How to Prepare Your Reveal
***Be sure to refer to the 05-JAN-2009 UPDATE at the very bottom of this post as well.***
The easiest method is to compose and send this using the Private Messaging facilities of the forum so that you can use the forum's bold, italics, image tags, etc.
The example below is a suggested format you might like to follow. Feel free to make it your own, include your own review, whatever you'd like...
Code: Select all
[img]http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0312329385.01.MZZZZZZZ.jpg[/img]
[b][size=7][font=Arial][i][url=http://bookcrossing.com/journal/4730868]Owls Well That Ends Well[/url][/i] by Donna Andrews[/font][/size][/b]
[i]This is the 6th book in Donna Andrews's hilarious Meg Lanslow Mystery series.[/i]
It's not required to read these books in the order they were published. In a few cases, it might give you some additional background about some of the main characters and their personalities, but it certainly doesn't affect the story negatively by not doing so. I started with the fourth book myself, and then went back and found the earlier ones.
[b]Book Description[/b]
Ever since [i]Murder with Peacocks[/i] won the Malice Domestic Contest (not to mention the Agatha and Anthony awards for best first novel), Donna Andrews has kept readers laughing. As [i]Publishers Weekly[/i] says of [i]Crouching Buzzard, Leaping Loon[/i], "There's a smile on every page and at least one chuckle per chapter."
But the secret of Andrews's humor isn't sharp gags and one-liners. From Meg Langslow and her boyfriend, Michael, to the minor characters who cross the stage and disappear, Andrews writes about real people, and invites the reader to join in the fun.
In [i]Owls Well That Ends Well[/i], Meg and Michael have bought a very elderly house from the estate of the uncrowned Queen of the Packrats, a woman who bought everything and kept it all. When the house became overcrowded, she moved the overflow into the barn. When the barn was crammed, she began filling the property's sheds. When she died, her "holdings" left the various grandnieces and grandnephews with decades of junk. They avoid the job of cleaning it up by selling the place "as is" to Meg and Michael, sticking them with the lot. Their solution: a yard sale.
... (clipped for brevity)
Just like when you're composing a forum message, you can view your PM before sending it. It's usually a good idea to send it to at least one other person who's in a different time zone from you, possibly even overseas, so that someone might be available to give your reveal if you're sleeping or unavailable for a long period of time.
To use an image in your reveal post, the easiest place to get the correct image UR from is the BookCrossing journal page and using the Firefox browser.
From Firefox: From the BookCrossing journal page for your book, right click on the image and choose
Copy Image Location from the right-click context menu. This is the URL you'll insert between the opening and closing IMG tags in the above example.
From Internet Explorer: It's not quite as easy since there's not a "Copy Image Location" context menu entry in IE. Instead, you still right click on the image, and choose
Properties from the context menu. Next to Address (URL), you'll see an http address. Drag your mouse over that entire address to highlight it, making sure to scroll down all the way so that you get it all. NOTE: it should end in .jpg. (You can also triple-click on that field and it
should select the entire thing.)
While the text in that field is highlighted, press Ctrl-C (on a PC) to copy it to your clipboard. (Or right click and choose Copy. If you do it this way, make sure you don't
left click first or all the highlighted text will become unselected.)
***UPDATE 05-JAN-2009*** It appears that with the launch of the new forum, it's no longer possible to get at the actual code behind a PM someone sends you. Because of this, it's difficult to post someone's swap reveal while keeping all the links, images, and formatting intact. To get around this, you should
enclose the entire text of your reveal within a set of [ code] [ /code] tags* (without the extra space after the opening bracket). Your PM will then come through looking exactly like my example above, within a box with the word Code at the top.
*[ nocode] [ /nocode] will work as well. See the
Full BBCode List for details on the difference between the two.
Als are sometimes too constrictive for me but sometimes the 12 hours rule is too much.
