[AccessD] Book or writing template

[Arthur Fuller]

Rocky et. al. ...
I agree with you 100%. There are two tasks: one is writing and the other is
formatting. Use LibreOffice if you wish (I prefere MS-Word but that's just
me). I have a template created years back, when writing my second book.
First thing I did was open the Normal template (not Create a file from the
template, but open the template itself). Then I created a few new styles,
the most important in my case being a style called Code. It was in Courier,
with a given font size and indents on both sides. I assigned a shortcut
(Alt+Shift+C). I created other styles for notes and footnotes and quotes
(Jesus, I'm sounding like a rapper 😀.) Anyway, once that was done, it was
pretty easy to go through the plaintext copy and format it to suit
publication.

On Mon, Oct 3, 2022 at 2:51 AM Rocky Smolin <rockysmolin2 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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> > AccessD at databaseadvisors.com
> > https://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd
> > Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com
> >
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-- 
Arthur