[AccessD] Book or writing template

[Rocky Smolin]

What I did was write the book in Word and worry about the formatting
 later. That way you won’t get bogged down. The prime directive is to get
all the content out of your head and into the doc.

When it came time for publishing I used a service which was very cheap, and
they did all the  formatting for me - both print and ebook. I als0 used a
fiver service for the cover artwork.

Of course, mine was fiction so not much formatting to it.

I would also recommend a complete outline of the book (I did this for my
last tech book). That way, as I thought of things I wanted to add to the
book,I had an easy way to get a global view of the book, slide the new
topic in where it fit, and as I completed each section, put a checkmark
next to it so I could see what was done and what was undone. That way if I
had a section that I couldn’t quite figure out immediately how I wanted it
to read, I went on to another section and did that. But with the outline I
always knew what parts were done and what parts were not done.

For fonts - serif is easier to read for text and I would use sans for code.

Hth

R

On Sun, Oct 2, 2022 at 11:08 PM John Colby <jwcolby at gmail.com> wrote:

> I am trying to write an ebook for my classes and events.  I keep getting
> bogged down in formatting.  TBH I have never written a book before and it
> is a skill I have never mastered obviously.  Anyway, I am trying very hard
> to use LibreOffice Writer rather than Office Word.  I have googled and I
> just don't understand the whole template thing.  I downloaded and opened
> several and though they do in fact seem to include 'all you need' what they
> don't do is teach 'these are the tasks, and this is how you use them in
> this template'.
>
> My challenge is that I do not expect to make any money on this thing due to
> the limited audience, and so paying much if anything for a Pro to do this
> for me is a problem.  Not to mention that the worse my formatting, the more
> time such a person would have to spend.
>
> And so I am reaching out to this forum for advice.  I know that Rocky wrote
> his book.  I know that Arthur has written an ebook.  And I know that Susan
> writes for tech magazines.  So perhaps one of you or others on this list
> can recommend a good book (ebook / kindle preferably) which discusses the
> process of writing a book, focusing on using a modern editor to set up
> everything.  And then discuss which if any template you use for your
> writing.
>
> I am thinking about such things as 'use this font for the main text, use
> this for code, use this for notes'.  How to automatically format a section
> of already written text to be one of those things.  For now I care less
> about 'page and paragraph widows and orphans' and all that. Making  a TOC
> and hyperlinks to get at the correct location would be good.
>
> I just want to discover 'this is a good template for writing a technical
> book, these are the things that a template does for you, and this is how
> you get these things done using this template'.
>
> I have a ton written but I need to make the push to get it done.  It was
> written over the years, much of it came from the AccessD emails from long
> ago, I have cut and pasted various things into a single document, and
> therefore I have a mess I need to clean up.
>
> --
> John W. Colby
> Colby Consulting
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>