At the beginning of this year, I decided I wanted to write a book. There were a number of trends in technology and society that I thought would be interesting to interrogate through narrative, and so I went out and did it. The book is called Future Sepsis (people who follow me might already know about it), and it'll be on most online stores soon. It's already on many storefronts now.
The first thing that I really need to point out is that there are no shortcuts. The tools that I used were helpful and made actually doing the thing easier on the road or at home, but there was nothing special about them in the sense that it takes 9 months for one woman to have one baby, and you can make sure that she has good nutrition, you can make sure that she has good exercise, that she has the best doctors, and the best material goods like couches that are suitable for pregnant women, but it is still going to take 9 months for one woman to have one baby.
When I originally started writing, I knew that I wanted to write a novel length book, so I made a promise to myself that I would write 1,000 words every week at minimum. If my goal was roughly 60,000 words, then it would take a maximum of 60 weeks to write the book. Any week where I got more than that done, my scheduled end date would move backwards. Thankfully, I found this to be a really smooth book to write, and so there were a lot of times I hit that 1,000 word mark and just kept right on going for two or three or 4,000 words because the story knew where it wanted to go and I was just chronicling the journey.
For anyone else who wants to write a book, remember this: according to one survey, 80% of people think they "have a book in them". Only 50% want to write a book. Only about 4% of adults actually write and publish a book in their entire lifetime, and less than 1% write two books. Only one person on earth is Issac Asimov, so don't try to bang out a novel in a few full days of writing; prepare for long term commitment to achievable goals.
I used two main tools for doing the writing: the primary one was LibreOffice.
This book is split into four arcs, one introduction, and one epilogue. During the writing, I kept each in its own file which was in the nextcloud folder on my PC.
In the bottom corner of the screen, it shows you the number of words in your current document, so I would write that weeks words and when I hit 1000 words I would know immediately. I would keep a blank document open with the section of the book I was working on at the moment, and when I was done, I would paste that section into the arc I was working on.
I have an unusual life. I travel a lot for work, so I have two completely separate PCs: my home computer is in my living room next to my big armchair, my road computer never comes in the house, it's always wherever I'm traveling to. This was a problem in the past because I would have different files at home and on the road. Nextcloud changes the world for me in this regard, because I basically live out of my next cloud folder. I have all of my windows folders like desktop, documents downloads and so on in nextcloud, so I have all the same files once they've synced on both of my computers. It was particularly useful for writing this book because no matter where I went, I had the latest copy of my draft. Once I hit save, it would be sent to the server, and it would synchronize. The other neat side benefit of this is that if I want to work on my book on a computer that isn't either of those two, it is immediately available on my nextcloud website. I've got collabra set up so when I open the file, I get it a wonderful looking full office suite in my web browser.
Nextcloud also provided another tool which I found incredibly useful: nextcloud notes he's a really lightweight way to right and keep a bunch of text. You can write on the website itself, and I do, but the other thing that's really helpful is the nextcloud notes app on f-droid. There were more than a few times where I had an idea for a scene, and I was at the store or out doing some other errand, and I was able to just pop open the nextcloud notes app, make a new note and start writing. Being able to just pop down a bunch of stuff wherever you are is surprisingly useful. In fact, I'm using that app right now to write this before I post it.
Eventually, everything came together and it was time for the next steps. Amazon requests you to have your document within certain measurements, and so I have a template document that I produced when I made the Graysonian Ethic originally (my first book). One key for a few different things here is that you use the document styles to help you. You see, whatever is set as heading 1 will be what becomes a table of contents. That's true in the book itself, but it's also true when you exported to Mobi format afterwards. Therefore, for everything that you would like to have in your table of contents, you really should have it all as heading 1.
For editing, I made use of the WritingTool libreoffice plugin. The built-in spell check is pretty minimal, and doesn't even have all the words that I used, but even without buying the special AI subscription that this plugin requests, you can still get a lot of good information out of it. In fact, you can also use a huge 8 GB file for suggested word choices, and it will help you further refine what you're writing. I chose to do my first pass of editing as one big file this way, and I just kept on going until writingtool was happy or at least ignoring all of the things that I told it I wasn't going to change LOL.
I did one more editing pass after this one chapter at time, this one was for more specific things. I had a real bad habit of switching between past and present tense based on how excited I was about that particular scene.
I had one moment during editing that was pretty interesting: when I'm writing normally, I handle most formatting in the document itself, for example writing this I will hit enter twice after I'm done a paragraph and that leaves a nice chunk of text. The more ideal way of doing that however is to let the word processor take care of it, so I opened up the files in notepad++ where you can find and replace using escape codes, and got rid of all double line feeds. Similar find it replace operations made other fixes a lot easier as well, such as putting punctuation marks on the wrong side of the quotation mark. I made the default body text handle indentation and paragraph spacing instead.
Another problem is that all the copying and pasting ends up with broken quotation marks. You can select the entire document, go up to tools/autocorrect, and have it run autocorrect immediately on that block of text, implementing stuff like curly quotation marks immediately. You'll still need to fix a bunch, but writingtool catches that.
From there, you have a couple of different options. Either, you can export directly as a docx or doc or ODT file, or you can export as PDF if you want pixel precise control over each page.
Honestly, each file format is useful for different things here; PDF for print, mobi for many ebook stores. You can also save in mobi v3 and mobi v2, some stores actually want the older version for some reason.
However, libreoffice's mobi export tool isn't perfect, and can create imperfections that cause importers to complain, that's where Sigil comes in. It's a FOSS mobi editor I used to resolve errors the importer had. In my case, the libreoffice exporter added an extra title to each section, and there was an improper direction element in the css file.
For the title, I took the photo with my camera (yeah yeah), then modified it with gimp. I cut each element out and made each a layer, allowing me to apply effects to make the snow colder and reduce the detail there's a filter to focus on one point and progressively blur more as you get further from that point. Then I made the blood more saturated, and generally left the plane alone.
Next, I used LibreOffice draw. I set the canvas size to the required size for the book, then put my image down at the same size as the canvas, and finally put the text elements down. I was able to use draw to fiddle with kerning and the like to lay things out exactly as I wanted, and I'm pretty happy with the outcome.
One more piece of advice outside the FOSS ecosystem: Amazon will offer you access to things like Kindle unlimited if you choose to hitch your wagon entirely to their ecosystem. Everyone is on Amazon. It's convenient to buy and sell, and their print on demand looks great. If you're an indie author, you should really consider diversifying. For my first book, I never earned a penny on Kindle unlimited anyway, and that locked me out of other stores. This time I chose not to. Choosing not to gives you a chance to be on big stores like apple and Google, book stores like chapters and barnes and noble, and as a work chasing just a few sales, being a bigger fish in a smaller pond can mean more visibility since you're one of fewer titles on the ecosystem.
FOSS Tools used
Next cloud
Libreoffice writer
WritingTool libreoffice plugin
Notepad++
Gimp
Sigil
The first thing that I really need to point out is that there are no shortcuts. The tools that I used were helpful and made actually doing the thing easier on the road or at home, but there was nothing special about them in the sense that it takes 9 months for one woman to have one baby, and you can make sure that she has good nutrition, you can make sure that she has good exercise, that she has the best doctors, and the best material goods like couches that are suitable for pregnant women, but it is still going to take 9 months for one woman to have one baby.
When I originally started writing, I knew that I wanted to write a novel length book, so I made a promise to myself that I would write 1,000 words every week at minimum. If my goal was roughly 60,000 words, then it would take a maximum of 60 weeks to write the book. Any week where I got more than that done, my scheduled end date would move backwards. Thankfully, I found this to be a really smooth book to write, and so there were a lot of times I hit that 1,000 word mark and just kept right on going for two or three or 4,000 words because the story knew where it wanted to go and I was just chronicling the journey.
For anyone else who wants to write a book, remember this: according to one survey, 80% of people think they "have a book in them". Only 50% want to write a book. Only about 4% of adults actually write and publish a book in their entire lifetime, and less than 1% write two books. Only one person on earth is Issac Asimov, so don't try to bang out a novel in a few full days of writing; prepare for long term commitment to achievable goals.
I used two main tools for doing the writing: the primary one was LibreOffice.
This book is split into four arcs, one introduction, and one epilogue. During the writing, I kept each in its own file which was in the nextcloud folder on my PC.
In the bottom corner of the screen, it shows you the number of words in your current document, so I would write that weeks words and when I hit 1000 words I would know immediately. I would keep a blank document open with the section of the book I was working on at the moment, and when I was done, I would paste that section into the arc I was working on.
I have an unusual life. I travel a lot for work, so I have two completely separate PCs: my home computer is in my living room next to my big armchair, my road computer never comes in the house, it's always wherever I'm traveling to. This was a problem in the past because I would have different files at home and on the road. Nextcloud changes the world for me in this regard, because I basically live out of my next cloud folder. I have all of my windows folders like desktop, documents downloads and so on in nextcloud, so I have all the same files once they've synced on both of my computers. It was particularly useful for writing this book because no matter where I went, I had the latest copy of my draft. Once I hit save, it would be sent to the server, and it would synchronize. The other neat side benefit of this is that if I want to work on my book on a computer that isn't either of those two, it is immediately available on my nextcloud website. I've got collabra set up so when I open the file, I get it a wonderful looking full office suite in my web browser.
Nextcloud also provided another tool which I found incredibly useful: nextcloud notes he's a really lightweight way to right and keep a bunch of text. You can write on the website itself, and I do, but the other thing that's really helpful is the nextcloud notes app on f-droid. There were more than a few times where I had an idea for a scene, and I was at the store or out doing some other errand, and I was able to just pop open the nextcloud notes app, make a new note and start writing. Being able to just pop down a bunch of stuff wherever you are is surprisingly useful. In fact, I'm using that app right now to write this before I post it.
Eventually, everything came together and it was time for the next steps. Amazon requests you to have your document within certain measurements, and so I have a template document that I produced when I made the Graysonian Ethic originally (my first book). One key for a few different things here is that you use the document styles to help you. You see, whatever is set as heading 1 will be what becomes a table of contents. That's true in the book itself, but it's also true when you exported to Mobi format afterwards. Therefore, for everything that you would like to have in your table of contents, you really should have it all as heading 1.
For editing, I made use of the WritingTool libreoffice plugin. The built-in spell check is pretty minimal, and doesn't even have all the words that I used, but even without buying the special AI subscription that this plugin requests, you can still get a lot of good information out of it. In fact, you can also use a huge 8 GB file for suggested word choices, and it will help you further refine what you're writing. I chose to do my first pass of editing as one big file this way, and I just kept on going until writingtool was happy or at least ignoring all of the things that I told it I wasn't going to change LOL.
I did one more editing pass after this one chapter at time, this one was for more specific things. I had a real bad habit of switching between past and present tense based on how excited I was about that particular scene.
I had one moment during editing that was pretty interesting: when I'm writing normally, I handle most formatting in the document itself, for example writing this I will hit enter twice after I'm done a paragraph and that leaves a nice chunk of text. The more ideal way of doing that however is to let the word processor take care of it, so I opened up the files in notepad++ where you can find and replace using escape codes, and got rid of all double line feeds. Similar find it replace operations made other fixes a lot easier as well, such as putting punctuation marks on the wrong side of the quotation mark. I made the default body text handle indentation and paragraph spacing instead.
Another problem is that all the copying and pasting ends up with broken quotation marks. You can select the entire document, go up to tools/autocorrect, and have it run autocorrect immediately on that block of text, implementing stuff like curly quotation marks immediately. You'll still need to fix a bunch, but writingtool catches that.
From there, you have a couple of different options. Either, you can export directly as a docx or doc or ODT file, or you can export as PDF if you want pixel precise control over each page.
Honestly, each file format is useful for different things here; PDF for print, mobi for many ebook stores. You can also save in mobi v3 and mobi v2, some stores actually want the older version for some reason.
However, libreoffice's mobi export tool isn't perfect, and can create imperfections that cause importers to complain, that's where Sigil comes in. It's a FOSS mobi editor I used to resolve errors the importer had. In my case, the libreoffice exporter added an extra title to each section, and there was an improper direction element in the css file.
For the title, I took the photo with my camera (yeah yeah), then modified it with gimp. I cut each element out and made each a layer, allowing me to apply effects to make the snow colder and reduce the detail there's a filter to focus on one point and progressively blur more as you get further from that point. Then I made the blood more saturated, and generally left the plane alone.
Next, I used LibreOffice draw. I set the canvas size to the required size for the book, then put my image down at the same size as the canvas, and finally put the text elements down. I was able to use draw to fiddle with kerning and the like to lay things out exactly as I wanted, and I'm pretty happy with the outcome.
One more piece of advice outside the FOSS ecosystem: Amazon will offer you access to things like Kindle unlimited if you choose to hitch your wagon entirely to their ecosystem. Everyone is on Amazon. It's convenient to buy and sell, and their print on demand looks great. If you're an indie author, you should really consider diversifying. For my first book, I never earned a penny on Kindle unlimited anyway, and that locked me out of other stores. This time I chose not to. Choosing not to gives you a chance to be on big stores like apple and Google, book stores like chapters and barnes and noble, and as a work chasing just a few sales, being a bigger fish in a smaller pond can mean more visibility since you're one of fewer titles on the ecosystem.
FOSS Tools used
Next cloud
Libreoffice writer
WritingTool libreoffice plugin
Notepad++
Gimp
Sigil
@sj_zero 4%? Sounds like a lot! I think I know, counting very wide, 3 people who wrote and published their own books. All of them were student books. Statistics, finance and law.
I don't know anyone who wrote and published fiction.
The majority gave the advice to never write a book for money. Only do it if you enjoy it, because the chance of earning something is very low. 2 out of the 3 indirectly got some PR that benefitted their careers, but that was basically it.
Yeah, that's assuming that every book published in the US was published by a separate person, which we know isn't true, and that's cumulative over an adult's lifetime. Reality is probably much lower.
And you're absolutely right with respect to the realities of being a writer -- I saw it with The Graysonian Ethic, that just because you write and publish a book doesn't mean you're going to make back the money you put into it, and it definitely doesn't mean you're going to have a bunch of sales.
I do believe that there's a benefit beyond money. You're better for it, and if you've mad something remotely worth reading, then the small number of people who read your work come away a little better for it too.
My sales goal for this book is to beat the average number of books sold according to Penguin House in their famous 2012 lawsuit, I'm aiming at 13 sales. After that I'm doing better than many published books.
https://www.authormedia.com/publishing-industry-secrets-revealed-at-the-penguin-random-house-trial/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
And you're absolutely right with respect to the realities of being a writer -- I saw it with The Graysonian Ethic, that just because you write and publish a book doesn't mean you're going to make back the money you put into it, and it definitely doesn't mean you're going to have a bunch of sales.
I do believe that there's a benefit beyond money. You're better for it, and if you've mad something remotely worth reading, then the small number of people who read your work come away a little better for it too.
My sales goal for this book is to beat the average number of books sold according to Penguin House in their famous 2012 lawsuit, I'm aiming at 13 sales. After that I'm doing better than many published books.
https://www.authormedia.com/publishing-industry-secrets-revealed-at-the-penguin-random-house-trial/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
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@sj_zero Best of luck though! =) I'm in the category of one thinking about it, but so far haven't found the motivation. ;)
The more stuff good people make the better the world is, so I'd definitely recommend trying.
The key is that it's a small thing to ask if yourself weekly instead of a bunch of big things. When it feels like doing the laundry or mowing the lawn in terms of not being a bunch of time and just something you're in the habit in, it adds up fast.
The key is that it's a small thing to ask if yourself weekly instead of a bunch of big things. When it feels like doing the laundry or mowing the lawn in terms of not being a bunch of time and just something you're in the habit in, it adds up fast.
@sj_zero Well, my problem is that I feel that most likely, someone, somewhere at some point in time probably already said what I want to say, so why should I say it again?
I've thought about writing a book on freedom, existential philosophy, positive psychology, or a mix of all three, but it would just be a kaleidoscope, were pre-existing bits and pieces would just be joined in a (perhaps?) new pattern. =/
But what I _do_ have on my computer, is loads of random text files from email and
@sj_zero usenet threads were I thought I wrote something worthwhile saving. Plenty of loose subjects, maxims and anecdotes... but no order or method at all.
I thought that perhaps one way to get started might be to sort through them and find a common thread for some of the files, and that might make it easier to "join the dots" and get something going.
That's about as far as I've come on that subject.