Wikipedia lists is under you cognates as "Used regardless of the genders of those referred to" ( ). a male person, but closer to the sense of the Southern y'all, an all inclusive mode of address. Many people use you guys not as a plural of guy, i.e. Sigil in particular makes e-book creation trivial.Ĭomments here suggest people are using the service and pleased with it, but it seems very expensive for a relatively small increment in convenience. I'm a lousy judge of business models but the intersection of people who would use a service called git-anything and people who aren't tech savvy enough to generate their own e-books or PDFs seems very small. Why pay someone a per-month charge for a book that you wrote last year? Much simpler and cheaper in the long run to generate an e-book using Sigil or similar, and put it up on Amazon for free. But it makes it difficult for services to make money off of them unless their incremental costs are negligible.įrom an author's perspective, the monthly charge seems problematic. The lack of sales is not a knock at indie publishing: there are plenty of reasons to publish a book other than making money. Why charge per month at all?īecause almost all independently published books sells almost no copies, so there would be no revenue stream. If there is someone who has tried both softcover.io (by Michael Hartl) and gitbook, I'd like to hear their thoughts. They do have a few options, but I'd like more options Also, the country demographics are very clearly wrong (unless there is a readership of my book in Philippines that I don't know of) It counts page loads, which are down by a factor of 2-3 as per my google analytics.
They even offer an educational discount on the pro plans if you ask nicely. Support for donations and selling (I'm not using it, though) Mailing lists for readers (so you can send email updates) Most of the product is open-source, which means I can tinker with their publishing platform. I'm using gitbook to write a book currently (so I'm biased), but its an excellent platform for writers (especially those familiar with git). If you're ever thinking of writing a book yourself, I'd highly recommend making the investment into a process like the above (or a tool like GitBook, though I've never tried it and it seems to be more than just a build tool) so you can get the boring stuff out of the way and focus on what you want to be doing - writing.
I can share some more of the above if there's interest. I can't imagine what it'd be like to not have this kind of thing in place.
Though it may seem like a lot, this investment has been totally worth it - the ability to push a change and be viewing the updated pdf in ~1 minute is very liberating. A buildbot configuration on my server to run 2, 3 and 4 above on `git push` and move the generated pdf and docx into a directory served by nginx. A makefile which runs docker (of course) to build the book with Manning styling.ĥ. A script which enforces the house style.Ĥ. an unterminated table will mess up all text following it).ģ. A script for checking for common AsciiDoc mistakes (e.g. A dead-simple web IDE for asciidoc with live previewĢ. For the book I'm co-authoring at the moment I ended up putting together my own toolchain, including:ġ.