| title | date |
|---|---|
How I wrote and self-published my ebook! |
2020-10-04 |
I recently wrote my first e-book Building JavaScript A+ Promises in 10 steps and self-published it on both Gumroad and Amazon.
If you asked me a month back that would I ever write a book?, I would have answered with a resounding NO. As I thought writing and publishing a book would be so much work and you'd need editors/reviewers and publishing houses to back it!
JavaScript Promises have always been a fun topic for me and I'd always try and experiment with its gotchas and different ways you can use it to accomplish my use-cases. I also found out that though most people are comfortable in using it well but when it comes to understanding how it's working underneath it wasn't always clear.
I initially planned on writing a blog on how to create Promises from scratch and what's A+ spec about. I had a fair bit of understanding; how they work internally but when I actually started implementing it, it was truly a humbling process :)
I was unaware of so many edge-cases and then I started documenting the entire journey of fixing and building and repeat.
I also did a tiny bit of market research where I wanted to see if building these Promises from scratch was covered but I only found books talking about the usage/patterns and a handful of blogs which taught to create Promises but not from the point of view of A+ spec. I wanted to write an in-depth guide on how they are done with a clean and simplistic implementation that'll stick in the reader's mind for days to come.
This is how the book came to be!
I wrote the book using plain markdown in a single file. I used top-level headings to demarcate chapters as it made sense to me at the time.
It was super easy to use mark-down as I was used to writing a lot of it and there's very less syntax to know. Backticks for code snippets, # for headings and - for lists. That's all there's to it.
I initially concentrated on finishing the manuscript and proof-reading it for flows and making sure I was covering all concepts in a clear and chronological way.
Once I was satisfied with the content I turned to my google-fu skills to see what all formats do I need to support. So there're three primary formats that you should take care of:
- epub
- mobi (for Kindles)
I used pandoc to create the books from markdown with a little bit of customization.
Using plain pandoc wasn't giving me what I wanted. So I used the amazing Eisvogel template to get a nice looking pdf book.
Please read the setup instructions which are written in detail in the above Github link.
To make it work, I needed to add a bit of metadata at the top of my source manuscript markdown file. Note the triple dots at the end, they are intended.
https://gist.github.com/09db7d6ef481c639877387726554f35a
This created table-of-contents into a separate page and added a cover pic which I self-designed on Canva
There was one more issue; since my entire manuscript was just in one big markdown file and the individual chapters were demarcated by a top-level heading. Pandoc was generating the pdf file where the chapters didn't start from a new page, they seemed to be rendered in continuous with the previous content.
To fix this I had to add this line before each top level heading \newpage
Top-level heading means the following
https://gist.github.com/1e502af83c3dff3d177928313b31948b
The command to generate the final pdf
https://gist.github.com/4089ed858535f0a2cd169e686f014043
This is needed for ebook readers, I used my Mac's Books.app to test.
The procedure is almost same but a different way of configuration. The metadata is removed from the top of the file and added separately in a yaml file. I also removed the \newpage tags as it was only for the pdf template.
The command to build epub file that I used
https://gist.github.com/79e5c8a3a862ca0c2dc5deb6bb11e7b8
You can pass a stylesheet to this to style some components. I used the following css file
https://gist.github.com/9216b0f2f7fc3940412a5c2885d71011
I only wanted to add a slight highlight to the code snippets which the plain pandoc was not adding.
The metadata.txt looked like this
https://gist.github.com/8650f38cbcb67b5e7f3a505dd7d97b69
This was the easiest to do. I logged into Amazon's Kindle Self Publishing portal. I uploaded the above generated epub and it converted it to a compatible mobi file.
That's all for this one, if you've read my book reviews would be amazing :)
Please post it on Amazon listing or send me direct feedback and I'll be happy to hear.
Thanks!