I’ve written about publishing with Leanpub before. They have a very nice workflow that allows an author to upload and publish a book with minimum friction. You can learn some of the details here.
Four and a half years after my post, Phil Newton has another post on using the Leanpub workflow to publish a book. He’s an Emacs and Org guy so of course he wanted to use Emacs. Leanpub has its own version of Markdown so Newton used that. There is, as you’d expect, an Org exporter to the Leanpub Markdown so he could have written in Org but this is is first book so he wanted to keep the workflow as simple as possible.
His post discusses his workflow, how he tracks progress and work in progress, and how he manages and publishes changes. The basic Leanpub workflow is to put the chapters of your book in a directory and to upload that directory to Leanpub when you’re ready to publish. You can also do that through Git so Git users will find it particularly easy to manage the source of the book.
There’s also a nice example of using directory local variables to automatically configure each file with his desired writing environment. Like many of us, Newton discovered that his writing life would be easier if he enabled visual-line-mode so he simply set a directory local variable to enable it for all the book’s source files. Take a look at his post to see some of the other directory local variables he uses; it’s informative.
If you’re working on a book or thinking of doing so and like what Leanpub offers, take a look at Newton’s post to see a good workflow for working with them.