Good Morning Fellow Authors;
So here I am lost in a maze called Tapas. It was easy to walk into, and I do know how to get out but not how to do access the parts of the maze needed to actually post the work I'm trying to publish. What is different about this maze is that it's not advertised as a maze. It come with enticing instructions that seem great until you find out that they don't actually tell you what you need to know to get to the other end of the maze. So it's not just me stuck in the maze, my work is stuck in here with me.
I'll try and give you the facts in order to help you help me.
First, there is that icon where you post some sort of pictorial reference as your identifier. That didn't show up until I'd written and posted the first book which is over 300 pages of 8 X 11" bond paper. It should be illustrated but there are no instructions for how to do that so far. There are no instructions for the icon either that I've been able to find.
Then as far as publishing the book itself, there is a notification that says to share my work. The assumption is that I click on that and my work will be shared. That doesn't work. Neither does click and hold. So that entire book and a week's work posting it is so far a waste of time. That book is called THE DEVIL'S DAUGHTERS and is Book 1 of a series called THE TINKERBELLE EXPRESS. The series itself is about child trafficking and is set in Colombia, South America. The story migrates north to the USA and Canada, Spain, China and South Korea
At the time I thought that maybe because it was such a big book it would take time to upload. So I started uploading FALLEN ANGELS. That was a problem because the title was already taken on this platform. So I changed the title to ANGELS OF PURGATORY which was actually more appropriate. Then I ran into another problem.
When I uploaded THE DEVIL'S DAUGHTERS, the system accepted my text at a bit less than 15,000 words at a time. Many chapters had to be split in two. That was tedious. But not nearly as tedious as what happened after Chapter 1 of Book 2 was uploaded. When I uploaded Chapter 2, the criteria for uploading changed completely without warning during the upload. All of a sudden my 789 characters were interpreted by the system as being 19,586 characters and too big to be uploaded. I tried all sorts of thing to fix it but the bottom line is that the system is either broken or someone is manipulating the system to prevent me uploading and are too cowardly to step from behind the green curtain and explain what he or she is doing. I can accept that my work might not be accepted, but not the sneakiness I'm seeing here.
In the meantime, I'd agreed to read another member's work who said she would read any first chapter if I would read hers. Deal. I read her four page "novel" and gave her the feedback she asked for. And then? NOTHING. Days later, I found out on the message board that took those days to find, that she had essentially retired from the community and didn't even bother to notify me.
What I'm looking for after all of this is for someone to help me figure out how to navigate the system since the people who run this site don't seem to help anyone.
Anyway, as part of my search for answers, I googled this website to find out what is going on here. I used AI and asked if this site was run by idiots. At first it said no, so I dug deeper. When I did that, it turned out that Google AI agrees, this site is run by idiots and morons. AI listed a slew of company issues that affect how we as site users are able to participate and share our work.
Then last night, I spent some time on a community forum to get a sense of how this site works financially with respect to Tapas authors being paid for their work. That turned out to be to be another can of worms. From what I can make out, the owners of this site may be considered child abusers. Traffickers in other words. That's a pretty serious allegation, but the reality is that there are some serious to long term fatal ramifications associated with using this site in the way it is being used and the owners remain unaccountable. In fact, I doubt they are even aware of the legal shit that will come their way if they don't smarten up. Deleting this post won't fix it either. It's gone to far for that. They have breached their own Guidelines.
Anyway, I'd appreciate some help if there are any of you out there as brave as the characters you create. Let's see who has the write stuff.
