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The Tools I Use to Write Books (2018)

170 点作者 benhoyt大约 3 年前

14 条评论

WoodenChair大约 3 年前
I&#x27;ve written 4 technical books including the Classic Computer Science Problems Series (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;classicproblems.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;classicproblems.com</a>). I agree with what Thorsten said at the end—none of this really matters—or it&#x27;s marginal at most. Most people who say they want to write a book lack the motivation to do it. It&#x27;s not the tools getting in the way.<p>Apress used Word templates back in 2013 when I did my first book with them. Manning let you use asciidoc or Word templates when I worked with them. I wrote my first book with them in markdown and translated to asciidoc using pandoc. There were so many formatting issues and I found the tools for asciidoc so immature that I ultimately went to using their Word templates on my next two books with them despite preferring purely text formats.<p>Now I&#x27;m working on my next book and I think I&#x27;m going to try self publishing. I&#x27;m liking leanpub&#x27;s use of a markdown like format. But again none of this really matters. You can fix formatting later. You have to sit down and write!<p>PS Thorsten&#x27;s &quot;Writing an Interpreter in Go&quot; is great: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;amzn.to&#x2F;3yLTJjE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;amzn.to&#x2F;3yLTJjE</a>
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yboris大约 3 年前
Maybe relevant to those interested: <i>The Snowflake Method</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.advancedfictionwriting.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;snowflake-method&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.advancedfictionwriting.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;snowflake-me...</a><p>The gist (might work better for fiction, unsure): write a single sentence summary, then, three sentences to describe what major things happen, then fractal it out - keep expanding. This way, from the start, you have a cohesive story with a planned-out arc.
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ggm大约 3 年前
I did KDP for an author, from Word. It wasn&#x27;t nothing. I valued my labour at $0 to get experience, There are a LOT of fine-grained issues to resolve, bringing a book to printable state.<p>Binding is it&#x27;s own special hell: There are huge expectations of barcoding, which plays with your cover artwork, and the positioning of things on the cover is a function of the width of the spine, which is a function of pointsize, margins, wordcount, paper density&#x2F;weight&#x2F;thickness. I became very dependent on other peoples templates and calculators to &quot;get this right&quot;<p>Perhaps the oddest part of this, is the join over paper and ePublishing: they are very unequal in terms of DPI expectations, for both font and artwork. I think the golden rule here is &quot;preserve your pixels as long as you can&quot; but there is also &quot;think about metadata, in images and in fonts and text&quot; because producing print ready PDF and ePub formats, the meta is what the printery&#x2F;bindery is going to work with. EPSF and other stuff comes to the fore very quickly.<p>Page numbering is another bugbear: some places demand you DONT number pre and post, some expect it to reset, some expect one to be roman numerals, the rest in decimals. some want it spine, some want it edge, some want it centered. Get too close to the margins, now the printer hates you...
cobbaut大约 3 年前
The link in the article to the pp tool is no longer active. Find it here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;CDSoft&#x2F;pp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;CDSoft&#x2F;pp</a>
markwisde大约 3 年前
If it’s interesting to someone I have a similar pipeline I used to write and deploy my book The Security Engineer Handbook [1].<p>I basically wrote everything using markdown files, and a pdf&#x2F;epub&#x2F;mobi is automatically generated from the folder using a Github Action. The action will also modify the date of the last update on the webpage, which gets deployed via cloudflare pages (although github pages could have been used). On the other side Stripe handles the payments (No server side code for me) and zapier detects new customers and sends the artifacts by email.<p>It’s magical :) the next time I want to write a book I’ll focus purely on the content and everything else will be taken care of automagically.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;securityhandbook.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;securityhandbook.io&#x2F;</a>
dglass大约 3 年前
Always cool to see what tools other authors use to write books. I took a different route with my upcoming book[0] on career advice for programmers working towards a promotion to a senior role.<p>I started out writing it in markdown but ended up moving to a workflow that was mostly Google Docs. My general flow was:<p>1. High level chapter outline<p>2. Outline for each individual chapter<p>3. Write each chapter according to the outline<p>4. First draft done!<p>5. Read through each chapter and highlight each sentence according to color code (Green: good, Orange: good but needs to be revised, Red: bad, needs to be rewritten)<p>6. Work through each chapter and revise&#x2F;rewrite based on colors.<p>7. Second draft done!<p>8. Developmental edits (Get feedback, move chapters or sections around, add missing sections or talking points)<p>9. Copy edit (This is where I&#x27;m at now)<p>10. Prepare for publication<p>11. Done!<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.holloway.com&#x2F;b&#x2F;junior-to-senior" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.holloway.com&#x2F;b&#x2F;junior-to-senior</a>
barnacled大约 3 年前
I am at the start of writing a book and had some major freeze at the start before, much like the author here, realised that all that matters is that I write the damn thing.<p>I love how LaTeX lays things out, so I&#x27;m using LaTeX. I&#x27;d like to have a web version possibly but I can think about that later.<p>And now, I better get back to it...
Mizza大约 3 年前
I wrote a screenplay using a Markdown-based language called &quot;Fountain&quot; designed and implemented by the guy who wrote Tim Burton&#x27;s screenplays, who I guess is apparently also a programmer. It&#x27;s a great language and makes the barrier to getting started extremely low.
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roycoding大约 3 年前
I&#x27;m about 3&#x2F;4 of the way through writing my second book right now (Zefs Guide to Deep Learning <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zefsguides.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zefsguides.com</a> ). I have am using a somewhat similar workflow. I&#x27;m writing in Leanpub&#x27;s Markua flavor of Markdown, which they use to build ebook, PDF, and HTML formats. They will also produce a reformatted PDF for you for book printing, with appropriate margins.<p>This is the same thing I did for my first book, except that I want a pocket book size format and there isn&#x27;t one that both Leanpub and Amazon KDP currently support, so instead I will be doing some LaTeX wrangling to produce a PDF formatted for KDP. I haven&#x27;t yet decided how I will do that, as there doesn&#x27;t seem to be a Markua -&gt; Markdown convertor anywhere (pandoc only goes in the other direction).
xnacly大约 3 年前
I find the flowchart visualizing the pipeline very intriguing, can someone link me a tool I can use to create similar charts?<p>For reference: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thorstenball.com&#x2F;images&#x2F;book_tool_pipeline.svg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thorstenball.com&#x2F;images&#x2F;book_tool_pipeline.svg</a>
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sdevonoes大约 3 年前
Being there. Having so many (nice) tools available out there, I spent more time playing around with such tools than I spent doing actual writing. Nowadays, this is what I do:<p>- I do the writing first using Word (or Google Docs)<p>- Once my writing is done, I use the cool tools (if needed)<p>It a little more work at the end (if any), but it&#x27;s totally negligible because the trunk work is already done (the writing itself).
fjfaase大约 3 年前
I wrote a tool that can process a number of MarkDown files with fragments of C code and put all those fragments in the right order to produce a file that can be compiled. It is grammar based and works with manipulating Abstract Syntax Trees, so I guess, it could be adapted for different programming languages. See: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;FransFaase&#x2F;IParse#markdownc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;FransFaase&#x2F;IParse#markdownc</a>
akeck大约 3 年前
Note that it looks like Amazon pulled KindleGen off the web awhile back.
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nhlx2大约 3 年前
No mention of org-mode?