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Simmerville's avatar
10 months ago

How to deal with Authors' books?

I've just started to focus more on writing books. Creating an in-game book publishing company helps, and I'm currently building both their community lot and a webpage.

This far about 5 Authors signed with the company, and the plan is to have them publish one book per year +/-. Some will be with national/regional themes, and most will be with a custom book cover for the advertising, if I see it will reflect the theme better. I love the game's covers, but some of them appear quite often, so perhaps there could be more alternatives or we could pick the cover for each book (like we did in TS2?).

Anyway, I have no clue how to make the published books useful to other sims in my game. Is it possible through a retail store? It would of course not include the custom covers. At the moment I make sure my Authors create a copy of their book before publishing it. So, in many cases there exists 1 copy, but I guess it can get lost at any time.

But how could a book be spread to numerous households or be made available to read at the community lot, maybe even in all libraries? If there were 6 libraries, would the Author need to create 6 copies before publishing? And then travel about to leave a copy on a table? Can others read a book they do not own? So, again, is retail and gifting the only way?

Also - is there a way to see what titles a sim wrote in the past? I know we see the titles in the royalty list, but that requires the sim to be actively played at 10 AM. Can a list be accessed on a computer? Would it require a certain Writing level, or a trait or whatever? The royalty list says nothing about genre and quality. Such a list would come in handy to know an Author's style/market. Would make sense if most of them will focus on one genre. So far I found nothing related.

Any other tips regarding Authors and making them more interesting to play? I plan to have them give lectures/speeches related to their latest book, and to arrange meet&greet (which might depend on their fame). Some Authors will focus more on literature than on celebrity status, though...

I've read guides to the Author career, Writing skill levels and how to publish books. Now I'm more curious about how these things can be developed into meaningful game play. Would love to learn how you handle your Authors and their books. Cheers!

13 Replies

  • Wyrmelin's avatar
    Wyrmelin
    Seasoned Hotshot
    2 months ago

    This is what I do with my Sim's books. I copy/paste them through this method in public libraries and some other Sims' homes, so everyone can read them. Because obviously, if my Sim is going to publish a "best-seller" book, the only logical thing is for every Sim to be able to access it.

  • As SheriSim said, you can copy your books with each sim, put them in a bookcase then make a room to upload to your build library. From there you can download in to each author's home and add books to it and update the one in your build library with the new one. You can place the bookcase from there into a library and add the books there. I made a library and wanted skill books in it years ago, and I had to put a bookcase into the library and the books I wanted on the lot while in build mode. I then went to live mode, had a sim go to the library and clean up the books. It worked then so hopefully still works now.  I love your idea! Really enjoy the writing career, especially now that we can write horror books with the Life & Death pack as well! You could do the same with putting books into a retail store.

  • My Rock Star's wife penned a biography about her husband and won a Starlight Accolade for Best Book. That was fun.

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