Show HN: IndiePaper – An easy way to write and sell self-published books

by aswinmohanme • 5 years ago

146 54 5 years ago

Heyy everyone, I'm Aswin Mohan from Kerala, India and I'm building IndiePaper. It's an end to end platform for making and selling beautiful self-published books.

During university, the only notes we had were shabby scans of handwritten notes. I love typefaces and beautifully typeset documents, especially the ones made with LaTeX, so I decided to create a set of beautiful notes tailored to our university syllabus. I wrote a bunch of notes as a collection of markdown files in Vim, used Git for change tracking, Pandoc for conversion and LaTeX for typesetting. I set up a GitHub repo [0] and a CI/CD pipeline which would typeset and publish the notes online for students to download [1].

Fast forward a couple of months and I wanted to write my own book, I found out how hard self-publishing was, especially for non-technical authors. They had to juggle a multitude of tools and people to make a finished book to the hands of their readers. They would write the book in an editor like Word, then either use the PDF export or hire someone to typeset it, then set up a storefront and then spent most of their time handling payments and returns and refunds. Launching a print-on-demand version of the book meant doing all this again. I wanted all the authors to have the simplicity of the workflow I had with my typeset notes. Write your draft, click a button and you would have your own beautiful finished book ready for sale. That is how I came up with the idea of IndiePaper.

I have been working on it seriously for the last four months, and it is a vanilla Elixir Phoenix monolith hosted on Fly. It uses AlpineJS for lightweight client-side interactions and TipTap for the editor. I had shipped an initial version which enabled Authors to upload their already finished books as PDFs we would make it available on print-on-demand, but modifying different PDFs to fit the printing specification was not feasible. So I rewrote it from scratch to have the editor side done, so we have the raw text to typeset to the exact specifications for printing.

Currently, authors can write in the editor, add and rename chapters and when finished with their draft, publish it. A web readable version will be generated which is can be bought by readers and the amount will be transferred to the connected Stripe account of the author. Here is the entire flow with screenshots [2], the generated store front [3] and the online reader [4].

The platform is nowhere finished yet, consider this a first MVP, next on the list is image uploads, rebuilding the editor to make it more stable, typesetting engine, print-on-demand integration and word import. It's my first time building such a platform let alone a company and I'm figuring out a lot of things along the way (it's a whole lot of fun though).

I love books and authors and believe this would make the process of making beautiful self-published books a whole lot simpler, and the process of buying and reading them a lot more fun. What do you guys think? All feedback and questions are welcome :)

[0] https://github.com/moot-books/moot-KTU

[1] https://moot-books.github.io/moot-KTU/CSE/S6/CN_CS306.pdf

[2] https://twitter.com/aswinmohanme/status/1444673276668616707

[3] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FAyA76QVkBIe8fS?format=jpg&name=...

[4] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FAyBeE3VIAQvggH?format=jpg&name=...

aswinmohanme24• 5 years ago

TLDR: Making books is hard, so I built a platform where you just have to write the text and we'll typeset, publish, make it available via print-on-demand and setup a storefront so you can sell it easily.

It's in alpha state and can make the book readable online, typesetting and print on demand coming soon, do check it out and and give your suggestions and thoughts. Cheers :D

Chris20482• 5 years ago

Serious question: If someone sends text that isn't their own, and you print it and send it back to them, who is liable for copyright violation? The printer, or the false author?

tbossanova• 5 years ago

I’m an aspiring author and wanted to put something out there, but found that every platform seemed to have a different way of getting your raw text into its particular editor… are you planning on an easy way to bring things in from more basic sources?

aswinmohanme24• 5 years ago

Currently the only supported way is copy and paste, and we'll retain the basic formatting. The editor is being rewritten and once it's finished we'll support direct import from Word documents. You'll just have to specify the chapters.

usrme• 5 years ago

Congratulations on getting something out there! I'm not an author myself, but the first thing I am curious about is concrete examples of ready-made books; especially if one of the supposed selling points is the beautiful result. Just how beautiful will it be?

I would also consider reading through the main copy and fixing any inconsistencies with spelling, capitalization, and wording ("the occasional fraud"?).

aswinmohanme24• 5 years ago

Thanks for the kind words :). Beauty can be subjective, but here is something we’re striving for https://moot-books.github.io/moot-KTU/CSE/S6/CN_CS306.pdf. Initially we would typeset the books using vanilla LaTeX which produces the standard quality books you expect from traditionally publishers. In the long run the goal is to produce books that look similar to this https://ctan.math.washington.edu/tex-archive/macros/latex/co... , but optimized for readability for different book types.

English is not my first language, but its still no excuse, I had run it through Grammarly, will check again for mistakes.

hanklazard• 5 years ago

Those look great! And thanks for introducing me to the Tufte-book style, I’ve always really appreciated The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and this style seems like a good one to shoot for.

ai_ia2• 5 years ago

Platform looks cool.

I created a course platform Primerlabs (https://primerlabs.io), where learners can generate Personalized Notebooks at the completion of the course. I used the Tufte-Latex template for that purpose. You can checkout my Personalized Python-I course book here: https://book.primerlabs.io/P2i3yuzb8

The goal is that, at the end of the course, people can actually buy their personalized at hands, with the click of a button.

I use Latex on AWS Lambda to compile LaTeX. If you need in compiling LaTeX, feel free to reach out to me. Email is in the profile.

tartakovsky• 5 years ago

I only clicked the Sign Up with Google button one time and got this:

“Request failed, you have exceeded maximum number requests. Please try again after 1 hour(s).”

aswinmohanme24• 5 years ago

It was a rate limit error, I have fixed it and it's deploying now.

hardwaresofton4• 5 years ago

We know you love it, you're readers will love it too.

This should probably be replaced with:

"We know you'll love it, and your readers will too."

Prose-minded customers might be a little turned off by slightly grammatically incorrect copy.

aswinmohanme24• 5 years ago

Thanks for the heads up, fixed it and pushed an update. Need to have someone professional check the copy out. It's bad taste to have grammatical errors on an author focused platform.

hardwaresofton4• 5 years ago

Great fast fix -- I'm not sure you need someone professional but hopefully your potential customers convert long before they get down to the bottom of the page! :)

[EDIT] - Two more things:

- "Heyy" in the page title

- "we know you'll love [IndiePaper]" might be better than "it". Getting your project's name to stick in heads is probably easier with more mentions

jawns2• 5 years ago

Need to have someone professional check the copy out.

Professional author here. It's a major, eye-rolling turn-off to see the grammar and punctuation errors, and to be honest, the breezy response is also a turn-off and screams amateurish effort.

If you are posting this on HN, accepting users, and (presumably) taking payments, then you have already publicly launched, and you should have done this already.

I understand that it's a side project, but if you want to have people take your business seriously -- and a business marketing to writers, of all people -- then you've got to make sure your homepage copy is beyond reproach.

Zanni• 5 years ago

Here are a couple more things you might want to look at: - you need a comma after Hey (Hey Authors) - audiobooks are "narrated" not "dictated" - inconsistent capitalization in headings throughout (e.g. Write your book, Publish your Book) - you need a comma before "and we'll take care of the rest" (under Publish your Book) - Painfree should be hyphenated (Pain-free)

There are a couple of stylistic choices you might want to consider as well. You've got quite a few run on sentences. And most writers use "word processors" not "text editors" (assuming you're going for the average writer, not the HN crowd).

(Just trying to be helpful, please don't take this as criticism. Congrats on your launch!)

gradschool2• 5 years ago

Regarding print-on-demand publishing, an author might very well think, "when the publisher has my book, the customers, and their money, what does it need me for?". I don't have a solution. I wonder if any blockchain geniuses could figure something out. Short of that, how about providing authors an itemized list of all purchases and a clause in the contract triggering a penalty if the author can prove someone made a purchase that wasn't listed?

aswinmohanme24• 5 years ago

Yes, that might have been an issue with traditional publishing, but here we take 9% per sale, the rest goes to the you, the author.

gradschool2• 5 years ago

More bluntly then, a publisher (traditional or otherwise) can defraud an author by selling more books than it reports to the author. In addition to your generous margin, a technical or legal means of preventing or disincentivizing you, the publisher, from defrauding an author would make authors more inclined to work with you.

bovermyer• 5 years ago

So it's like DriveThruRPG but with higher fees and automatic layout.

I like the concept. What binding options are available?

aswinmohanme24• 5 years ago

Print on demand is being worked on, but for the initial set we’re thinking mass market paperback and hardcover.

knadh• 5 years ago

The platform looks slick. Great job!

- It would be nice to have a sample book or two featured on the homepage.

- About print-on-demand, where is it printed and shipped from? Perhaps an FAQ page can answer some of these questions.

aswinmohanme24• 5 years ago

Thanks for the feedback :)

- A new design is already in the works which shows published books right on the home screen.

- We integrate with a third party print-on-demand service that has printers in almost all major countries, once the order is made the book will be printed nearest to your location and then shipped to you directly.

Also the FAQ is coming, I wanted to get an MVP out fast.

ai_ia2• 5 years ago

- We integrate with a third party print-on-demand service that has printers in almost all major countries, once the order is made the book will be printed nearest to your location and then shipped to you directly

Can you tell the name of the service? I was looking for one.

mikeiz404• 5 years ago

It would also be great to see a quick video or gif showing the editor features since it will be replacing what the customer might already be using.

sinyug• 5 years ago

When I come across a service that helps indie-anyone (authors, musicians, artists), my first question, always, is: what about taxes?

This is something even big services often punt on because of the complexity involved.[1] Not only do you have to collect taxes, but you also have to pay it to the appropriate government. You then have to file periodic returns in each jurisdiction.

The simplest solution for the user in such cases is to let the service become the seller/intermediary between them and the customer. That leave them with just one headache to deal with: whether any income tax is due in the country in which the intermediary is resident/incorporated.

[1] Even Stripe Tax doesn't seem to handle GST in India. (https://stripe.com/en-in/tax)

aswinmohanme24• 5 years ago

The plan is to act as an intermediary between you and readers and take on most of the responsibility and risk associated with moving money. I do understand taxes are a complex hairy beast, but we’ll do our best to handle most of it for you, like generating auto reports and all. Also we use Stripe under the hood so any improvements made by them will be passed along.

_tom_• 5 years ago

9% ? I'm guessing you mean 9% of net profit, as I don't believe you can print and ship for 9%. You should specify what percent of gross sales the author actually gets, as it's not 93%

Indie authors sales these days are almost all ebooks. Actual indie physical book sales are tiny. Do you plan to generate ebooks?

Authors are notorious for sticking to their favorite writing tools. You might want to call out what import options you have.

aswinmohanme24• 5 years ago

Yes, I don't have the pricing nailed down, so I thought I'd start with 9%. How it works is you set a price for your digital book, and when a printable version is ordered we add the cost of printing and shipping on top of the cost of the digital book. We take 9% of the price of the digital book, so your profit remains the same.

Generating Ebooks (PDF, EPUB, MOBI and Online Versions) is the main core of the product, we would generate beautiful typeset ebooks from your draft text.

Although now the only import option is copy and paste, we are working on rebuilding the editor and once that is finished we would have import from word document, since that is the most common formats among authors.

jamescampbell2• 5 years ago

In publishing context, typeset usually implies / means printing physical copy, I think you mean "beautifully formatted ebooks"?

alexdrue• 5 years ago

A good approach for people who wants to start their career as a writer. I definitely recommend to put FAQ section, this will definitely help people understand and learn more about the website.

aswinmohanme24• 5 years ago

Thanks :), the FAQ is on the way too.

jamescampbell2• 5 years ago

I think this a solution in search of a problem. Using some open source text editors these days you can print to ebook formats (ePub, etc.) and both Kindle Direct Publishing (doesn't require ISBN even) and Blurb are two very popular routes to self-publish your works and already come baked in with print-on-demand services at no cost to the author.

aswinmohanme24• 5 years ago

Yes, this is precisely the problem we're trying to solve.

- Text Editors - with the exception of some specialised tools, text editors are seldom made for authors, they are either too much specialised or too little. Building a custom word processor precisely for authoring means we can fine tune the writing experience.

- Exports - Almost all of the default export options suck, they create unreadable messes of typography with zero consideration for making something beautiful. There is a reader on the other end of your books, it is our duty to give them the best reading experience. With our own typesetting engine we can create beautiful looking books at the click of a button.

- Selling - This is where most of the competition lives, you can publish on KDP but need to stay in their price bracket or they take 70% of your book price. Setting up blurb is not easy. Even if all this happens, you would still need to provide support and handle returns and refunds.

I believe Authors, Readers and the entire publishing landscape would benefit from a fully integrated platform, but only time will tell.

jcmontx• 5 years ago

Looks like your server didn't survive the HN crowd lol I'll check it out later!

aswinmohanme24• 5 years ago

Yeah, the good kind of problems to have. Fixed it and it's back up. Setting up a status page for so this doesn't happen again.

Edit: It's live at https://status.indiepaper.me/

strzibny• 5 years ago

As someone that just finished an ebook[0] and went through making it a reality[1], I welcome the effort to make this step effortless. I don't think anyone really nailed this up until now. If you succeed, it could be huge!

That said, I miss any kind of examples on the site. Let me see a finished ebook, let me try the editor. And because I am a technical writer, I have to ask. Will you support technical books? How will you handle code snippets, highlighting, or line comments?

[0] https://deploymentfromscratch.com/

[1] https://nts.strzibny.name/ruby-for-ebook-publishing/

aswinmohanme24• 5 years ago

Thanks for the support :D

I really liked your detailed write up on the publishing chain you have used, code is just text in it's essence and because of that programmers have access to superior tools for it's manipulation. But that power is hidden behind a steep learning curve. IndiePaper is just the collection of tools you have specified all integrated and wrapped up as a web app.

Regarding examples, I never thought this would blow up on HN, that's why it doesn't it even have an FAQ, I'm working on a new design that would bring published books of the platform front and center.

Technical books are and will be supported, even though technical authors have the know-how to setup up a publishing toolchain, most would love to write in a completely integrated platform. Since we control the entire editor, we can and will support code snippets, highlighting and comments by adding to the text-editor raw structure and processing it during typesetting phase.

IndiePaper was actually ideated with rich technical books from the start, features like code integration with Github were all thought of from the start. So IndiePaper will have first class support for technical books.

dSebastien• 5 years ago

This is an interesting project! There's a lot of room for improvement in the self-publishing space!

I'm currently self-publishing a series of books about software development & it (https://dev-concepts.dev). As you've mentioned it is indeed quite complex to get up and running and generate beautiful output.

I've chosen to use AsciiDoc and created a template (https://github.com/dsebastien/e-book-template) based on Matt Raible's work for InfoQ books (https://github.com/mraible/infoq-mini-book). It's far from perfect, but it's a good starting point.

My first book was published by Packt, and I also used Asciidoc for the initial draft, but then had to switch to their wordpress-like platform, and it was a real nightmare to use. Being able to use Asciidoc end-to-end feels so much better.

aswinmohanme24• 5 years ago

Thanks for the support!

I still haven't decided on what input format I should be using, most authors are familiar with a WYSIWYG style editor, but technical authors are more inclined to markdown like formats.

Authors are more inclined to switch with the writing tools they already own, so I think multiple import options and a single editor representation would be better. Upload a bunch of files of asciidoc or markdown and get it published.

gwbas1c2• 5 years ago

This is a preview of what the authoring experience will look like. Even though we have autosave it is advised to write your manuscript elsewhere and edit it here once finished.

Scary!

The promise, from your home page, is that I can write my first draft on your platform, but the reality is a big "there be dragons here" disclaimer.

Some suggestions:

- Give me a way to export my book, perhaps as a zip file with each chapter as docx or odf.

- Give me a way to upload each chapter.

aswinmohanme24• 5 years ago

Hey, like I said, it's just the first preview version of the platform. Even though the editor auto saves every 200ms to the server, there is no local caching. So even if we lose data, it's going to be a couple words. But still it's unacceptable, that's why I put up the disclaimer.

- Once the typesetting engine is finished you can export the books and sell on your preferred platform.

- Uploading each chapter would be finished when I move the editor page to a SPA. That way we can get a more stable editor and a better authoring experience.

gwbas1c2• 5 years ago

Even though the editor auto saves every 200ms to the server, there is no local caching

Loosing a few seconds of work isn't that big of a deal. It certainly isn't worth a scary warning.

But, what's more important is to warn when saving isn't working.

Show HN: IndiePaper – An easy way to write and sell self-published books

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