- Having table of contents autogenerated
- Being able to intelligently switch among all your chapters
- Being able to have multiple books going at once
- Easy numbered lists and bulleted lists
- Start a chapter is a wizardy like new page type thingy
It’s going to hook
Top level – books (you may be writing three books, one on sushi and one on poker and one on seduction tips)
Second level – chapters – let’s say you have 15 chapters that you lay out spontaneously, and then whoops you want to add a new chapter inside after chapter 8 – it ought to renumber the chapters if you insert (sort of like adding a ppt slide)
Third level – sections – you can have multiple sections that you might want to reorder inside a chapter… at the same time, you might want to just let the user worry about sections within chapters, because that’s the way word works (let them do their own copy paste surgery in editing)
There are ideas that people haven’t thought yet because they have been plugged in to the system too long. Conversations are not happening! They’re just ersatz conversations – they LOOK like conversations but they’re way more “virtual” and therefore less in control !!!
People are producing nothing of value. If you put your blogging energy in book form and sold it, you might move some units and it’s not like you’d lose the ability to blog also. Indeed, having a book to sell off your blog is a perfect way to monetize your blogging. If you have written an expert book on managing your teenage daughter, then clearly you should blog regularly about that just as you always have, but with an actual business model this time, plus people will actually stop what they are doing and actually read your ideas in splendid isolation and maybe – gasp! – learn something that you are trying to tell them, rather than just chuckling at the lolcat you put up on your blog. This will give shape and form to your blogging. You’ve always actually wanted to write a BOOK, and THEN blog about the book. That’s the way it always should have worked, but the publishing industry is a bunch of asshole Zionists who don’t want to read your fucking book, which is another big reason you never bothered to write one. Well Amazon doesn’t seem to give a rat’s ass what you write, and doesn’t even care if you sell a goddamn unit. This is rad, a way around the big Z trap of “we get to pick who gets to write a book”. Fuck you. This is a critical thing for every brain to do. If you don’t write a book, you are a fucking idiot, after we are done with this that is… because MS Word is another massive obstacle. Not a fuck you obstacle. This is more neglect than hate. They just aren’t paying as much attention to the miracle of Kindle publishing, so we’re just going to take that away from them. Snip. They didn’t need it anyway. But we will make it HUGE.
A create a chapter wizard path vs a just start typing path. Both are good. And the idea of a separate palette for free writing. And then color coding to say “I have actually edited this one once, or twice even”. Lotsa date and time stamping would be good too. Maybe a “time log” type thing to be autogenerated chronological list of your changes. We’re clearly like five steps ahead because no coders write books on kindle as obsessively, and no people who want to write books are coders – the coders are busy and aren’t writing books, but WILL do so if it can be done AMBIENTLY over time and privately and then actually make $1 after the work. So if I have some kind of crazy tutorial about some kind of stackexchange kind of thing, I can post a tip on stackexchange with a link to my e-book about that topic if you (the reader, or the future lurker-reader) want to learn ALL about that topic from me. This is a way of monetizing wisdom that will actually make the encoder of the wisdom work a touch harder to do it.
Monetizing wisdom. Not bad at all. Thanks Jeff Bezos. That’s fucking cool. I’ve always thought just the way this dude smiles is Buddha like or something and Jeff has actually built a way for words to consistently pay. Now, ETHOS is important too – who you are as a writer, because Stephen King can sell a novel tomorrow about feces and sell a million and you could write the fucking Vedas and sell nothing. So that is maybe a later thing for us to look at – how to use your writing to build your rep – but that’s what you do with your BLOG, is BE someone. Fine. The PATHOS is your ability to emotionally connect with your words. The LOGOS is your actual topic on which you’re writing. I can’t help you with any of that but hey, I can at least list it out for you.
Look at all these awesome scribbled notes all around my apartment. Also amazing books that are all marked up. I’d love to just sit around and type these up, but I’ve never bothered. Why? I mean, shit, I even invented a post it note system with John to do this ! Why did this never happen? It’s a use model thing. If such typing yielded Kindle books, maybe I would have gone ahead and done it. It bears FRUIT. You can see that occasionally I’ll take wisdom and make a poster of it using Illustrator to put it up on my wall and memorize or learn it or make it a part of my environment. A cute tactic that only Srini would ever possibly do. Nay, people should make Kindle books if they want to learn their own ideas. Give Jeff $1 and he will sell you your own book. And that is a good idea, and you should do it, because you’ll see your own book in there with all the other ones you’ve bought.
Now everybody doesn’t read Kindle books. I understand that. So, what, you want zero readers rather than the possibility for some? No, you have a chance for one reader, you fucking take it. One reader is all you need. And the best readers in the world are all fucking crazy for kindle books. They’ll even pay a lot more than $1 for one, as I have multiple times.
So the kindle process is as follows:
1) They want the whole damn thing in one big html document. So no separate chapters after all. We’d want to put let’s say a page break before chapters. So the chapter side of things is the user side, but it’ll output one big html file.
2) In Word, to export an HTML file there’s this menu item: save as web page.
3) There are some kind of image type restraints. For instance, I believe they are mostly black and white images in kindle (kindle fire may be different?) There is a file size limit on the whole shebang too.
4) Easy to link etc – it’s a word processor… you do need bold and italic. Don’t need much w/r/t fonts but have fun… whoa! Times new roman and courier are the only two fonts that the kindle has.
5) LATER BONUS POINTS for an actual kindle simulator not important right now.
6) Table of Contents builds automagically etc.