We have been working on a number of site updates and improvements behind the scenes, but the one I’m most excited about is that when you download an ePub of a story that has images in it, the images are now included in the ePub. This means you can download artwork submissions, comics, and mixed media stories and not lose any of the gorgeous images our artists create and share with us. For authors/artists, please note that art must be in the body of the chapter; anything in the summary, story notes, chapter notes, or end notes will not be pulled into the file.
To ensure ePubs with images work correctly, we also added a default cover image that will be included with each ePub download. HappyWhenItRains was kind enough to create a cover for us that we hope you will enjoy as much as we do! Here is a preview.
In the future, we’re hoping to incorporate the ability to add your own cover image to your story, so watch out for more improvements! Please let us know if you’re having any issues with downloading ePubs at ssolace@gmail.com
Also, we do have a known issue that we are working on resolving related to certain characters that our site considers to be “special characters,” though some of them seem bog-standard to us. Until we are able to implement a fix, if your story title, summary, or chapter titles include these special characters, then ePub files may not open after a reader downloads them. The main culprits seem to be “smart quotation marks”, which are when Word or Google Docs see you typed a single or double quotation mark and make it curl in toward the words. We are attempting to write code that will automate this, but in the meantime, you will need to either re-type the quotation mark in the field (on desktop) or copy/paste in a straight single or double quotation mark from elsewhere (on mobile). As I mentioned, we are working to correct this but do not yet have an estimate on when the fix will be available. If you download an ePub and it won’t open (especially if you get an error message about a formatting issue), please reach out to the mods and we can work with the author or make the edit ourselves. We are also available to help authors troubleshoot their own fics should they need help.
--cawthraven and the Mods on May 26, 2023 11:50am 12 Comments
Beautiful art as always from Happy. Great idea! Would love to see a variety of covers and artists since we have so many talented artists in our community. Opening it up to all EF artists and letting the community vote on the next cover would make it feel more inclusive..
Hi Dynamite, glad you are excited for the update! We do have plans to feature more artists in the future on a rotating basis, and as we mentioned, want to allow authors to upload their own covers once that feature is built. In the meantime, in order to enable images within the ePubs we needed to set one as default, and the software does not currently allow us to set more than one default cover at a time.
That's so cool, thanks for all you do to make the E.F. experience fun! 
Thank you so much for these impr! We are lucky to have such a group of dedicated mods at the helm!
You guy's are the best. The work you do makes this a great sight to be a member of.
Cool!
This will be another great improvement for the writers and artists - I'm sure that many of our graphic artists. like myself, love creating covers. I created many Spuffy Comic Editions covers several years ago and love doing Spuffy covers based on books.
Great big THANKS to all our absolutely wonderful mods for all their efforts.
Forgot to add what a beautiful sample cover - thank you so much for showing it.
Forgot to add what a beautiful sample cover - thank you so much for showing it.
I left a comment on the gram, but this is so cool. Great job! This is a very encouraging reason to download those fics I love for sure.
I can’t wait to see what other artists come up with and thank you for letting me be part of this project. I know it has been a lot of behind the scenes work!
That's a fantastic news! Thank you for this improvement.