Publish Your Own Book With WordPress and the Anthologize Plugin
Years ago, living with the brilliant @curtsiffert in California, I got to play with his little pet publishing project Storysprawl. It was a terrific web app for writers to collaboratively build choose your own adventure stories. Some of my most fun writing was on Storysprawl. At one point, I think I even made up some banner ads for it when we were talking about releasing it as a tool for schools and publishers to use it white-labeled for building their own books online and prepping them for publication. No, Storysprawl isn’t live right now. But I hear rumblings that it might be on the way back. Rumble… rumble… rumble…
While the Anthologize plugin for WordPress 3.0 doesn’t appear to do the choose your own adventure thing, it sure does nail the prep-for-publication angle. I haven’t tested it yet, but I think I’ll test it to release my latest novel on my own site. Definitely worth checking out for all you would-be self publishers out there.
Anthologize is a free, open-source, plugin that transforms WordPress 3.0 into a platform for publishing electronic texts. Grab posts from your WordPress blog, import feeds from external sites, or create new content directly within Anthologize. Then outline, order, and edit your work, crafting it into a single volume for export in several formats, including—in this release—PDF, ePUB, TEI.
As an aside, this project comes out of the One Week | One Tool project, which is one of the coolest initiatives going to support smart, open source development for the humanities, critical angle, that.
Generously funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, One Week | One Tool is a unique summer institute, one that aims to teach participants how to build an open source digital tool for humanities scholarship by actually building a tool, from inception to launch, in a week.