6 ms·

Sounds like a lot of the pain points that Peter Armstrong and I ran into when writing our books, and that we're trying to solve on Leanpub (http://leanpub.com h

by spatten 15y ago

Sounds like a lot of the pain points that Peter Armstrong and I ran into when writing our books, and that we're trying to solve on Leanpub (http://leanpub.com http://leanpub.com). It's free to sign up, you write your book in Markdown and we convert it into PDF, epub and mobi for you. We pay you 90% - $0.50 for sales on our site. You can put it on the iBookstore and Kindle store yourself (or be patient for a few weeks and we'll do that and provide an ISBN for you as well...). If you've already written your book in HTML, we can convert it to Markdown for you automatically -- throw your HTML files into a Dropbox folder and click a button on Leanpub. As for technical editors, our approach is to publish early (before you're done the book, preferably before you've written 100 pages) and have your readers function as development editors. It's not a complete solution (yet), but I think we would have saved you tons of pain. Drop me a line (scott@leanpub.com) if you have any questions.

chubs 15y ago
I just had a look at leanpub for a friend whos about to start writing a book, it looks fantastic! I love the idea of writing markdown files into a dropbox folder, that sounds like a workflow made in heaven to me.
Samuel_Michon 15y ago
You're confusing books with manuscripts. Please don't call these things you sell 'books'. "A manuscript is not a book. The author's job is to write the manuscript. The publisher's job is to turn a series of manuscripts originating from different suppliers into consistently produced books, mass-produce them, and sell them into distribution channels. [...] While it's true that the author is the one with the creative input, they only do about half the work. And the other half of the job is not optional. The reason publishers exist is to provide for division of labour; if I did the other 50% to bring my rough manuscripts up to published-book-quality, I'd only be able to write half as many novels." As per Charlie Stross, accomplished fiction writer: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/cmap-2-how-books-are-made.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/cmap-2-h...
- _delirium 15y ago
  There are definite value-adds by publishers, but it varies hugely by author, publisher, and genre. I can certainly see it for novelists, but a lot of technical-book publishers, especially the lower-tier ones, do very minimal editing of manuscripts, and are as likely as not to screw something up when they do (they rarely have subject-matter experts on staff). Academic book publishers also vary hugely, both in how involved they are, and in how good their editing is.
  - Samuel_Michon 15y ago
    "a lot of technical-book publishers, especially the lower-tier ones, do very minimal editing of manuscripts" It shows. I notice when a manuscript hasn't been taken care of by a good editor before going to print. I can't think of a single genre in which editing is not necessary. NB: I'm a publisher of non-fiction books, primarily lifestyle and comp sci. My dad's a publisher, my mom's an author, my brother is a photographer for print. I'm familiar with the amount of work it takes to turn a manuscript into a book.
    - JoshTriplett 15y ago
      I've also seen numerous cases where editors have screwed up the original text of a technical publication in semantically critical ways. This holds especially true for editors who remain a few decades behind in technology, and don't quite grasp the concept of providing diffs, as well as the concept of having the author review the changes.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- JoshTriplett 15y ago
  Such a distinction might exist in the traditional publishing world (the one with a sign "deposit manuscripts here" right above the trash can), but no such distinction exists in an all-electronic medium. Authors produce books; editors, illustrators, graphic designers, and others might provide help that improves the quality of the book, but they don't magically imbue it with a "book" status that it didn't already have.
halostatue 15y ago
I'm sending you a note via email, but…how close to print-ready are the PDFs that are generated? My wife has been working on a novel (and 90%) of a sequel that we're getting ready to self-publish through Lulu and KDP and I'm tired from the formatting hoops. We're using Ulysses (similar to Scrivener) and exporting to Word and importing to Pages (because the epub export was somewhat disappointing compared to the Pages epub export, and Pages layout tools are more powerful than Word's) because we need both epub and 6"x9" (US trade) print-ready PDF. She's got a cover and a back cover. She wants to have both ebook and hardcopy, and you guys don't offer hardcopy. I don't have the time to write the software I would need to prepare this stuff myself—and I don't know that I want to learn all the standards that I'd need for it, either. If your PDFs are print-ready or I can somehow specify the size so that it can be print-ready, I'd happily pay to convert her novel—because this is just one of four books that we're going to have to do in the next few months. (Shameless promotion for my wife: If anyone is interested in a late 70s rock and roll novel set in Canada and the UK, let me know—an email is in my profile. I'll send a note out when it's available, regardless of the process we use to produce it.)
- dangoor 15y ago
  FWIW, I recently wrote a novel in Scrivener and with very little tweaking it did a nice job converting for print and ebooks (and it allows a fair bit of tweaking). All depends on your needs, of course, but I was pleasantly surprised at the output I could get directly from Scrivener (which I really like for its organization and writing capabilities)
  - bennesvig 15y ago
    Did you export from Scrivener for CreateSpace formatting? I'm interested in learning how if you did.
- spatten 15y ago
  The short answer is that they're print ready as-is. Eric Ries printed a Leanpub book of his first year's worth of blog posts (we sold them at the first Startup Lessons Learned conference). They looked pretty good. The slightly longer answer is that we are working on some features for a more print-ready PDF. Right now our PDFs are optimized for on-screen reading. Sone small changes such as gutters and page numbers that alternate sides will make a nicer looking print book.
alexchamberlain 15y ago
Is there any DRM on the mobi files? Will there be when you have connection to Amazon?
- spatten 15y ago
  No, there is not and we don't plan on adding any when we submit them to Amazon. Here's Peter's/our take on DRM: http://www.peterarmstrong.com/?p=257 http://www.peterarmstrong.com/?p=257 (this is slightly out of date, since Peter only talks about PDFs in the post).
davidw 15y ago
How do you upload the mobi files to the Kindle store?
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- spatten 15y ago
  If you want to do it yourself, it's a somewhat involved process where you get an account with Amazon, provide a US tax id (annoying for those of us out of the US, but we got ours in less than a week) and then upload the mobi file through a web interface. When we get the feature completed on Leanpub, it will involve you filling out a form (we need to know a few things like the description and what categories you would like your book listed under) and clicking on a button on Leanpub. We'll do the rest. We'll charge a one-time fee for the service, and you'll get an ISBN as part of the deal, but you will get 100% of the money from Amazon or Apple -- we won't take a cut of the sales.
  - davidw 15y ago
    So you're listing it for people, collecting the money on their behalf and then forwarding it to them?
    - spatten 15y ago
      Exactly. We don't really want to be in the money loop for this, but we think that this is the only way to get our authors on the iBooks and Kindle stores without them having to sign up for themselves.

by spatten 15y ago

chubs 15y ago

I just had a look at leanpub for a friend whos about to start writing a book, it looks fantastic! I love the idea of writing markdown files into a dropbox folder, that sounds like a workflow made in heaven to me.

Samuel_Michon 15y ago

You're confusing books with manuscripts. Please don't call these things you sell 'books'. "A manuscript is not a book. The author's job is to write the manuscript. The publisher's job is to turn a series of manuscripts originating from different suppliers into consistently produced books, mass-produce them, and sell them into distribution channels. [...] While it's true that the author is the one with the creative input, they only do about half the work. And the other half of the job is not optional. The reason publishers exist is to provide for division of labour; if I did the other 50% to bring my rough manuscripts up to published-book-quality, I'd only be able to write half as many novels." As per Charlie Stross, accomplished fiction writer: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/cmap-2-how-books-are-made.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/cmap-2-h...

_delirium 15y ago
There are definite value-adds by publishers, but it varies hugely by author, publisher, and genre. I can certainly see it for novelists, but a lot of technical-book publishers, especially the lower-tier ones, do very minimal editing of manuscripts, and are as likely as not to screw something up when they do (they rarely have subject-matter experts on staff). Academic book publishers also vary hugely, both in how involved they are, and in how good their editing is.
- Samuel_Michon 15y ago
  "a lot of technical-book publishers, especially the lower-tier ones, do very minimal editing of manuscripts" It shows. I notice when a manuscript hasn't been taken care of by a good editor before going to print. I can't think of a single genre in which editing is not necessary. NB: I'm a publisher of non-fiction books, primarily lifestyle and comp sci. My dad's a publisher, my mom's an author, my brother is a photographer for print. I'm familiar with the amount of work it takes to turn a manuscript into a book.
  - JoshTriplett 15y ago
    I've also seen numerous cases where editors have screwed up the original text of a technical publication in semantically critical ways. This holds especially true for editors who remain a few decades behind in technology, and don't quite grasp the concept of providing diffs, as well as the concept of having the author review the changes.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
JoshTriplett 15y ago
Such a distinction might exist in the traditional publishing world (the one with a sign "deposit manuscripts here" right above the trash can), but no such distinction exists in an all-electronic medium. Authors produce books; editors, illustrators, graphic designers, and others might provide help that improves the quality of the book, but they don't magically imbue it with a "book" status that it didn't already have.

halostatue 15y ago

I'm sending you a note via email, but…how close to print-ready are the PDFs that are generated? My wife has been working on a novel (and 90%) of a sequel that we're getting ready to self-publish through Lulu and KDP and I'm tired from the formatting hoops. We're using Ulysses (similar to Scrivener) and exporting to Word and importing to Pages (because the epub export was somewhat disappointing compared to the Pages epub export, and Pages layout tools are more powerful than Word's) because we need both epub and 6"x9" (US trade) print-ready PDF. She's got a cover and a back cover. She wants to have both ebook and hardcopy, and you guys don't offer hardcopy. I don't have the time to write the software I would need to prepare this stuff myself—and I don't know that I want to learn all the standards that I'd need for it, either. If your PDFs are print-ready or I can somehow specify the size so that it can be print-ready, I'd happily pay to convert her novel—because this is just one of four books that we're going to have to do in the next few months. (Shameless promotion for my wife: If anyone is interested in a late 70s rock and roll novel set in Canada and the UK, let me know—an email is in my profile. I'll send a note out when it's available, regardless of the process we use to produce it.)

dangoor 15y ago
FWIW, I recently wrote a novel in Scrivener and with very little tweaking it did a nice job converting for print and ebooks (and it allows a fair bit of tweaking). All depends on your needs, of course, but I was pleasantly surprised at the output I could get directly from Scrivener (which I really like for its organization and writing capabilities)
- bennesvig 15y ago
  Did you export from Scrivener for CreateSpace formatting? I'm interested in learning how if you did.
spatten 15y ago
The short answer is that they're print ready as-is. Eric Ries printed a Leanpub book of his first year's worth of blog posts (we sold them at the first Startup Lessons Learned conference). They looked pretty good. The slightly longer answer is that we are working on some features for a more print-ready PDF. Right now our PDFs are optimized for on-screen reading. Sone small changes such as gutters and page numbers that alternate sides will make a nicer looking print book.

alexchamberlain 15y ago

Is there any DRM on the mobi files? Will there be when you have connection to Amazon?

spatten 15y ago
No, there is not and we don't plan on adding any when we submit them to Amazon. Here's Peter's/our take on DRM: http://www.peterarmstrong.com/?p=257 http://www.peterarmstrong.com/?p=257 (this is slightly out of date, since Peter only talks about PDFs in the post).

davidw 15y ago

How do you upload the mobi files to the Kindle store?

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
spatten 15y ago
If you want to do it yourself, it's a somewhat involved process where you get an account with Amazon, provide a US tax id (annoying for those of us out of the US, but we got ours in less than a week) and then upload the mobi file through a web interface. When we get the feature completed on Leanpub, it will involve you filling out a form (we need to know a few things like the description and what categories you would like your book listed under) and clicking on a button on Leanpub. We'll do the rest. We'll charge a one-time fee for the service, and you'll get an ISBN as part of the deal, but you will get 100% of the money from Amazon or Apple -- we won't take a cut of the sales.
- davidw 15y ago
  So you're listing it for people, collecting the money on their behalf and then forwarding it to them?
  - spatten 15y ago
    Exactly. We don't really want to be in the money loop for this, but we think that this is the only way to get our authors on the iBooks and Kindle stores without them having to sign up for themselves.