4 ms·
I've published some children's fiction this year, but I suspect I will publish programming works again at some point. I'll give another plug for Scrivener[1],
by dangoor 14y ago
I've published some children's fiction this year, but I suspect I will publish programming works again at some point.
I'll give another plug for Scrivener[1], which is really a great tool. All of the editions that I have in the major online bookstores come straight out of Scrivener (though I obviously used an image editor for the covers).
I wanted to also mention out awesome Leanpub[2] is. Write your files in Markdown (and they support code snippets well... definitely a service that works well for software topics), save them in Dropbox. Press a couple of buttons in your browser and you've got PDF, mobi and epub. And, you can sell right away and keep 90% - 50 cents. They make it easy to publish early in the process and keep readers up to date as you complete the work.
One bonus that's not as obvious: Leanpub also makes distribution to a sample audience easy. You can generate coupon codes trivially.
I'm planning to go straight to Leanpub with my next technical work.
[1]: http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php
[2]: http://leanpub.com/ http://leanpub.com/
- StavrosK 14y agoI will second Leanpub. I'm going straight to them with anything. It's just fantastic.
- __mharrison__ 14y agoI'll be interested to hear how the Leanpub output compares to Scrivener. The Scrivener pdf looks decent. There are a few line spacing issues though on the example I saw on Amazon.
- peterarmstrong 14y agoHere's an example: https://leanpub.com/s/0DZeiyt-T53wahAxB34u4E.pdf https://leanpub.com/s/0DZeiyt-T53wahAxB34u4E.pdf https://leanpub.com/s/0DZeiyt-T53wahAxB34u4E.epub https://leanpub.com/s/0DZeiyt-T53wahAxB34u4E.epub https://leanpub.com/s/0DZeiyt-T53wahAxB34u4E.mobi https://leanpub.com/s/0DZeiyt-T53wahAxB34u4E.mobi It's my book so I can do this :)
- r4vik 14y agoI suspect they are using pandoc at the backend to do something like pandoc -lean.pdf lean.markdown?
- pat_shaughnessy 14y agoThe only complaint I've heard about Leanpub is that they don't give the author access to end user email addresses. I don't use email as a marketing tool much (almost never) but I would guess this could be a show-stopper for many eBook authors who are considering their solution.
- peterarmstrong 14y ago(Leanpub cofounder here.) We changed this very recently: readers can new choose a checkbox to share their email with the author, and this checkbox is on the purchase form as well as on the reader dashboard. (And, being Canadian, I feel the need to apologize. So, we are sorry it took us so long to get this feature right!)