to see what the fic is about: Main ship, genre, length, completion status. You can decide exactly what information you want displayed. the templates available in this guide are slightly different as they don’t have per-fandom icons and text, but they’re editable, so if you want you can modify them yourself.
The Tutorial
Step 1
Basic covers
Get cover generation working with GCC
Step 2
Per-fandom covers
Different cover templates per fandom using FFF
Step 3
Custom columns
Ship names, genre tags, status — on the cover and in the library
Step 4
Advanced custom columns
Creating columns from other columns to process and change metadata.
Step 5
Advanced ships
A better way of figuring out primary & secondary ships.
Step 6
Tips & tricks
Take it further with these techniques.
Before you start
You'll need
- Calibre with the FanFicFare plugin installed and working
- The generate_cover plugin installed
- Basic comfort tinkering and editing code. Don't worry, it's all explained and ready to be copy/pasted and modified easily.
Note
This guide is written with AO3 in mind. Settings may need adjustments for other sites.