PS Power Books • Forum

Anthologies
The Anthologies Notebook is a listing of all the books I have with multiple authors (2 or more).



When I create the Note for these, I include all of the Authors names as tags, so that I can add copies of the Anthology note to their Notebook as needed.

Adding An Author

When I am creating an Author's Notebook, I am using information from Amazon's website and cutting/pasting.

To start, I look for the Author in the Amazon Kindle Store.



Once the information pulls up, you usually see one of their recent novels, followed by the Author's Amazon Page.



I create a Note inside the Notebook to keep track of the hyperlinks particular to that Author.
These are "- Author's Name Links". The hyphen is used to keep this at the top when sorting by alphabet in some Evernote views.
Once the Note is created and named, I drag the picture of the Author over to the Note.



Amazon uses a technique of adding white space to their pictures and images to center them / square them off.
This makes things look nice in Evernote by default. Here is the Note after we have dragged the image over.



Since this is an Author's Link Note, I want to add the link for their Amazon page.



I include a little text between the picture and the links to make the Notebook listing look better.
After adding the Amazon Author Page, I add any websites that the author might have, or other significant pages (Goodreads?).



Here's the Notebook listing for the Links Note we just made.

Adding A Book

Let's add a Book Note to our P.S. Power Notebook.

In this case, we're adding Off Center which is book 2 of The Lament series/trilogy.
For this example, I'm taking the books information from inside the Amazon Author Page's listing.



Again, after creating the Note and naming it Off Center (The Lament 2), I'm dragging the cover art into the Note.



After dragging over the cover art, I like to add the book's description, so I select it from the Book Description.



And drag it into the Note after adding a few returns for spacing.



At this point, I consider the Note itself complete and am adding additional information that I like to track.
So next we're adding the number of pages the book has. On a Book's page, you can usually find this to the right of the cover art.



Click on the "Click to add tag.." to add the pages as a tag.



When I add the pages as a tag, there is a hyphen first to make the Notebook view look better and to place the pages tag first out of all the potential tags (see Anthologies).



Next, I like to add the date that the Author released the book, so I change the Created Date.



After changing the date, I click on the calendar to change the time to noon, so the times aren't distracting on the Note's page.



Since we dragged and/or copied material into the note from the internet, Evernote creates a link to the page it was taken from automatically.



If this Book's Note is for a future release, I will add a reminder to let me know when the book is available for download.



The Reminder button will open a drop-down allowing you to set the date and time of the reminder.
This is awesome for cell phones with the Evernote App, as it will remind you without needing to open the application on your desktop.



Our Note for the book is completed. Here's what it looks like in the Notebook's listing.

Evernote iPhone App

I have been using my desktop to enter all this wonderful information into Evernote,
but find that I use the information more from my iPhone 5.

This post is to give an example of how sweet this works once it is set up!

Here is what the Evernote App looks like when I first open it. (My account email is blurred for privacy... )



While entering books into Evernote from my desktop, I added books that I wished to read and added the tag "To Buy".
When I scroll down my app a bit, we can see the "To Buy" in the Tags section.



After clicking on the To Buy, there is now a listing of all of the books I wish to purchase by their release date (that's how I like to sort the books).
At this point, I haven't purchased Unrelenting Terror yet by P.S. Power (it's the only one I haven't...)



So clicking on Unrelenting Terror brings me inside its Note - looks pretty good!



By clicking on the "more..." I get a listing of the additional information that was added to the Book's Note earlier.
Since I'd like to purchase the book, I'm going to click on the link that Evernote added automatically.



By clicking on the link, Evernote opens its built in browser and Amazon's programming takes us automatically to the mobile version of the page we found the book at earlier when making the Note. Most likely will look something like this.



I have "Buy Now" set up so it is just a click to buy (and occasionally enter my amazon login).



Once I've purchased the book, I click Done at the top left to exit the browser.
Upon returning to the Book's Note, I click on the To Buy tag and press Delete to remove it from my book shopping list.



Sure enough, the book downloads into my Kindle App and I am a happy reader!

Planned Changes

I plan on making a few changes to things as I get closer to adding all of my books into Evernote.


Cover Art
I don't like the "Look Inside" addition to the Cover Art. I also wish to have nicer/bigger copies of the cover art in the Notes.
Unfortunately, the free account for Evernote only allows 60MB of upload per month, so adding those images will take some time.

Amazon has been adding nicer images to their book listings that meet my requirements. You can find them below the presented cover art.



When you click on that little image, Amazon opens a large viewer that has a high-rez version of the cover art.




Note Links
Evernote allows you to create internal links of Notes to place into other Notes within your account.
My plan is to add links to my "Books Read" listings to each of the Books' Notes.

To create a Note Link on a PC, right-click and look about halfway down the menu.



Then go to the Note you'd like to add it too (in this case, my Books Read 2013 Note).
Paste it and it will automatically paste in the Note's title and link to that Book's page.

My little instructive rant is complete!

If you have any questions or comments about any of this, please feel free to add a post to this topic.
I'll respond as soon as I'm able.

Brent / Argy /ArgyrosfeniX

Its much cooler than my excel spreadsheet, but probably takes more work to maintain. I just need to keep track of my series, I don't need a database. To each his or her own but for me simple is better.

Argy, thank you very much. I guess it's a good thing that I'm retired since it looks like I have a bit of work in front of me. Unfortunately I have a very large number of books to work on, especially if I try to include the hard copy books in my collection.