Where are the categories?

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If you've come here from another writing site, you may be expecting to find writing categorized by genre. "Science Fiction," "Romance," "Thriller," and so forth. You will find no such things here.

"But why?" you might ask.

Simple: on Bookzek, we use tags. Tags offer more flexibility and are totally user-driven.

Whenever you create a page, there is a field called "Tags." There, you should put a comma-separated list of descriptive tags. But you probably don't know what to put, do you? Here is where tagging gets interesting: tags themselves start to take on a life of their own, once people really get into doing it. You can just go around tagging random pieces of writing. If you want to know what tags are being used right now, click the Tags link in the menu on the left sidebar. The more commonly a tag is used, the bigger it will appear on the tag page. The display of all tags, with their relative popularity indicated by their size, is known as a "tag cloud."

There aren't really any restrictions on what tags you can use. You can tag things with their genre, e.g. "scifi", "fantasy". You could tag regarding the piece's format: "essay", "prose", "poetry". You could even tag regarding theme or content, such as "death", "loss", "love", "family". Or comment on the features of the work itself, using tags: "alliteration", "wordplay", "disturbing", "weird".

What we want you to get out of this is that when it comes to tags, the only rule is that there are no rules. Everyone has a say in what tags are used. You can use any tags you want. Abusive or just plain nonsense tags may be removed to keep the site running smoothly, but no one is going to say "you must tag things with these words and only these words." 

The search system is also based around tags. By clicking the Books link near the top of the page, you will enter our faceted search system, which relies heavily on tags.

We hope you find the tagging system both useful and fun. It may take some getting used to, but it offers a lot more flexibility than a traditional category system.