Backing Up Fanfiction with Calibre + FanFicFare (with screenshots!)
If you've been reading fanfiction for any significant length of time, you've probably had the horrifying realization that a fic or series that you absolutely loved was deleted. Maybe the author was harassed or stalked, maybe they didn't want an abandoned WIP lying around, or maybe they just didn't like the fandom any more. Whatever the reason, it is so important to back up your favorite fanfictions.
Calibre is one of the most popular ebook management softwares available, primarily because:
It is full-featured and fairly easy to use
It has a large plugin ecosystem (like Firefox's addons)
It's available for most operating systems
By "ebook management", I mean it can do things like indexing and searching a library of your books, downloading covers and metadata for them, etc. I originally got Calibre for backing up ebooks I had purchased from various online stores in case they ever shut down (like Microsoft Books) or decided they wanted to take a book back (like Amazon has done), and so I could read in whatever app I wanted.
BUT, remember that plugin ecosystem I mentioned? JimmXinu took advantage of that to create FanFicFare, a plugin that allows Calibre to download stories from over 100 creative writing sites (primarily fanfiction archives, but also erotic writing sites among others).
Just paste in the URL to an AO3 fic, for example, and it will:
Download the fic in your preferred format (EPUB, MOBI, TXT, HTML, others)
Fill in all the metadata for you (story name, author + AO3 pseuds, the fic's order in a series, if the fic is complete or not, word count, all tags, etc.)
Generate an ebook cover from scratch OR using art that was embedded in the fic
From here you can just click on a tag to find all other fics in your library with the same tag; you can also click into the author or the series. It's almost like having a mini-AO3 on your computer, one that is always available and where fics never get deleted.
Download Calibre from here, choosing the appropriate copy for your operating system
Run the Calibre installer and click through the wizard. For most people the default options work well.
Open Calibre; the Welcome Wizard should appear and walk you through initial setup
Choose your language, and the place on your computer where you want Calibre to store the fics/ebooks that it downloads, then click Next.
Select the device you use most often to read fanfiction on. This helps Calibre decide what format ebooks should be stored in (but you can override it with FanFicFare later)
You should now have Calibre open with an empty library. NOW we want to install several plugins to teach it how to handle fanfics.
Installing Calibre Plugins
First up is Count Pages. This plugin counts the words and pages in a fanfiction and shows it in Calibre so you know whether the fic you're looking at is a oneshot or a behemoth.
Look for an icon like the one below and click it to open Calibre preferences.
2. Under the "Advanced" section, click "Plugins"
3. At the bottom of the Plugins dialog, click "Get New Plugins"
4. Type "Count Pages" into the "Filter by name" search box at the top right. Once the plugin is visible in the list, click it, then click "Install". It will bring up a prompt about the security risks, but we are only installing well-known plugins today (ex. ZimmXinu has been developing FanFicFare for over a decade). Click Yes to install the plugin.
5. It will then prompt you to restart Calibre in order to begin using the plugin, but just click "Ok" because we're going to install a couple more plugins first.
6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 for three more plugins: "Generate Covers", "EpubMerge", and "FanFicFare"; once all 4 plugins are installed, close Calibre completely and open it again. You should now have several new buttons on your Calibre menu bar:
FanFicFare is now installed! But we still have a little bit of work to do to unlock its full capabilities.
Configuring FanFicFare for Your Fanfic Site of Choice
So FanFicFare is now installed, but right now if you tell it to look at a fic on AO3, it will be browsing AO3 as a new, anonymous user without an account. This means that:
It won't be able to see explicit fics because it hasn't accepted the "See adult works" prompt
It won't be able to see locked fics (ones you can only read if you are logged in to AO3; these are very common nowadays as authors try to prevent AI engines from scraping their fics and flooding them with spam comments).
So we need to configure FanFicFare to accept the adult prompt (if you'd like to download anything rated higher than T), and we also need to give it our AO3 username and password so it can download locked fics on our behalf.
Click the dropdown arrow to the right of the FanFicFare button in the Calibre toolbar. A dropdown menu will appear. Click "Configure FanFicFare"
2. At the top of the "Basic" tab, select your prefered download format (if you prefer a format not listed, like PDF, don't worry, Calibre can convert it for you later).
3. Click the "Personal" tab in the FanFicFare settings dialog, then click "Edit personal.ini"
4. It will open a very basic text editor where you can type your personal fanfic site details for FanFicFare to use. If the box is small and text is cut off or hard to read, resize the editor window by hovering over the edge of the window until your cursor changes into an arrow with two heads, then click and drag to expand the window.
5. Type "is_adult" (without the quotes) into the Find bar, then click Find. The first result should be this a line that looks like "# is _adult:true". Delete the "#" and the space after it to uncomment the line; the text color of that line should change from yellow to green and light purple.
6. Type "archiveofourown" (without quotes) into the Find bar, then click Find until you see a section that looks like the one below (it should be the first or second result):
7. Type your AO3 login details after the "username" and "password" text. Do not put any spaces between the colons and your username or password. Note that your password is stored in plaintext in this file, so don't let anyone else get a hold of it.
8. Skip this step if the only site you're interested in downloading from is AO3. Repeat steps 5 and 6 for each fanfiction or erotic writing website you use. There are only a few sites in personal.ini out of the box, so you may have to copy a specific site's configuration section from defaults.ini, which has example sections for all 100+ supported sites.
9. Click "OK" to close the personal.ini text editor, then click "OK" again to close the Customize FanFicFare box.
Whew! Lots of clicking but you're done now! Time to download some fanfic.
Downloading or Updating Fanfic(s)
Copy the URL of the fic (I'm using one from AO3 for this example).
Click the FanFicFare button on the Calibre toolbar. It should automatically detect that you have a URL from a supported site in your clipboard and paste it into the dialog
If you want to download multiple fanfics in a batch, you can hit enter and paste more URLs into the box, one per line. NOTE: please do not try to download like 30 fanfictions at once; a bunch of people doing that can strain AO3's servers, and your account might have its download capability temporarily throttled to prevent that.
5. Click OK. Calibre may look like it's frozen for a few seconds, but this is normal during the metadata fetching process. Once it figures out which of the fics you pasted actually need to be downloaded, it will unfreeze and begin downloading them
6. Once Calibre has begun downloading your fics, it will display "Jobs: 1" with a spinning icon in the bottom right corner of the Calibre window. If you click that, you'll get a progress bar of what it's doing
7. Once Calibre has finished downloading your fics, it will display a summary of the job in the bottom right corner of the Calibre window. In this summary, "good" updates meant that a fic had to be downloaded, while "bad" updates indicate fics that didn't need to be updated (because you already had them on your computer) or that could NOT be downloaded due to an error (usually a fic that was deleted or hidden in a private collection). You can click "View Log" if you're curious about which fics were downloaded and which were skipped. In this example, 2 fics were missing from my library and were downloaded, while "Where the Sand Meets the Sea" was not downloaded because it was already on my computer and up to date.
8. Exit the FanFicFare log if you clicked into it, then click "Yes" to accept the results and add the downloaded/updated fics to your library. The fics should appear in Calibre almost immediately. Then FanFicFare will kick off a second job by calling the Count Pages plugin to grab a word count for the new/updated fics. Once that job completes, just click "Yes" in the job summary window that appears in the bottom right of Calibre to store the word counts in your library.
And you're done! You just backed up your first fanfictions :)
FanFicFare can actually pull all of the URLs for individual fics in a series for you automatically!
Copy the AO3 series URL (not to an individual fic in the series)
In Calibre, click the dropdown arrow to the right of the FanFicFare button on the menu bar, then click "Get Story URLs from Web Page"
3. FanFicFare should automatically detect that you have a supported web page in your clipboard and paste it into the text field. Choose the download option you prefer: downloading each fic in the series as a separate ebook, OR combining every fic in the series into a single ebook, commonly called an anthology. Note: anthology ebooks can get rather large in file size if they have embedded fanart in them.
4. Once you pick an option, FanFicFare will grab the URL of every fic in the series and automatically paste them into the FanFicFare fic download window. From there on out just follow the normal steps for downloading those fics (this will start at step 3 in the "Downloading Fic(s)" section above).
Just wanted to note that you can update fanfictions in multiple ways. You can either:
Select ebooks in your Calibre library, then click the dropdown arrow next to the FanFicFare toolbar icon and click "Update Existing Fanfiction Books"
OR
Take the URLs and just download them like you would a new fic. FanFicFare will automatically replace your existing copy with the updated one. This way you can just paste in the URL from an AO3 subscription email alert instead of having to hunt down the fic in your library first.
FanFicFare can actually pull the URLs off of any page of multiple fics - this includes pages of bookmarks. For example, if you want to download fics that you have bookmarked and tagged with "favorite", just filter your bookmarks for that tag and then use the resulting URL in the steps for "Downloading a Series". Note that FanFicFare doesn't handle pagination, so if you have multiple pages of results for that bookmark search, you'll have to paste in each paginated URL separately.
Well this got WAY longer than I meant it to. I think my background in technical writing is showing - this is probably more detailed than the average tumblr user wants or needs. But whatever, at least it's thorough. If you found this guide useful, please reblog it! The more people who back up fics, the better the chances that those fics will be available if you want them later. And if you end up using Calibre extensively, consider donating to the one-person developer team to keep the project going :)
