I've posted my scene for today so I'll spend some time updating the Blogsite, explaining what I'm doing.
There a number of ways of publishing a book on the internet.
- Probably the easiest and most common is to post them on a fiction archive or website, which are in most cases laid out as a forum. The Trek United fan fiction subforum is an example. In this case you post the individual chapters as a separate post - You can put it together as a pdf and post it on Issuu. These are a great option and frankly, other than perhaps true eBooks (see below), they are the closest you will get to seeing high-quality print online. - What I call a "true eBook" though is a publication that is portable media and can be read on a hand-held reading devise like the Kimble. These have most everything that a hard-print book has and more. - Those last two options have one major drawback though. They are best suited to a finished item rather than a work-In-Progress. (WIP) Posting on a forum is pretty good for a WIP but there's nothing that sets it apart from other forum posts as a book - Now, you could do it the old-fashioned way, in html, and make the individual chapters a web page then string the whole thing together as a book... ... or you could make it a Blog Book!
Using a Blog as your medium for publishing a book on the internet is not new. I first remember seeing it done for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) a couple of years back and the instructions are still there in Blogger Help under "How do I post a book?" with an example Blog made up of "The Castle of Otranto".
I used this method myself to create the fiction archive for my old Fanzine "The Lief Erikson" which I named "The Lief Press" ... well, my kids thought it was funny!
The trick with this is that you have to always link to the contents page to get the contents, so that this is the "public face" of your fiction archive. As you add new stories to the archive, you update this page in the 'Posts' section of your Blog's dashboard. In fact this type of Blog is pretty intensive on fiddling with the posts and templates.
Since then the standard Blog construction has changed to make customisation easier to a certain extent. For an updated explanation of how to create a similar blogNovel to "The Castle of Otranto" but using the new style templates Vin has posted an excellent, detailed explanation on, with an updated example template.
So ... How about a specific base example of what I'm trying to do then? To start off with, we'll create a generic book using the instructions from Blogger Help.
This is pretty standard and if you haven't made a Blog before you might as well stop now because this isn't something for a newcomer. As long as you know your way around the Blogger "Dashboard" you should be able to follow most of the instructions here, if not just post a query and I'll see if I can help. If you are new to Blogger, you need to open an account - a Google account that brings a number of free publishing tools that I'll be using later. Checkout step 4a on Mahalo.com. If you already have an account, all you need to do to create a new Blog from your Dashboard is hit "Create a Blog" at the top of your list of Blogs. Blogger allows you to have an unlimited number of Blogs on your account, so if you are a prolific writer, you need not worry about running out of space.
This takes you to screen 2: Name your Blog. As regards the name, you can snap off something short and memorable - MyLifeAsATeenagedTrekkie - but in my case I like to think of the books that I publish on the 'net as coming from my own publishing house, The L'Stok Press, so I always start them as
Hitting the 'Continue' arrow at the bottom of this screen takes you to a third screen labeled, confusingly, "2 Choose a template". Click the radar button on the top left hand template, "Minima", then the continue button and Blogger will congratulate you on creating your new Blog and invite you to make your first post! There are only a half-dozen options so I I pick a generic template to start off with and change it afterwards.
I've posted my scene for today so I'll spend some time updating the Blogsite, explaining what I'm doing.
ReplyDeleteThere a number of ways of publishing a book on the internet.
- Probably the easiest and most common is to post them on a fiction archive or website, which are in most cases laid out as a forum. The Trek United fan fiction subforum is an example. In this case you post the individual chapters as a separate post
- You can put it together as a pdf and post it on Issuu. These are a great option and frankly, other than perhaps true eBooks (see below), they are the closest you will get to seeing high-quality print online.
- What I call a "true eBook" though is a publication that is portable media and can be read on a hand-held reading devise like the Kimble. These have most everything that a hard-print book has and more.
- Those last two options have one major drawback though. They are best suited to a finished item rather than a work-In-Progress. (WIP) Posting on a forum is pretty good for a WIP but there's nothing that sets it apart from other forum posts as a book
- Now, you could do it the old-fashioned way, in html, and make the individual chapters a web page then string the whole thing together as a book...
... or you could make it a Blog Book!
Galah's Guide to ePublishing
ReplyDelete1 - The BlogBook
Using a Blog as your medium for publishing a book on the internet is not new. I first remember seeing it done for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) a couple of years back and the instructions are still there in Blogger Help under "How do I post a book?" with an example Blog made up of "The Castle of Otranto".
I used this method myself to create the fiction archive for my old Fanzine "The Lief Erikson" which I named "The Lief Press" ... well, my kids thought it was funny!
The trick with this is that you have to always link to the contents page to get the contents, so that this is the "public face" of your fiction archive. As you add new stories to the archive, you update this page in the 'Posts' section of your Blog's dashboard. In fact this type of Blog is pretty intensive on fiddling with the posts and templates.
Since then the standard Blog construction has changed to make customisation easier to a certain extent. For an updated explanation of how to create a similar blogNovel to "The Castle of Otranto" but using the new style templates Vin has posted an excellent, detailed explanation on, with an updated example template.
So ... How about a specific base example of what I'm trying to do then? To start off with, we'll create a generic book using the instructions from Blogger Help.
1.Create a new Blog
ReplyDeleteThis is pretty standard and if you haven't made a Blog before you might as well stop now because this isn't something for a newcomer. As long as you know your way around the Blogger "Dashboard" you should be able to follow most of the instructions here, if not just post a query and I'll see if I can help. If you are new to Blogger, you need to open an account - a Google account that brings a number of free publishing tools that I'll be using later. Checkout step 4a on Mahalo.com. If you already have an account, all you need to do to create a new Blog from your Dashboard is hit "Create a Blog" at the top of your list of Blogs. Blogger allows you to have an unlimited number of Blogs on your account, so if you are a prolific writer, you need not worry about running out of space.
This takes you to screen 2: Name your Blog. As regards the name, you can snap off something short and memorable - MyLifeAsATeenagedTrekkie - but in my case I like to think of the books that I publish on the 'net as coming from my own publishing house, The L'Stok Press, so I always start them as
Hitting the 'Continue' arrow at the bottom of this screen takes you to a third screen labeled, confusingly, "2 Choose a template". Click the radar button on the top left hand template, "Minima", then the continue button and Blogger will congratulate you on creating your new Blog and invite you to make your first post! There are only a half-dozen options so I I pick a generic template to start off with and change it afterwards.