Recently, I’ve spent some time consolidating my ebooks in Calibre (freeware ebook library management software). One of the things I had to import and organize was my archive of downloaded fanfiction (saved fics can be imported into Calibre as files or one can use plugin FanFicFare for it)
I wanted those files to have some nice looking book covers, so I’ve created a special AO3-edition of my book covers template. Those are to be used with “Generate Cover” plugin, that allows more control over the generated book cover, with an option to create your own design.
Download for free here + get instructions on installation and usage:
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hey so uhhhhh just a heads up: ao3 may or may not be in deep legal trouble. specifically for mistreatment of volunteers and lax compliance with certain laws, afaict.
i highly recommend you back up any stories you have and any favorite stories/authors you'd miss.
here's how i'm doing it:
download calibre. it's an open source ebook reader. link here.
it has a plugin called fanficfare. download that here.
open calibre and go to the dropdown next to "Settings", and then select "Get plugins to enhance calibre"
Find and install FanFicFare (sort by title and scroll down to F to find it easier)
go to the dropdown menu next to the fanficfare icon in the top bar and select "Get story URLs from Web Page"
when prompted for a URL, you can post any URL that displays a list of stories, e.g. "https://archiveofourown.org/users/[username]/bookmarks?page=7" or "https://archiveofourown.org/series/[number]" or "https://archiveofourown.org/users/[username]/pseuds/[username]/works"
click "Yes", then wait for it to gather the metadata and download the stories (you can give it another URL to grab stories from once it's done with gathering the metadata if you want)
it will give you a little popup in the lower right corner once it's done, telling you how many it was able to download (usually all of them) and how many it didn't.
if it misses one or two, you can click to see the details and find out which one didn't get downloaded, and go back to the page you got it from and download those yourself if you want.
tell it to update your library.
voila! all the stories on that page are now backed up on your computer.
notes: it will skip any fics that are locked to archive users only (the ones with a blue padlock next to the author's name in the listing), and you'll have to go back and grab those yourself. if your whole account is under archive lock, i highly recommend unlocking it for the duration of the time it takes to grab and download them (a few minutes to a few hours, depending on whether you have <20 or multiple hundreds like i do lol) before locking them again.
back up everything you love!! back up everything you moderately like!! back up anything you wouldn't like to lose!! even if the ao3 mess pans out to nothing, it's always good to have a "just in case".
EDIT: check replies and reblog comments for further information on the legal trouble they may or may not be in. if anything happens, it will likely be in the scale of months or years. i still recommend backing everything up, but it might not be as dire as this makes it sound.
This is your periodical reminder to download your favorite fics from ao3 every once in a while!!
Personally, I got into the habit of doing it once a year, when I'm working on my "Favorite" fic recs.
While I'm at it, here's a few tools I use that help greatly with my Ao3 experience!
Userscripts
Here's a few userscripts that I love for Ao3!
AO3: Kudosed and seen history: Highlight or hide works you kudosed/marked as seen.
This is the userscript that helps me the most when making fic recs. While browsing a tag or my history, I can see which fics I've already kudosed and I can decide to skip/hide individual fics (there's other userscripts out there if you want to permanently hide specific tags).
AO3 Review + Last Chapter Shortcut + Kudos-sortable Bookmarks: Adds shortcuts for last chapter and a floaty review box, sorts bookmarks by kudos.
AO3: Estimated Reading Time: Add an estimated reading time to a fic description in hours and minutes.
Calibre
Calibre is an ebook management software. You can download it here. I really love using Calibre to send fics I've downloaded to my kindle, but there's also a function where you can download all the fics in one Ao3 page, or multiple fics URLS, all at the same time. Just last night, I used it to download all my Buddie bookmarks. Super helpful! It also allows me to add my own covers to fics and use them on my Kindle. I love it!
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Calibre ebook manager now includes integrations with multiple AI chatbots (both local and remote models) so you can right-click a book and ask generative AI chatbots like Gemini or ChatGPT to "recommend similar books".
If you're like me and hate genAI shit with a passion, here's how to break it (unfortunately you cannot remove or completely disable it but you can make it so Calibre doesn't know how to actually reach out to AI anymore AND doesn't load the code required for talking to it every time it starts).
Go to Preferences -> Plugins
Click the triangle next to the "AI Providers" section in the plugins list to expand it; it should be the first section
Select an AI provider from the list, then click the "Enable/disable plugin" button at the bottom of the list. The provider plugin should turn grey and say "this plugin has been disabled" directly underneath it
Repeat step 3 for every plugin under the "AI section". Once you've finished with all of them, click "Apply" and then restart Calibre
And you're done. Now when you right-click a book in your library -> Similar books -> Ask AI for what to read next, it will bring up an empty chat box with an error reading "AI provider not configured".
Note that you won't be able to configure anything related to AI settings from this dialog box; I don't think the developer was expecting anyone to disable all the AI plugins so clicking any of the settings buttons in this box just throws an exception.
Things you CANNOT disable
You can't remove the AI option within the UI unless you remove the whole "Similar Books" menu option entirely, which sucks because that can be useful.
Keen eyes may notice another AI-related plugin elsewhere in the Calibre plugins list, namely "Discuss book with AI"; unfortunately Calibre doesn't allow you to disable any of the "User Interface Action" type plugins like this one (not a new restriction, and not specific to the AI one).
I've been downloading a lot of fanfic lately for personal archival purposes, and I figured I'd share how I do it in case it's useful to anyone else (and so I have it written down in case I forget!).
There are lots of different ways to save fic, including the file download built into AO3, but I find that this gives me the nicest ebooks in the most efficient way.
(Under a cut cause long.)
Download Calibre: https://calibre-ebook.com/ or (clickable link).
Calibre is about the best ebook management and control program around and it's free. You can get it for windows, mac, and linux or download and run it from a portable storage device (I'm using a windows PC).
Install it and run it. It's gonna ask you where you want to put your library. Dealer's choice on this one. I recommend your internal drive (and then back up to external/cloud), but YMMV.
If you want to keep fanfic separate from the rest of your ebooks, you can create multiple libraries. I do, and my libraries are creatively named 'Books' and 'Fic'.
Customise Calibre
Now you're gonna install some plugins. Go to Preferences on the menu bar (far right), click its little side arrow, then choose 'Get plugins to enhance Calibre'.
At the top right of the box that pops up is 'Filter by name'. The plugins you want to get are:
EpubMerge
FanFicFare
Install them one at a time. It will ask you where you want them. I recommend 'the main bar' and 'the main bar when device is attached' (should be selected by default). When you're done, close and reopen Calibre.
The plugins you just installed should appear on the far right of the toolbar, but if you can't see one or both of them, fear not! Just click Preferences (the button, not the side arrow), then Toolbars and Menus (in the 'Interface' section) then choose the main toolbar from the drop down menu. That will let you add and remove things - I suggest getting rid of Donate, Connect Share, and News. That'll leave you room to add your new plugins to the menu bar.
(Do donate, though, if you can afford it. This is a hell of a program.)
Now you're ready to start saving your fave fanfic!
Saving fanfic
I'll go through both methods I use, but pick whatever makes you happy (and/or works best for what you're downloading).
ETA: if the fics are locked you can't easily use FanFicFare. Skip down to the next section. (It does ask for a username/password if you try and get a locked fic, but it's never worked for me - I had to edit the personal.ini in the configuration options, and even then it skips locked fics in a series.)
Calibre and FanFicFare
You can work from entirely within Calibre using the FanFicFare plugin. Just click its side arrow and pick from the menu. The three main options I use are download from URL, make anthology from a webpage, and update story/anthology.
Download from URL: pick Download from URL (or just click the FanFicFare button) and paste the fic's URL into the box (if you've copied it to your clipboard, it will be there automatically). You can do more than one fic at a time - just paste the URLs in one after the other (each on a new line). When you're done, make sure you have the output format you want and then go.
Make Anthology Epub From Web Page: if you want a whole series as a single ebook, pick Anthology Options, then Make Anthology Epub From Webpage. Paste the series URL into the box (if you've copied it to your clipboard, it will be there automatically), click okay when it displays the story URLs, check your output format and go.
Update series/anthology: if you downloaded an unfinished fic or series and the author updates, you can automatically add the update to your ebook. Just click on the ebook in Calibre, open the FanFicFare menu using its side arrow, and select either Update Existing FanFic Books or Anthology Options, Update Anthology epub. Okay the URLs and/or the output format, then go.
Any fic downloaded using FanFicFare will be given an automatically generated Calibre cover. You can change the cover and the metadata by right clicking on the title and picking edit metadata. You can do it individually, to change the cover or anything else specific to that ebook, or in bulk, which is great for adding a tag or series name to multiple fics. Make sure you generate a new cover if you change the metadata.
Browser plugins, Calibre, and EpubMerge
You can also use a browser addon/plugin to download from AO3. I use FicLab (Firefox/Chrome), but I believe there's others. FicLab: https://www.ficlab.com/ (clickable link).
FicLab puts a 'Save' button next to fic when you're looking at a list of fics, eg search results, series page, author's work list etc. Just click the 'Save' button, adjust the settings, and download the fic. You can also use it from within the fic by clicking the toolbar icon and running it.
FicLab is great if you're reading and come across a fic you want to save. It also generates a much nicer (IMO) cover than Calibre.
You can add the downloaded fic to Calibre (just drag and drop) or save it wherever. The advantage to dropping it into Calibre is that all your fic stays nicely organised, you can adjust the metadata, and you can easily combine fics.
Combining fics
You can combine multiple fics into an anthology using EpubMerge. This is great if you want a single ebook of an author's short fics, or their AUs, or their fics in a specific ship that aren't part of a series. (It only works on epubs, so if you've saved as some other format, you'll need to convert using Calibre's Convert books button.)
Select the ones you want to combine, click EpubMerge, adjust the order if necessary, and go.
The cover of the merged epubs will be the cover of the first fic in the merge list. You can add a new cover by editing the metadata and generating a new cover.
Combing with FanFicFare
You can also combine nonseries fics using FanFicFare's Make Anthology ePub from URLs option by pasting the individual fic URLs into the box.
Where there's more than a few fics, I find it easier to download them with FicLab and combine them with EpubMerge, and I prefer keeping both the combined and the individual versions of fic, but again YMMV.
Reconverting and Converting
Once I'm done fussing, I reconvert the ebook to the same format, to ensure everything is embedded in the file. Is this necessary? YMMV, but it's a quick and easy step that does zero harm.
If you don't want your final ebook to be an epub, just convert it to whatever format you like.
Disclaimers
Save fanfic for your own personal enjoyment/offline reading/safeguarding against the future. If it's not your fic, don't distribute it, or upload it to other sites, or otherwise be a dick. Especially if the author deletes it. Respect their wishes and their rights.
This may work on other fanfic sites, eg FFN, but I've never tried so I don't know.
If you download a fic, do leave the author a kudo or a comment; you'll make them so happy.
This is how I save fic. I'm not pretending it's the only way, or even the best way! This is just the way that works for me.
Not my usual thing but sometimes when i find a fanfic i love on AO3 i download it onto calibre and find a cover i like so i can download it on my kindle.
I liked one of the covers calibre generated but I didn’t like the font or the colours and so i edited it a little and added a little doodle to it.
The ravens hymn by @wolveria is on AO3 and its one of my favourites , if anyone wants to use the cover feel free to.
