[ACGAuthor]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Issue #1: This doesn't make any sense to me -- are you sure the plugboard is properly applied? Is it still being applied to the old ones? Double-check by putting the template into a custom column, which books are being affected properly, which aren't?

It is still being applied to the old books. I even completely removed the books from the device and reloaded them. The books that I initially applied the plugboard to are still correct, but books I have added since aren't.

Checking the template in the custom column...

Okay, it appears to work in when I applied the template to a custom column. Hmm. Wonder why it's not working when sending to the device.

Could it be because I had a custom template in the "sending books to device" settings? I think when I was messing around trying to figure the plugboard and templates thing, I plugged in one of the "Send to Device" templates someone had posted. I don't remember if I put that back to default settings before or after I created the metadata plugboard, or whether or not I got rid of it before or after I loaded the books onto my device last.

Anyway, I wiped the books off the device again earlier because I was doing a bunch of massive changes, and with this new stuff I'm working on, I'm just going to reload the whole library once I've got it figured out. So I guess... maybe it will work this time?

Issue #2: use this instead for your third column to fix the space after ampersand:

Name: #initials. Template: {#stripped_series:re(([\s])?([^\s])[^\s]+(\s|$),\1)}

Edit all the series' that use "and" to use "&".

Woot! Awesome!

Issue #3: what genre tags do you have in mind? I will assume they will be in the "tags" column.

Well, these are the overall collections I have (I have jailbroken my Kindle to use Collections Manager to nest sub-collections within them):

M/F Romance - I have author, series, and sub-genre categories within this and the next one. Not really a large enough collection of this genre to worry about separating them out.

M/M Romance -this is the one I'm most concerned with. I read a lot of it, since it's the genre I publish in.

I use author/series/sub-genre collections for my favorites or the ones I have a large enough collection that it's worth separating it out from the rest. But I also have A LOT of misc singleton authors and books that are hard to wade through.

SFF/UF/PNR (sci-fi/fantasy/urban fantasy/paranormal) This is my second largest collection, but again, I don't think I have enough to need to worry about separating them out. That may change someday in the future, but for now I'm okay here.

So, right now, the only genre I really need to break down by alphabetical author groupings is M/M Romance. SFF/UF/PNR is okay for now, but if whatever system I end up using is customizable to allow me to include that later, so much the better.

I am thinking that I might make a Genre column because the tags that can come with a book or that are downloaded when you download the metadata can be a mess.

M/M Romance might be tagged any of the following ways: M/M Romance, MM Romance, gay romance, lgbt romance, M/M, MM, gay, lgbt, MM erotic romance, etc etc etc.

SFF/UF/PNR could be tagged Fantasy, Science Fiction, Sci-Fi, Urban Fantasy, Paranormal, shifters, vampires, magic, and so on and so forth.

So I could go through and add a tag to the masses in bulk, or I can just add a genre field. Same amount of effort either way, but the Genre field is visually cleaner.

Thanks again so very much!

ETA: I used your code for the third (initials) column and now I have an error that says "TEMPLATE ERROR unmatched group" where the series info used to be in a whole bunch of my books.