Pulling blog posts together into a book
Once again, I’ve dusted off the idea of turning a set of blog posts into an ebook. The inspirations for this resurrection were Wil Wheaton’s recently-released book Sunken Treasure and a Web-to-book experiment done at the recent Tools of Change for Publishing conference.
I realized that the way in which I’ve been writing my blog posts for the last year or two — detailed here and here — makes converting those posts (which exist as files on my computer) to a format that I can compile into an ebook fairly easy.
As the second post I linked to in the previous paragraph explains, I write my posts in a text editor using a lightweight markup language called Markdown. I have a tool on my computer that will convert Markdown files to a typesetting format called LaTeX. From there, I just combine all of the LaTeX files into a document, and then use the typesetting software generate a PDF. It actually is that simple.
Assuming that I can actually find the time to do the job, what will these ebooks contain? Advice, opinion, tips, techniques, and how-tos. The content won’t simply be the blog posts as they exist now. I’m hoping to expand on some, combine a few, and add some padding material, and even include some work that has yet to be seen by eyes other than mine and my business partner’s.
So, all I have to do is:
Choose the posts to include
Find time to pull everything together and do the additional writing
Come up with a decent cover design
Watch this space for updates on this (somewhat mad) project.
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