Publishing a hit book using Linux

Credit: www.libreoffice.org

Part One

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So, you want to write and then self-publish a book? Then Linux has all of the tools that you need. In this case, we’re going to cover a workflow using the LibreOffice office suite (www.libreoffice.org) for the writing and the book’s layout.

There are two main types of book publishing: print and electronic (ebook), and we’re going to look at an approach that works equally well for both. Fortunately, as long as you produce standards-compliant files, the publisher won’t care if you used open source software on Linux rather than ‘industry-standard’ proprietary software on Windows or a Mac.

Rather than write a book from scratch, for this tutorial we’ve grabbed the text from a book that’s now in the public domain, and we’re going to run through everything it took to turn the plain text of that into a properly formatted book using the component of . by author Edward Everett Halet was first serialised in 1869, and at around 25,000 words and divided into four chapters, it’s classed as a novella rather than a full-length novel. That makes it a good length for learning the ropes of creating a book in . At the same time, this project also has a lot in common with other book types such as full-length novels, collections of short stories, autobiographies or various types of non-fiction books.