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Congratulations! This is a thing of great beauty. I would like to write an iOS-centric game development book; this is truly inspiring. Just curious... what are

by Arjuna 13y ago

Congratulations! This is a thing of great beauty. I would like to write an iOS-centric game development book; this is truly inspiring. Just curious... what are your self-publishing plans (if you don't mind discussing them)? What software do you use for writing?

munificent 13y ago
> what are your self-publishing plans (if you don't mind discussing them)? The book will remain freely available in web form in its entirety. When I put up the last chapter, that will include a nice redesign that should hopefully make it pleasant to read across most devices. Soon after, I'm going to start working on an eBook and print version. I'm not sure how I'll do the eBook yet, but I'll do some investigation. The book is written in markdown, so it should be fairly straightforward to eBook-ify it. For the print version, I'll be laying it out by hand with lots of love in InDesign. I was a designer before I turned to programming, and I've always wanted to typeset a full book. I didn't think I'd have to write it first to get the opportunity! Sometime soon, I'll also contract out for a proofreading pass over the book. Each chapter has gone through a few revisions already, as well as numerous bug reports from eagle-eyed readers, but there's always mistakes. I'll pay out of pocket for it. I'm purchasing my own ISBN. I'll put the eBook and print-on-demand version up on Amazon. I'm not sure if I'll sell it through other channels yet. I still have to look into it. The best thing I did was start a mailing list when I was about halfway through the book (using MailChimp, who are swell). It's got over 2k subscribers now, so when the eBook and print versions are ready, I have an audience I can tell. > What software do you use for writing? Sublime Text. The first thing I did when I started the book was set up a very simple workflow. I have a Python script[2] that takes the markdown, transcludes the code snippets (which are in separate source files so they can be compiled and tests), and converts it to HTML. I write in Sublime and then run the script to see the resulting output. I find seeing the prose in two different forms (markdown and styled HTML) helps me during the editing process. It's serves as a proxy for a fresh pair of eyes. [2]: https://github.com/munificent/game-programming-patterns/blob/master/script/format.py https://github.com/munificent/game-programming-patterns/blob...
- steveklabnik 13y ago
  > The book is written in markdown, so it should be fairly straightforward to eBook-ify it. I put my "toolchain" to do this up on GitHub, which really is just a Makefile that feeds things to Pandoc: https://github.com/steveklabnik/words https://github.com/steveklabnik/words
  - munificent 13y ago
    Thank you! I'll take a look at this when I start digging into the mechanics of the conversion.
    - steveklabnik 13y ago
      No problem. One quick thing I learned: pandoc is sooooooo much better for this than anything else. I was originally using Calibre to generate stuff, and their epubs don't follow the spec, and so don't work correctly in some readers. I was _this close_ to writing a Ruby script that would unzip, s/foo//g, rezip it back up, before I found pandoc.
      - munificent 13y ago
        That's good to know. Calibre was on my list too.
- teach 13y ago
  I'd recommend Leanpub[0]. They accept markdown and their workflow is pretty easy and non-exclusive. For my book[1] I just used pandoc and Makefiles, but once the school year ends and I turn my attention back to the book getting it up on Leanpub is a priority. [0] https://leanpub.com/authors https://leanpub.com/authors [1] https://learnjavathehardway.org/ https://learnjavathehardway.org/
  - munificent 13y ago
    Yup, leanpub is one of the things I've started looking into. :)

by Arjuna 13y ago

munificent 13y ago

> what are your self-publishing plans (if you don't mind discussing them)? The book will remain freely available in web form in its entirety. When I put up the last chapter, that will include a nice redesign that should hopefully make it pleasant to read across most devices. Soon after, I'm going to start working on an eBook and print version. I'm not sure how I'll do the eBook yet, but I'll do some investigation. The book is written in markdown, so it should be fairly straightforward to eBook-ify it. For the print version, I'll be laying it out by hand with lots of love in InDesign. I was a designer before I turned to programming, and I've always wanted to typeset a full book. I didn't think I'd have to write it first to get the opportunity! Sometime soon, I'll also contract out for a proofreading pass over the book. Each chapter has gone through a few revisions already, as well as numerous bug reports from eagle-eyed readers, but there's always mistakes. I'll pay out of pocket for it. I'm purchasing my own ISBN. I'll put the eBook and print-on-demand version up on Amazon. I'm not sure if I'll sell it through other channels yet. I still have to look into it. The best thing I did was start a mailing list when I was about halfway through the book (using MailChimp, who are swell). It's got over 2k subscribers now, so when the eBook and print versions are ready, I have an audience I can tell. > What software do you use for writing? Sublime Text. The first thing I did when I started the book was set up a very simple workflow. I have a Python script[2] that takes the markdown, transcludes the code snippets (which are in separate source files so they can be compiled and tests), and converts it to HTML. I write in Sublime and then run the script to see the resulting output. I find seeing the prose in two different forms (markdown and styled HTML) helps me during the editing process. It's serves as a proxy for a fresh pair of eyes. [2]: https://github.com/munificent/game-programming-patterns/blob/master/script/format.py https://github.com/munificent/game-programming-patterns/blob...

steveklabnik 13y ago
> The book is written in markdown, so it should be fairly straightforward to eBook-ify it. I put my "toolchain" to do this up on GitHub, which really is just a Makefile that feeds things to Pandoc: https://github.com/steveklabnik/words https://github.com/steveklabnik/words
- munificent 13y ago
  Thank you! I'll take a look at this when I start digging into the mechanics of the conversion.
  - steveklabnik 13y ago
    No problem. One quick thing I learned: pandoc is sooooooo much better for this than anything else. I was originally using Calibre to generate stuff, and their epubs don't follow the spec, and so don't work correctly in some readers. I was _this close_ to writing a Ruby script that would unzip, s/foo//g, rezip it back up, before I found pandoc.
    - munificent 13y ago
      That's good to know. Calibre was on my list too.
teach 13y ago
I'd recommend Leanpub[0]. They accept markdown and their workflow is pretty easy and non-exclusive. For my book[1] I just used pandoc and Makefiles, but once the school year ends and I turn my attention back to the book getting it up on Leanpub is a priority. [0] https://leanpub.com/authors https://leanpub.com/authors [1] https://learnjavathehardway.org/ https://learnjavathehardway.org/
- munificent 13y ago
  Yup, leanpub is one of the things I've started looking into. :)