We’re joined by Shelly Brisbin, author of the book iOS Access for All and host of The Parallel Podcast. As she’s written more than a dozen tech books, I asked her to come on the show to explain how she creates her books, what tools she uses, and how she migrated from using an agent and a big publishing house to doing self publishing. It’s a really fun episode because while you’d think creating a book is all about writing, Shelly gets into how she uses TextWrangler and writes her own Cascading Style Sheets to create her books.
You can find Shelly on Twitter @shelly and you can find her book at iosaccessbook.com/…, and The Parallels Podcast at parallelpodcast.com/….
Links to things Shelly mentioned in the show:
- Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur by Guy Kawasaki
- EPUB Straight to the Point by Elizabeth Castro
- OmniOutliner
- TextWrangler
- Marked
- Take Control Books
- Apple support page on making an ePub with Pages
- ePub Zip/UnZip AppleSripts
- ePub Converter
- ePubcheck
- TidBITS article on using iBooks to proof ePubs
- Fetchapp
It was really interesting to hear what you had to say about self publishing. Did you try using Scrivener which allows you to do your work and compile out to a number of different formats as needed . Send out as your ePub and to PDF from the same software. It takes a bit to set up how the Compile thing works but once you have it set you are golden.
Another possibility is Ulysses. It is a simpler interface and will also let you export out to ePub and PDF as well as other options. I like it because you have an extended markdown format to work in.
Hi David,
I had the “why not Scrivener?” as a point on my ridiculously long list of things to talk about, but I mercifully did not run through the entire list. Allison and I would still be on Skype, if I had.
I looked at Scrivener. I own it, in fact. The two issues I had were that I found it difficult to pull an existing project into it in an efficient way. It could have been done, but being gun shy after battling Pages, I wasn’t game to learn a new piece of software, especially since I wasn’t sure whether I could trust it output. Second, and more importantly, I wasn’t able to get Scrivener to format images the way I wanted to do it. I wanted a screenshot in a box, with an accessible caption. For some reason, making that happen was not easy, and the documentation wasn’t super helpful.
I have a dear friend who swears by Scrivener, and has promised to hold my hand through a project. By which I mean, I won’t use it for production work unless he’s willing to be on my virtual speed dial to talk me down.