[DIYbio] Re: Book or Blog?

There are several web authors I've read, originally offering their fully typeset books (quite professionally self-PDF-published, too) on their own web sites.  I have noticed that those who first write blogs for their content, end up publishing blog-books which read like blogs - meaning, the content is not as good (there's a difference in writing style when you write a blog entry, or an email, that is time consuming to edit out later, compared to writing a real paper or real book chapter - I can give an example that is sitting on my bookshelf, if you want - especially the organization of material is not great).  I have also noticed that some open-book authors offer these same books on the amazon store as ebooks and have quite reasonable sales of the ebook, even though their amazon description itself offers potential readers the link to go to the author's web site to download the PDF for free.  It turns out that the majority of readers really are willing to pay $2.99, or so forth, for the convenience of wirelessly sync-downloading a book into their Kindle or ebook app.  I'm not one of those, but then again, I'm like seven sigma.  On openwetware or wikipedia I paste the text into vim to edit locally then paste it back.

So if you want to self publish, I'd say your best bet is to start with a real book template.  Publish as a book and also provide a download.  But don't "ebook publish" a blog-style work, the end result is unsatisfying.  Hm, maybe you could also do it thru BioCoder issues if you wanted to spread the publication out - assuming you already have a well organized table of contents and breakdown etc.  The couple technical book authors I've talked to recently simply said they wrote their books in Open Office (back then, at the time) then sent to O'Reilly press.  One even said he made the index by hand.  When I wrote large tomes I used more advanced options like Pagemaker (a while ago, yeah) which is a night-and-day improvement over any end-user document app, and the cost more than made up for itself through ease of use (it's supposed to be fun, not a struggle!).  There's no way I'd use an online web platform to generate content although I've given different platforms a shot multiple times, they are just so incredibly annoying with browser-based-lameness compared to a full blown local application.  I was recently sent two software dev tech books to review/collaborate on, and the author is using .docx with google drive to sync revisions - how frustrating.  There is little on the planet more unsatisfying than using microsoft software and doubly so with revision control enabled.

Maybe Simon wants to share his workflow, what do you say Simon?

Recently I ran across a self pub ebook author who is amazingly prolific and she strongly recommended using text-to-speech apps and writing while walking (not sure how well that would work for highly technical content), and then publishing through amazon (after multiple for-pay editing cycles).  She was writing historical fiction.. multiple books per year, which is phenomenal output.


## Jonathan Cline
## jcline@ieee.org
## Mobile: +1-805-617-0223
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On Saturday, November 28, 2015 at 10:21:57 AM UTC-8, Sebastian wrote:

Hi Everyone,

I've been bouncing around the idea of compiling the 7+ years of plant tissue culture experience I've mustered into articles for my blog for a long time now. I have a ton of content as drafts and galleries of original pictures and whatnot