Self Pub Stories

The MVP of Self Pub Stories is a simple website to host interviews with successful self-published authors—so from a development standpoint, a blog. Simple enough!

I could've used something like WordPress to get an MVP out ASAP, but I decided to code it myself for two reasons:

1. I want flexibility for the future of this site. If a community ends up forming around its content, I don't want anything to constrain me when it comes to adding new content to serve that community. Coding everything myself gives me that flexibility.

2. I'm a college student, so even if this project doesn't go as planned, if I build it myself from scratch it will at least look solid on my portfolio come job-hunt time!

My initial tech-stack was React (using Create React App) for the frontend and Strapi as a headless CMS for the backend. I made decent progress here before I realized using CRA on the frontend was going to be less than ideal for SEO... back to the drawing board.

I eventually settled on Next JS to replace CRA for the frontend. There was some hesitation at first because I'd already sunk a decent amount of hours into this MVP, and now I was faced with rewriting the entire front-end, but it didn't end up being too tough. I'd never worked with Next JS before, but after just a few days of perusing tutorials and documentation, I had a fully rewritten version of my site ready to go.

Next stop, completing the first batch of interviews!

PS: This site was very much inspired by Indie Hackers. I see a lot of parallels between the startup and self-publishing communities, and thought aspiring authors (myself included) could really benefit from a similar resource. I wanted to point this out to anyone noticing the similarities, and also to thank Courtland for building something inspiring.