The Business Master (3rd Edition)

home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search

/ The Business Master (3rd Edition) / The Business Master (3rd Edition).iso / files / wordmisc / fame / readme < prev

Wrap

Text File | 1990-05-02 | 20.0 KB | 460 lines

The FAME Program 1.0 INTRODUCTION FAME is a database program for poets and writers that runs on MS- DOS compatible computers. The program keeps track of the poems/ stories that you write, the publishers that you send them to, and the status (result) of the submission. It also lets you know which poems/stories are available for submission to a particular publisher, factoring in whether or not the publisher accepts simultaneous submissions. It even writes submission, withdrawal, and query letters. FAME has the capacity to handle 198 poems/ stories and 162 publishers. In addition to allowing you to update the status of your poems/ stories, the program has a series of pre-established queries that provide many types of summaries. The program is menu driven and very user friendly. The main menu is shown in table 1. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Table 1 Main Menu PROGRAM OPTIONS DATA BASE UPDATES A --- Add Poem Name B --- Change Poem Name C --- Delete Poem D --- Add Publisher Name and Related Data E --- Change Publisher Name or Related Data F --- Delete Publisher G --- Change Poem Status (Initialized to "Not Submitted") \ --- Change Date Database Maintenance Utilities QUERIES (Display Option Listed First, Print Option After /) H/I - List of Poems With Dates Written & Status (Sorted by Date) J/K - Alphabetized List of Poems With Status Of Each L/M - Alphabetized List of Publishers N/O - List of Poems Submitted To Selected Publisher, With Status P/Q - List of Publishers That Were Sent Selected Poem, With Status R/S - Summary of Poems For Each Status T --- Status Of Selected Poem For Selected Publisher U/V - Publishers For Whom Poems Are Outstanding W --- Overall Status Summary X/Y - Candidate Poems To Send Selected Publisher Z --- Create Publisher Mailing Label File or Print Letters Esc Key - Exit Program ENTER LETTER OF OPTION ------------------------------------------------------------------ During initialization, you can choose to have the word "story" appear in all places instead of the word "poem". When entering an option, either a lower case or upper case letter may be used. It is not necessary to use the ENTER key. 1 If you want to print out this file, make sure that the README file is in the default subdirectory. Then enter: copy README lpt1: at the DOS prompt. If using a laser printer, set it for 66 lines/page. 2.0 DATA FILES, PROGRAM INITIALIZATION, AND PROGRAM OPERATION 2.1 General Before using the FAME program, you must first initialize five data files (NAME.DAT, POEM.DAT, PUB.DAT, PUBAMP.DAT, and STATUS.DAT) using the FAMEI program. The FAMEI program allows you to tailor the front screen to show your name and select if you want to use the word "story" or "poem". In addition, it puts one test poem/story and one test publisher in the data files so that you can try out the queries. After putting in real data, delete the test data using the Database Update routines. During initialization, you are asked two questions that control how certain things look when you use FAME to write letters to publishers. The first asks if you want to use italics; this effects how your name and address appear at the top of the letter. The second asks if you want the names of publishers contained in the body of the letter to be bold or enclosed in quotes. The FAME programs generates commands to the printer for turning on and off italics and bolding, using commands that are compatible with most standard dot matrix printers. For other printers these commands may be ignored or may be misinterpreted. For example, one popular laser printer misinterprets the FAME generated "turn off bold" command as a "start new page" command, incorrectly splitting the letters into two pages. If these commands cause problems with your printer, rerun the "Configuration" portion of the FAMEI program and select the "No Italics" and/or "Quotes Instead of Bold" options. 2.2 Running on Different Computer Configurations 2.2.1 Hard Drive 2.2.1.1 Initialization If you have a hard disk and want to operate FAME from it, create a subdirectory for the FAME program and copy the files from the FAME PROGRAM disk into the subdirectory. Make that subdirectory the default and then run the FAMEI program. 2.2.1.2 Running on a Hard Drive To run the FAME program, make the FAME subdirectory the default and then enter "FAME". 2.2.2 Floppies 2.2.2.1 Initialization 2 If you do not have a hard disk drive (or want to operate FAME from floppies), place the FAME PROGRAM disk in the default drive and run the FAMEI program. The program will prompt you to enter information about your "floppy" configuration. The NAME.DAT file will be created and put on the FAME program disk. If your floppy disk only holds 360K bytes of data, you will need a second disk to hold the other FAME data files. You will be prompted to place a blank formatted disk in the default drive and continue the FAMEI program. The other four files will be created and stored on this new disk. This disk should be labelled the FAME data disk. 2.2.2.2 Running With One Floppy Disk If all the files are on one floppy disk, make the floppy drive the default, place the FAME PROGRAM disk (with all the data files you have initialized on it) in the drive and enter "FAME." 2.2.2.3 Running With Two Floppy Disks, One Drive If you have two FAME disks (a PROGRAM disk and a DATA disk), place the PROGRAM disk in the drive and enter "FAME." You will be prompted when to replace the FAME PROGRAM disk with the FAME DATA disk. 2.2.2.4 Running With Two Floppy Disks, Two Floppy Drives If you have indicated this configuration when running the FAMEI program, make the "B" drive the default drive. Place the FAME PROGRAM disk in drive "A" and the FAME DATA disk in drive "B". Enter "B:FAME" to run the FAME program. 2.2.3 Exiting FAME Program The PUBAMP.DAT and STATUS.DAT files are updated immediately when you change them. However, to save running time the POEM.DAT and PUB.DAT files are only updated in the computer RAM until you exit the program, at which time any updated files are automatically written to disk. Therefore exit the program before turning off the computer. 3.0 DATABASE UPDATE ROUTINES The first 7 routines (A through G) are used to input new data and update the data files. The "Change Date Database Maintenance Utilities" would not normally be used. They are used for special purposes as described below. When you enter a publisher's name (Query D), the program will cue you to enter additional data. This includes whether or not the publisher accepts simultaneous submission, comments about the publisher, a contact at the publisher, and the publisher's address. When entering the publisher's name, the additional data, or the name of a new poem/story (Query A), use upper and lower case letters as appropriate. This is required because much of this information will appear in the letters written under Query Z. (See Section 4.0) 3 When you are attempting to match the name of a poem/story or publisher already in the database (either to correct the database or as part of a query), you only need to enter enough letters to make a unique match. In this case you do not have to worry about using upper and lower case letters. If enough letters are not entered to make a unique match, you will be shown each of the possible matches and allowed to select the one you want. If you do not enter the name of a contact at the publisher, the letters (Query Z) will be addressed "Dear Editor." However, if you enter a contact and you want to have the FAME program write letters, you must follow the following format. You must start with "Mr.", "Mrs.", "Ms.", or "Mr. or Ms." and use a first name or at least an initial. If you know a title for the contact (e.g. editor, poetry editor), put a semicolon after the name and then add the title. When using Option Z to print a letter (see Section 4.0), the title will be suppressed in the salutation but included in the address. For example, "Mr. or Ms. T. Jones; Poetry Editor" will be printed as "T. Jones, Poetry Editor" in the address on the letter (note the comma instead of the semicolon), and as "Dear Mr. or Ms. T. Jones" in the salutation. The status of each poem/story and publisher combination can have one of eight values. They are, in order of ascending priorities: Not Submitted, Withdrawn, Rejected, No Response (within a reasonable time), Outstanding (you have submittted the poem/story), Accepted, and Published. Outstanding is divided into two categories: for publishers who accept simultaneous submissions and those that do not. Entries are initialized to "Not Submitted". When you enter new data or change the current status data, the program automatically calculates an overall status for the poem/story, based on the priority order listed above. The poem/story cannot have an overall status of Withdrawn; if the only submission(s) of that poem were withdrawn, the overall status will indicate "Not Submitted." If you change the status, the date you enter the data (i.e. that day's date) is automatically associated with that status. If for some reason you want a different date, use the Change Date Database Maintenance Utilities routine ("\"). 4.0 QUERIES 4.1 General All the queries except T, W, and Z have both a screen and a printer version. The letter for the print version option appears after the "/". The symbol "*" is used on displays and printouts to identify publishers who accept simultaneous submissions. On certain queries, the number of simultaneous submissions is indicated in parenthesis. Except in query H/I where poems/stories are sorted by the dates they were written, all lists will be in alphabetical order. The word "the" at the beginning of a poem/story or publisher name is ignored in the alphabetizing process. 4 4.2 Candidate Poems Query X/Y, "Candidate Poems to Send Selected Publisher", tells you which poems are available for submission to a particular publisher, avoiding duplication or unauthorized simultaneous submissions. The query provides a list of all poems that are not outstanding to another publisher nor have been submitted previously to this one. For publishers who accept simultaneous submissions, the list also includes poems that are outstanding only to publishers accepting simultaneous submissions. 4.3 Publisher Contact, Address, and Associated Date/Delay Data As you use the FAME program, it automatically generates date and delay data that will appear on the first screen of queries N/O and X/Y. This data includes for the selected publisher: 1) the date of the last submission, 2) the date of the last reply, 3) the last delay from submission to reply, and 4) the last delay from acceptance to publication. Delays are calculated assuming each month has 30.3 days. If you have a record of this data and wish to enter it directly before the FAME program is able to generate it, use the Change Date Database Maintenance Utilities routine ("\"). The comment data, contact, and address data also appear on the first screen of the N/O and X/Y queries. In addition, the printer version of the query "Alphabetized List of Publishers" (Query M) gives you the option of including that data in the printout. Query U/V lists the publishers for whom poems/stories are outstanding and the associated dates of the submissions. If more than 4 months have elapsed since the submission, the elapsed time also will be shown/printed. 4.4 Number of Simultaneous Submissions The program keeps track of the number of publishers to whom a poem/story has been sent simultaneously. The number of simultaneous submissions is shown next to the "Outstanding" status indication on Queries J/K, N/O, and X,Y, as well as when selecting poems/stories whose statuses are "Outstanding" under Query R. 4.5 Publisher Mailing File and Letters Option Z is for communications with others. You are given four choices as discussed below. 4.5.1 Publisher Label File The first option under Query Z allows you to create an ASCII mail merge file containing each publisher's name, contact, and address; this file is in the format that can be used by a number of standard programs to print labels. Because of the way commas are treated by these type programs (i.e. to separate data fields), any commas in the address data are replaced by blanks in the created file. The name of the file is "ADDRESS.DAT. 5 4.5.2 Submittal Letter The second option under Query Z allows you to print a submittal letter to a selected publisher. Your name and address as well as that of the publisher are placed in the appropriate parts of the letter. If applicable, a statement is added to indicate it is a simultaneous submission. NOTE: The FAME program does not select the printing mode for dot matrix printers. For letters, manually select the NLQ mode on your dot matrix printer when you are cued to line up the paper; for query printouts you probably will want to select manually the draft mode. The letter can be tailored by having a paragraph inserted about your successes to date. The paragraph must be in ASCII format and in a file called LETTERS.TXT that has been placed in the same directory as the FAME data files. A sample paragraph is shown in table 2. A number of standard word processor/editor programs can be used to create this ASCII file. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Table 2 Sample Paragraph My poems have appeared in |Poetry|* |The Paris Review|* |The New Statesman|* |The Anthology of Magazine Verse Yearbook of American Poetry|* and various other magazines. I have forthcoming work in |Crosscurrents|* |Raccoon|* and several anthologies. ------------------------------------------------------------------ You will notice some funny things in the sample paragraph. First, all commas have been replaced by the symbol *. This is required because the routine that the FAME program uses to read this letter will misinterpret commas. You will also notice the symbol |. When you run the FAMEI program, you will be asked if you want to bold the names of publications or insert them in quotes. The symbol | is used to indicate the beginning and end of the bolding or the quotes. If you have problems printing bold when you run the FAME program, use the FAMEI program to change your choice to "quotes." The FAME program puts a ten-space margin on the left and approximately the same on the right. Therefore, each line in the paragraph except the first line should be kept to no more than 60 characters. The first line should be four characters shorter since the FAME program indents paragraphs that much. If you are using bolding, do NOT count the special symbol | in the character count. Do count quotation marks ("). 4.5.3 Withdrawal Letter The third option under Query Z will print a letter withdrawing one or more poems/stories because they have been accepted by another 6 publisher. You select the publisher and the poems/stories as with normal queries. The names are placed in the appropriate portion of the letter. In addition, you have the option of adding another paragraph indicating you are submitting replacements. 4.5.4 Query Letter The fourth option under Query Z will print a letter asking the status of a previous submission because no response has been received. 6.0 AUTHORIZATION TO USE FAME The FAME program is shareware. The FAME Program disk includes the FAME.EXE program, the FAMEI.EXE program, and this README file. Both the FAME program and this documentation are copyrighted by the author. FAME is intended for your private, noncomnmercial use only. You may make copies of the FAME and FAMEI programs and documentation file for your own use, and may copy the files for others. I do not warrant that the documentation is correct, nor that the program operates as indicated. Your use the program at your own risk. I will not be liable for any damages of any kind sustained through the use of this program. By using the program, you agree to these conditions. If you use the program, please send $15 to: A. Stone 10 Nancy Lane Framingham, MA 01701 If you do, we will keep you posted on future updates. Indicate which version of the FAME program you are using and the type floppy you require. Good luck in your career! ********** COMING SOON, FAME version 5.1 *********** A new version of FAME is being developed and will be available soon. To see the additional features that will be added, print out the COMING file. To do this, make the drive with the fame disk the default and enter COPY COMING LPT1: 7