Hi folks! If you want to send me a screenshot of evidence that you’ve rated/reviewed Faerie Blood or any other Drollerie work, this is a post to walk you through how to do that. Those of you who know how to do this already, no worries, you can go about your business.
Okay. For purposes of this example, I’m going to assume that the hypothetical person doing a screenshot is a Fictionwise user. Here is what this person would need to do to get me a screenshot of having rated a book (although the steps should apply to any other site as well, of course).
Go to Fictionwise in your browser
Just go to fictionwise.com in your browser, click on Bookshelf in the menu at the top, and log in. Then scroll down to the place in your bookshelf list where Faerie Blood (or whatever other Drollerie work) appears. You should see the control where you selected the rating, and if you rated the book already it should be set to whatever you set it before. That’s the part I want to see.
Get the screenshot
If you’re on Windows, hit the Print Screen button on your keyboard. It may be marked PrtScn for short. This dumps a picture of your entire desktop to your Windows clipboard.
If you’re on a Mac, you can do the same thing by hitting the Command, Shift, and 3 buttons all at the same time. This does the same thing Print Screen does in Windows, only it saves it as a graphics file on your desktop.
Command-Shift-4 on a Mac is similar, only it kicks you into a selection mode that lets you select and save only a tiny part of your desktop. If you do this you can save yourself a couple of steps. Select the part where Faerie Blood appears on the list; get just enough to show me the title of the book and your rating for it. You can drag your mouse pointer over the area, and when you release the mouse button, the screenshot is created and saved on your desktop.
Trim and edit the screenshot
Once you have the screenshot, if it’s a full dump of your desktop, you should load it into something and trim it down to just the parts I need to see. If you are a Mac user and did the Command-Shift-4 trick, you should still edit out anything I don’t need to see, such as any bit of your credit card number, the book’s purchase date, or any other personal information.
In Windows:
- Click the Start button, then click the Run box, and type in ‘mspaint’ to launch the Paint program
- Select the Edit menu and then Paste to dump the screenshot into the program
- Click the Select button (the button on the right at the very top of the toolbar on the left side) to go into Select mode
- Draw a box around the area you want to trim down to
- Click the Edit menu and then select Copy
- Launch Paint a second time, and in that second Paint window, select Edit->Paste and save your smaller graphic into there
- Now click on the Eraser button on the toolbar (second button from the top on the left) and use that to white out any personal information in your picture
- Save the file, name it whatever you want
On a Mac:
- Find the screenshot picture on your desktop; it should be called “Picture 1” or something similar. Doubleclick on it to load it in Preview
- You should already be in Select mode, so just draw a Select box with your mouse pointer around the area I need to see
- On the Tools menu, click Crop
- To block out any bits of personal data, you can select harmless bits of color elsewhere in the picture and then copy them in over the data you want to hide
- Save the picture as whatever name you want
Email me the attachment!
Once you have the screenshot created, send it to me at my gmail address. But don’t stress too much if you can’t properly figure out how to do it. If you need help, drop a comment. Thanks all!
