Presentation?

[Shaggy]

I'm still a little ways from having anything ready to post in Echo War, because I'm working on the ship histories at the moment, but I was wondering what would be the best way to present a FanFic online.
My current idea is to create a webpage for each page of story, since I'm writing everything in a manuscript format anyway. That way when you finish reading page 1 you can click a little arrow that takes you to page 2. What do you think, advice?

 

[ChrisReid]

That can get annoying. Most people divide pages by chapters.

 

[Death]

Personally, I would recommend the chapter breakpoints that Crid mentioned.

Including forward/back links is a good idea, though. Lots of fanfic stories (or story series, like say a multi-post PBM campaign) tend to not include those, leaving you having to back up to the index page to get to the next section/story. Not a fatal flaw, to be sure, but annoying at times, particularly for the longer stories/campaigns.

 

[Shaggy]

The story is going to be about as long as your average WC novel. So it could be as long as 350-400 pages, if it were traditionally published. I was thinking it would be easier to read through then flip each "page" as you go. That way as you go if you read to a certain page you can bookmark your place and continue later. I'm also toying with the idea a placing some links to the ancillary information (ships histories, unti stats, etcetera) within the body of the text. So when the Captain reads information on the Spitfire fighter you can click the fighter name and it would take you to a page the lists the fighter's history and stats, then a link from there would take you back to the story. That way I could provide extended information at specific points in the story without ruining anything.
That's just the plan I've got so far, but I am open to any ideas or advice.

 

[Viper61]

Its your job as the writer to give the audience all the information they need, nothing more, nothing less. The balance between the two is the difference between your audience knowing and being comfortable with whats going on and feeling like they are reading a technical manual/mission briefing. I thought the WC3N did a pretty good job of introducing what the audience needed to know about the fighters (although it did call the Hellcat an Arrow ) though it did have a little feeling of "I have to get this information out there, so I might as well do it in one lump" about it

C-ya

 

[Shaggy]

Within the body of the story I am going to provide plenty of information that's directly necessary to the story. But I do have to write up a lot of technical info pertaining to the ships and project histories, so I figured I would provide all this info to anyone curious enough to read it. Some of the technical details will give away some of the plot twists, so I thought of using the link within the text of the story so that anyone interested in the extended technical details would be able to read them without spoiling the story.
Also there may be elements in the characters' histories that may play into EW2, if I ever write it, that don't necessarily affect EW1.
As to the text of the story I'm still planning to go ahead with the 1-1 setup, where 1 page of text appears on one webpage, probably with the text in red or blue against a black background, so your eyes don't burn out reading it, with GIF buttons for flipping pages. Right now that's the best idea I've got, since each chapter will run between ten to fifteen pages in a traditionally published format.