Angelo Basile has a nice post on publishing a book with Leanpub and Org Mode. I’ve written about this before when I discussed Lakshmi Narasimhan’s workflow with Leanpub. Narasimhan used Dropbox, which some may find inconvenient so Basile employs an alternative method that uses BitBucket (or GitHub if you prefer).
I’ve never published with Leanpub so I don’t know how they are to work with but you certainly couldn’t ask for an easier publishing pipeline. If you use Basile’s method, you simply
- Set up a new book with Leanpub (they say it takes 30 seconds)
- Set up a repository for the book on BitBucket or GitHub
- Add a file,
Book.txt, that tells Leanpub the names (and order) of your chapters - Write your book adding the file or files to
Book.txt - Use Leanpub’s publishing mechanism to preview or publish your book with a single click
Leanpub wants their input in Markdown but Juan Reyero has an Org mode to Leanpub Markdown exporter that will take your Org files and output them in Leanpub compatible Markdown (Markua). You can keep both sets of files in your repository as long as Book.txt has only the names of the Markdown files in them.
Be sure to take a look at Narasimhan’s post too because he has some Elisp to automate almost everything but the writing. If you want to self publish, it’s hard to imagine an easier way of doing so.