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What ebook writing software do you use?

Curious to know what you use to write your ebooks, and whether you're happy with the software.

What do you love? What do you hate? What do you wish was different?

I'm building a new app for novelists to write and self-publish ebooks, and would love to know what problems other writers are having.

(Btw: That app can be found at paperbackauthor.com)

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    hi Mario,

    I've built an editor to create eBooks in ePUB and PDF formats. It is MagicAuthor.com
    I invite you to check it out and post your thoughts.

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      Just seeing this now. Looks great! Took the concept further than I got. Way to go :-)

      What's your experience been so far? Any paying customers?

      It's an idea I'm passionate about, but trying to sell software to novelists is tough... they have many free options and generally don't have a lot of money.

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        Thanks mate. I too have the same feeling. It is difficult to get any paying customers from the writers niche.

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    I am writing a technical book https://efficientdeveloper.com, that needs things like asides, table, and other content inside. I started with LeanPub's Markua format and their online PDF generator, but because the template customization was difficult, I switched to AsciiDoc, specifically to AsciiDoc PDF (at least for now). The format is perfect for technical documentation and books and I believe it will allow me to customize it more easily.

    I write in VSCode, with a preview pane for AsciiDoc format.

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      You're hand coding it? That's outstanding. Hats off to you!

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      How was the experience? What kind of book was it?

      I've tried to use it but personally found it challenging unless I was using one of their templates.

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        It was fine, we kept it really simple even without templates! Only thing we did outside of Pages was adding the cover to the final PDF.

        Main goal was to ship the book instead of fussing with layouts, since the original edition of the book was shipped in 24 hours using the same principles in the book: https://stackingthebricks.com/24-hour-product-challenge/

        JFS has sold many thousands of copies since: https://shop.stackingthebricks.com/just-fucking-ship

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          1. Love the title.

          2. Love that you wrote and published in 24 hours.

          3. I'm gonna have to test creating e-books this way. I've tried it in Word and Google Docs, and found the end product to be unsatisfying, to say the least.

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            There's nothing more unsatisfying than a book that doesn't ship because you spend tons of time fiddling with the layout. :)

            I'm not knocking great book design, btw. I've also gone the other end of the spectrum, hiring a professional book designer for my paperback + digital book Tiny MBA. And that end product came out amazing!

            But JFS has helped thousands of people without having a fancy design. Based on the DIY ebooks that I've bought and read, it's almost never the design that holds them back but lack of editing. That's where you're gonna really wow your reader...when the is structured well!

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              There's nothing more unsatisfying than a book that doesn't ship because you spend tons of time fiddling with the layout. :)

              100% agreement. That's why PaperbackAuthor will simply make everything beautiful by default, with little-to-no room to fiddle with the layout.

              My philosophy is that a novel has absolutely nothing to do with layout, so authors should spend no time on layout whatsoever. Just focus on telling the story.

              This is entirely why PA will be so low-featured. It's a creative constraint designed to keep the focus where it belongs.

              Good typography is good design. But that's not something a writer should spend any time thinking about. They should be able to trust that it's going to look good without actually spending any time on that whatsoever.

              All of which is to say, I think we're in agreement?

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                Yup we're def in agreement!

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    For my ebook I used word.

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      Did you have any challenges converting it from Word to an ebook format? Whenever I've tried I've ended up having to open it up in a code editor to clean up the result. Do you have any tips or tricks that make it easier?

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    I've been writing content in a Jupyter Notebook with Python.

    This allows me to show code examples, have engaging content, enable easy change management and starts to explore the limit of the 'e' in an e-book.

    Since I am only releasing 'mini' ebooks to small groups of people, I can utilize already existing infra and workflows. +
    (Release in epub/pdf/notepad form)

    I am disappointed in the limited places to view my created content. Giving quick walkthroughs on installing vscode / anaconda / using Google colab is not ideal.

    Eventually, I'll probably be moving to NextJS/tailwind/MDX, which should eliminate readability issues and allow me to embed more types of content in my books.

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      I love Jupyter, but that's probably true of most programmers.

      What are your books about?

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      I'd never heard of it, but just gave it a quick run through and have to agree, it's an excellent editor for those of us who love markdown.

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      What was your experience like in converting from Google Docs to an ebook format like ePub?

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    I use Leanpub and absolutely love it.

    Leanpub is a self-publishing platform focusing on works in-progress and technical works.

    Along with an online store for selling published works, it comes with a complete ebook formatting and publishing toolchain based on Markua, a Markdown dialect designed for creating books and text-based courses. The toolchain integrates with GitHub, where authors can store manuscripts.

    When my manuscript on GitHub is ready for publication, I click a button on Leanpub's dashboard and it formats and publishes the book in PDF, ePub, and Mobi format. It can optionally output InDesign and print-ready files.

    The whole process feels magical. With a click of a button I get professionally formatted ebook files that work perfectly on the major platforms and ebook readers such as Kindle, Google Play books, and more.

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      I'd somehow never heard of Leanpub before, but I'm following them now.

      That "magical" feeling is exactly what I'm looking to create, but for non-techies. I'm hoping that by focusing exclusively on novelists, I can streamline and simplify the whole process to reflect what they need and nothing they don't.

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        Are you working on something in the same space as Scrivener, Vellum, and Wawemaker?

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          Same space, different niche and different emphasis in terms of what's important.

          1. I'm focused exclusively on novelists. So there's a lot of features that word processors and apps like Scrivener have that I won't. Many people won't like that, but I'm hoping some will share my love of minimalist functionality.

          2. The web version will be 100% free. I'll be rolling out paid apps for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, along with some pro features like collaboration and offline storage. My hope is that 2-5% of my users will see enough value to buy the native apps and pro features.

          3. Radically different pricing. I may be shooting myself in the foot, but I don't think it's right to charge budding novelists $200-250 (Vellum) or $67 (Scrivener) for the level of features I'll be implementing.

          In other words, the idea is to (hopefully) execute exceptionally well on a much smaller set of functionality for a much more niche audience.

          This is not a critique of what's currently available, because I think they're great. I just think (hope) there's room for something more focused in the market.

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