Hey guys, what's up? Welcome-- Oh don't do it. Don't! Excuse you. Hey guys what's up
welcome back to another video. I'm gonna be covering how to use world anvil as a
digital series Bible so I'm gonna cover some of the different perks of using
world anvil and then I'm gonna go over this just demo style so I can show you
guys exactly what it looks like. Now if you don't know the basics about what a
series Bible is or why you need one then go make sure to watch that other video
that I did so I'll link that in description down below. And I will
eventually be covering all of the different methods of how to make a
series Bible so if you have a preference for which type of thing I cover next
make sure to drop a comment down below to let me know. Alright so let's talk
world anvil. World anvil is a web based world-building app that was
originally designed for sort of role-playing games but very easily
applies to writing and they've started adding features specifically for writers.
I do want to cover the fact that this is a small team created product so if
you're someone who only likes to use products that are created by large
companies and you feel like there's more security in that then this might
not be the app for you but if you're someone who likes to support small
creators and likes the idea of an app created by the very types of people that
use it then this is definitely a good choice. Now one of the really nice things
about world anvil is there is a free tier and it really covers everything
that you need. I am currently on the journeyman tier and I think journeyman
is really the max of what you would need for any standard writing project where
master and Grand Master are much more useful for people who are doing more RPG
type things. So by doing journeyman you do get a bit more space you get upgraded
from 100 megabytes to 1 gigabyte which if you're doing purely text-based stuff
doesn't really matter 100 megabytes is more than enough but if you want to
include a lot of photos you're probably gonna need a little bit more space here.
You do get to export your data a little more often with
journeymen, once a day versus once a week. You get five universes versus two. You do
get slightly less draft articles with the free version but then the main thing
that was a deciding factor for me personally was this level right here:
private worlds and articles. So I wanted to start out my world being private so
that it couldn't be searchable by anyone and no one else would see it but me.
Another notable difference between the two is this subscribers level so you
could have a specific patreon tier where people get to see sort of behind the
scenes or secrets of your world. And I think another main other difference between
the two which sort of influences my choice is themes and CSS
personalizations. You can make your worldview page look a lot nicer. You can
look through this entire list yourself but I think as a writer you can be more
than happy with this 3.99 a month and you can definitely make the 0 month work for
you. Now I did want to briefly mention this fifth level that was just
released and that is sage. It is quite a bit more pricey at a hundred and thirty
dollars for six months but the benefit of this is you get a custom world URL
and up to a thousand subscribers so if you have a very large patreon you're a
big author this could be a really good benefit because you can give up to a
thousand people access to your secrets and behind the scenes of your world.
So to keep this video a manageable length I'm gonna be mostly just focusing on the
features available to you and just highlighting why this is a good option for
series Bibles. This app is incredibly intuitive so you aren't really gonna
need a step-by-step guide on how to do things. So first things first you're
gonna want to create your world and that's just a couple quick button clicks
we'll do create a new world you enter your title and hit create world. Now your
world itself is gonna have some configuration options here, you'll be
able to change that using this menu here on the side going down to configuration.
One of the neat things about this is you'll be able to set your current date
in your world and your eras so the way I'm using this is I don't want to set
actual dates so here I have my global era of the before Alethea which is
essentially BC or BCE and then I have after Alethea which is essentially aD
or CE. Then we have setting, again because I'm journeyman I have the
private feature but I could set this to public at any time and that would make
this publicly searchable. This is the cover image for my world. You do have the
ability to transfer your world so if you were to ever want to give it away that
is an option. And then of course export your world so if you ever want to just
back up your data make sure you don't lose anything you just hit export world
it will compile all your information into this PDF so you can just toss this
PDF in the cloud somewhere and you'll still have that data. It's obviously not
gonna look as pretty as it does in world anvil but it does save everything there
so something were to happen you could access everything. Now if you have
journeymen you'll have access to this theme here where you can just set kind
of a general theme for what your world will look like to the average viewer and
of course you have access to CSS which will allow you to do a lot of
customization of the styling of how your world looks and we'll go over that in a
bit and then you have this social section here where you can put in your
patreon and your Twitter and so to see what all of this here does we'll just go
and view our world. And this is my world and sort of the user friendly viewable
version so if this was public I could send readers here and this is what they
would see. So having patreon listed in social gives me this link click that
opens it up and there's Josh and my patreon. You get to be a kitten. You could
be a cloud kitten and Josh could critique your work with his evil red pen...
This isn't a plug, you're a plug. It's ok. So yes, back to the actual video. Having your
Twitter username up in that social section puts this Twitter feed in here.
And here is the cover of the world. So that's what these world setting basics
do. So while you're working it's a good idea to have this world view just open
in a different tab that way whenever you make changes you can refresh it and see
what it looks like over here. So next up let's cover the features. First things
first we have articles and you can either access that through here clicking
articles or also with this little button here at the bottom. You click that and it
opens up create new and you can create new of any of these articles. And then we
have this button which is for even more quickly creating articles if you just
want to jot down an idea real quick before you forget it. Like let's say I
think of an item I just have this free form option here and my
categories. So each of these things is a template which is really great
especially if you haven't thought of these things before, this encourages you
to think about them. So let's take a look at one of the most common ones which is
character so I open that up and here we have just a ton of different options and
I'm not gonna cover every single one but this is what you're gonna be working
with. It's a pre-setup template designed for character building and you don't
have to put in all of the information if you don't it just won't show up on your
list. So here's the user-friendly version so you can see what that looks like.
Here's 736, so if you don't fill in a section it just doesn't show up on the
list. Because you don't want to have super small supporting characters that
you put in all of these details for but for your main character I think it's
good to try to fill out as many as possible and one of the nice things is
that you can create new articles and link them straight to this so an example
of this is conditions. 736 had Lethe but it was cured I just clicked here put in
lethe cured and added it so later on I can go click articles go to lethe cured
and fill out the information for lethe. But what that does is here on her page
for characters under conditions this will now show up as a link so if I click
on that it'll go to the page about lethe and once I've entered in information
about it which I haven't yet it would all show up here. And you can use that
anywhere as long as you have an article for something, all you have to do is put
an @ and you can then mention that article and it will link to it in that
same way. Now we also have this design tab which is again CSS customization and
that's a little bit of a learning curve but CSS is pretty easy to figure out
your way around. Navigations you can add things like tags you can add it to
categories so I have it under the category of main characters which means
on the main page it shows up under this category I created for main characters.
You can assign previous articles and next articles so there's a next and
previous button at the bottom of the article so people can flip. Then
we have access so you can set it to private or set subscriber groups so again this
would be if you have patrons who have special access. And then we have this tab
which is really nice which is character relationships and this gives you a whole
little prompt you can fill out for each character relationships you have
your character that you're on currently and then you select a
counterpart and then you say what they are to each other then you have your
actual opinion of that person, displayed opinion of that person, honesty towards
that person, importance of the relationship, all of that sort of thing.
So there's tons of options and I just really love this. Then we have this note
section so if you ever think of a note and you don't know really where it falls
you can just add a quick note here and it's also worth mentioning that you can
do that at any time for anything so say you have an idea and you don't know
where it falls you just go over here and you click notebook that opens up this
and you can just create notes here that you can then later categorize or you can
just leave them as notes forever. And then we have secrets which again is
that thing that only you is the owner see or if you allow certain subscribers
to see they would see that as well. But if you have spoilers that are revealed
in the actual story and you're okay with people knowing there are also spoiler
tags so you go ahead here and click spoiler and that'll fill in these
spoiler tags here and anything you write in between these tags will show up with
this show spoiler button and that's hiding that section that we added. Now it
is important to note that this does use BBC code which stands for... What does that
stand for? Which stands for bulletin board code which you're probably
familiar with if you've ever written stuff like HTML. As you saw in this 736
down at the bottom where we have likes and dislikes this doesn't register the
extra spaces so if I want this to register the extra spaces I have to
actually put in just a quick code for it. So they have it pre-built in here at the
top which is super convenient you can just click the button break line or you
can just write it out yourself but this will then be read as a separate
paragraph and now they're on separate lines so the formatting is always going
to be like that and again you can write it out yourself if you'd like.
There is a cheat sheet that you can access on every page you'll just scroll
down here to where it says BB code reference and I'll have this large list
that tells you all the different things you can do. It is also worth noting that
you can embed Spotify music, you can also embed videos so I went ahead and did
that for a food and I went ahead and embedded the video
where I made a kind of actually good tasting version of ration blocks "for a
fun alternate recipe checkout" and then I put in the video here so you can hover
over it you can subscribe of course you want to subscribe why wouldn't you. "Echo
has concerns". Now since we're here let's talk about themes. I haven't
customized yet the image that's tied to this specific thing so ignore the random
rocks, but the rock image specifically is because I currently have it set to the
Zen theme but you can change this theme at any time if you're journeymen they have
a couple presets and then you can completely customize the theme yourself
using CSS. So I currently have the CSS set to add this background image of my
vines by linking to it and if you need help figuring out the CSS they have this
nice style guide it looks a little overwhelming if you've never dabbled in
website construction but it's really very simple and this page here will walk
you through it and makes it very easy to just copy-paste the different things you
need and add them to your customization. Small learning curve but nothing you
can't handle. Now next up to talk about we have the categories into which your
different things fall. So I had my characters category under side
characters I then have super side characters for the ones that are just
kind of offhandedly mentioned so you can layer all of these into each other and
then that shows up in your world in this sidebar organization here of table of
contents. And then we have maps I haven't dabbled in maps so I can't
talk a lot about it but basically you can do create a map upload an image and
it'll allow you to place markers on that map, link maps together, and reference
them then from any article you create. And then we have timelines so here I've
set it up per book when you create a new historic event you put in the date and
then it automatically organizes the date onto this timeline and you can put as
many things on this as you'd like so in my Aletheia one i'm eventually going to
have sort of little summaries of each day as they progress and those will also
show up in your world if you choose to allow it and that displays here in this
nice just little convenient view. Then we have images where you can just upload
all of the different images of your characters in world so you can then
reference them and include them anywhere you need.
If you're using art by someone else this is really cool in that it lets you
credit that artist and art original URL which is it's just really cool because
so often artists don't get credited for their work and this allows you to do
that. We also have this quick access button which is for uploading images. Keep in
mind there are a couple little bugs here in there because this is something still
in development, again it's a small team. Then we have secrets which again are
things that are only visible to you the owner and those who you have given
access who are subscribers. Then we have blocks and this is pretty much for role
player game things so you probably won't be using this I'm not gonna cover it. And
we have followers so if you have a public world people are able to follow
it and then they will get updates when you make changes so this is really great
if you have a large world and you want to give your readers a little something
to hold them over between books. And then just access rights which is where you
would create your different subscriber groups. And then one more item that I
want to reference is something brand new and that is focus mode. So let's say I
create a location here and there's just... there's so much on this page. Maybe I
just really want to focus and put in a lot of details for this location. I just
go over here and I click enable focus mode and again this is in beta, is brand
new, so it might be a little buggy but that opens that up here so it gets rid
of all of the extra clutter and I can focus on writing. One of the great things
about using this as a series Bible is this search feature. Let's say I forgot
what color Jason's eyes are I can go and search Jason
that'll open his character thing and I did a nice little writerly thing
here: if something appears in the first book I mark it as cannons so I have C
that stands for cannon (I've started actually using CA which stands for
cannon Alethea) and then the page that it shows up on so I've been trying to
include that in everything that I get straight from the book. So now let's
cover some fleshed out worlds and these are two worlds that I got permission
from the managers of the world to show on here as an example of what these look
like when they're fully filled out and the CSS has been played around with so
this is Etnhnis. We have the created by and the
team and these linked to each of these people's profiles so if I click on a
name that would then open their profile. Got all your links here. I could leave
comments and feedback on their world. You can get badges. So there's definitely a
community aspect to this tool. Going back to the world itself we have all of these
base details here at the top then we have timelines, table of contents,
followers, so this is what it looks like if you have actual followers. I can click
on each of these people. So let's take a look at map since that's something I
don't have and this is an example of how you can use markers. So by adding markers
to this map you can then hover over them and it you can have a little details
about it and you can also have the link to the actual places. So let's look at an
other world that I also have permission to show on here and that is Swordsfall.
This is created by sokyoshiro and as you can tell this has a different design
setup. So this is customized to better match this world, now I
don't currently know how to do this fancy book cover thing and it isn't
something the average user can do, if you'd be interested in seeing a tutorial
on how to do it once I figure it out let me know in a comment down below. So let's
check out the swords fall maps. So here's an example of this used on an actual map
and then we have these little map markers throughout and if you hover over
them they just give a little detail so like here we have the headquarters of
Omicron technologies and if you click on those they extend and you can then read
a full article on them and this particular creator has done a lot of
cool things like here we have "alert wait don't wander that direction no matter
what you do don't click" now that's something that they've done entirely in
CSS and that is something for more advanced users but it's really neat.
Now I'm gonna link both of the worlds that I referenced in the description
down below so you can go check them out and I can just kind of show you what
entirely is possible with this. So yeah as you can tell I haven't been using
this very long I am far from an expert and I don't know what all potential
issues I might hit but so far I'm really enjoying it I think it's a really good
way to organize all of my data and I really love the templates that prompt me
to explore things a little deeper than I might otherwise. So far I think this is a
good online option and I love that you can access it from anywhere,
you can export the data to make sure you have it backed up, and they're improving
it every day and adding new features so I think it definitely has a lot of
potential. So make sure to check it out. I will link world anvil in the description
down below. This is not a sponsored video so I'm not getting paid, the link is not
an affiliate link, I don't get anything if you sign up so this is purely just me
trying to share with you something that has been working for me. And that was it
for the video if you found this at all helpful make sure to give this a thumbs
up and a share it really helps the channel grow and I really appreciate it.
If you like the content you like what we do here and you want to support us make
sure to go pick up a copy of Aletheia, it is available on Amazon in hardcover
paperback and eboo. Thank you guys so much for watching as always I will see
you in the next video!
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