4/30/2023 0 Comments Gitbook editor not availableSince I was using Markdown on a private GitHub repo anyway, it doesn’t seem to offer more than Lulu for the marketplace reach. To me, after reading the origin story for Lulu, I feel that Lulu is a bit more “open source” based than say, Amazon. I did sign up and get approved for an account with IngramSpark, which is the print-on-demand service that XML Press uses. There are other publishing options - IngramSpark, Amazon, LeanPub, and I’m sure others. Pull it together!Īnd so, with all those bits of input from others, it created a quest to be a product manager for my own information product! I went that route, and for me, Lulu was a tool I was already familiar with because we had done publishing with it for OpenStack. So I hired a designer with access to Indesign who could take the epub and turn it into a print book. I wanted more fine-tuned layout and design for the print copy, including proper page breaks and nice tables. So, when Gitbook did not output a PDF that I considered “print-ready”, I went to Upwork. That said, I was not willing to take on the layout work myself. (Updated to add: the t-shirt store cost $300/year which was not profitable so I stopped offering t-shirts in 2019.) I used the free trial for Canva to make the book cover and stickers and t-shirt design. This part was thanks to Canva and some nice templates that service has online. I also was able to do all the design imagery myself, including the book cover. I haven’t missed the index yet, and for a smaller book it seems like an index could look like padding. One area I did skip on for this book was a professional-level index, which Kelly was able to do for a great job on for Conversation and Community. Then, I realized I have a great friend in Kelly Holcomb, who edited my first book and I could talk her into editing this one, wahoo! Kelly also had experience in using GitHub for editing, so her contributions were super important for the final copy. The best writers re-write a lot, and I knew Diane would provide an eagle eye for both technical accuracy as well as great writing. Diane is a talented writer and also a super editor. Over lunch, we realized we both wanted this book to be available for the next time we teach developers and writers how to write and review docs on GitHub. I also reached out to Diane Fleming, now Skwish, who had been teaching writers how to use Git and GitHub for docs over the same time as I had been. Well, I thought that the timing was essential, and I didn’t want to wait that long, knowing both the market and my own availability. He couldn’t read through at the draft copy for about 3 months. His name is Richard Hamilton and he runs XML Press. In parallel, I reached out to the publisher for my first book, Conversation and Community. Really great of him to offer to help out, and I simply thanked him and kept going with my idea. He said he’d be happy to read what I had, but didn’t see the initial concept fitting into their current catalog. Reaching out to current contactsįirst, I reached out to Andy Oram, a senior editor at O’Reilly who knows me from a couple of open source projects, asking if he thought O’Reilly would want a book proposal. In my recent experience with Docs Like Code, the process led me to choosing to produce the site, epub, and printed book all using tools I had prior experiences with. You may chose self-publishing over pitching the book idea to a technical book publisher. You need an audience, an editor, a way to reach that audience, and a “pitch” for the book idea itself. Let’s look at what you need for a book idea. What does it take to put together a web site, a book, an ebook, all for sale online? Let’s look at costs for tools and services that make it happen.
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