Publishing a hit book using Linux

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 Writer component of LibreOffice. 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 LibreOffice. 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.