Friday, September 10, 2010

eBook writing and publishing

Today I'm trying something and I'm not sure it's a good idea (yet).

I have decided to write my eBook with Google Sites rather than with OpenOffice. Why ? So I can switch computer and share my draft with friends. The idea is to work in two phases : work on the content until I'm happy and than have a formatting only issue.

Is it a good idea ? Not sure yet...

The Pros :
  • I can share it
  • I can publish it in one click and people online can read it
  • People who have access can comment
The cons :
  •  I'll have to copy it all back from Google Sites to OpenOffice... and/or something else to create a PDF or an ePub or a file for Amazon DTP... And it's a LOT of work...



5 comments:

  1. Why not trying something else:

    * Write your ebook as MarkDown pages on GitHub (so people can comment and even fork/contribute to your book).
    * Convert MarkDown to PDF or DocBook (for example with http://github.com/williamsjj/markdown2manning_tools)

    Text editors, whether they're on your machine or on-line, are ill fitted for writing books anyway...

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  2. You may also want to write your texts on Google Docs. Your friends can still edit them in a collaborative manner and you can easily export them in PDF format.

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  3. @David : Github seems quiet technical... But indeed a "CVS" is a good idea. I'm afraid my collaborators will be scared...

    @Michel : Google Docs is nice but when you come to 100 pages, I'm afraid it will not be optimal anymore... I tried to import my Open Office in Google docs and the message I got was : An Error has occured.

    I have been thinking about a process for downloading the site and repackage it as one single HTML which should help me to go to Amazon DTP or ePub.

    I'll test it and let you know...

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  4. By the way you can see the site here : http://erra.appepaper.com.

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  5. Well, I would like to congratualte for your success and earn so much money by publishing an ebook and I am sure you had given some wonderful tips for writing an ebook here that will help other in writing an ebook that will get success after getting it published by some popular ebook writing service in their area or location.

    ReplyDelete