Better Books with LaTeX, the Agile Way: Self-Publish your book on Amazon, Google, and Leanpub
Streamline your writing process with LaTeX and connect with readers from Day One. Self-publish your book on Amazon, Google, and Leanpub. Here you can find all tools you need to publish your book professionally online or in print with LaTeX. Learn to complete your book project in small steps—the agile way. Better Books with LaTeX the Agile Way covers the entire publishing process, from your initial concept to marketing your book on Amazon, Google, or Leanpub.
Streamline your writing process with LaTeX and connect with Readers from Day One. Self-Publish your book on Amazon, Google, and Leanpub. Here you can find all tools you need to publish your book professionally online or in print with LaTeX. Learn to complete your book project in small steps—the Agile Way.
Better Books with LaTeX the Agile Way covers the entire publishing process from your initial concept to marketing your book on Amazon, Google, or Leanpub. The focus of this book is to organize your book's ideas, chapters, files, images, and formatting, as well as to guide you through the process of uploading your book to a publisher.
Getting Published
The craft of writing and marketing a book has changed significantly over the past ten years. It is no longer enough to just write a good book; you have to write for a specific audience and connect to your readers long before the book hits the shelves. Releasing part of your work early allows you to make adjustments to your book—or even discard your project entirely to invest your time into a better book idea.
Likewise, the process of "getting published" in the book world has been revolutionized. Thanks to companies like Amazon, Google, and Leanpub, you can publish your book on your own. Better Books with LaTeX the Agile Way can help you to overcome obstacles along the way, using the most powerful typesetting software available (LaTeX and Overleaf).
Using modern project management methods, you can organize your work into individual "user stories" and reuse them to market your book, for example with blog posts or newsletters. This will ensure that you make steady progress, avoid getting lost in the details, and achieve high quality consistently throughout your book.
Bundled with this book is a template that will give you a head start in your publishing process. In fact, this very book was produced with the same template. You can check out the template here.
If you are already proficient in LaTeX and project management, you can go straight ahead and use the template! Likewise, if you are looking for detailed explanations of each command, there are more comprehensive books and online resources available. This book is for beginners.
What would lead a computer scientist to write about publishing books with LaTeX? Clemens Lode has a passion for clean design and streamlined workflows in software projects. The same methods can be applied to publishing and typesetting. In this book, he explains the provided book template—file by file—so that you can adapt it to your needs and concentrate on actually writing and marketing the book.
Better Books with LaTeX the Agile Way covers the entire publishing process from your initial concept to marketing your book on Amazon, Google, or Leanpub. The focus of this book is to organize your book's ideas, chapters, files, images, and formatting, as well as to guide you through the process of uploading your book to a publisher.
Are you a first-time author with a complete manuscript that you are ready to publish? It’s not enough to just “have a friend look it over”—unless your friend has already published a book of his or her own. You need advice for final polishing, the front and back covers, and marketing. You may even want to work with an editor, but don’t know where to begin.
Or do you write novels in Word but now want to write a professional non-fiction book? Are you looking for a better way to choose the subject of your next book? Do you want to improve the way you work with your editor?
Perhaps you are a professional editor seeking to expand your services from merely editing Word files to helping to release books online. Are you also looking for better project management techniques to guide your clients along the way? Are you spending a lot of time indexing or managing bibliographical references?
You may already be a LaTeX expert who wants to publish your work as an ebook. Are you planning a series and need to reuse text blocks? Are you looking for ways to share your work and collaborate with others? Are you looking for support to help you with diagrams and graphics?
Or are you already a professional self-publisher who is looking for ideas to improve your existing documents and processes, especially by connecting to your readers before a book launch?
Do you plan to establish yourself as an expert in your profession by complementing your portfolio with a professional book?
Other contents
Besides providing you with a ready-to-use template to generate your first book, Better Books with LaTeX and Agile can teach you:
The basics of LaTeX to get you started to make small adjustments to the template.
Advantages of using LaTeX instead of Word.
How working with an editor can save you time and money.
Special requirements for final polishing (images, blank spaces, page breaks, etc.) to make a professional-looking book/ebook.
The legalities of writing a book (ISBN, publisher page, copyright, etc.) and what is required in the book.
Which images you are allowed to use in a book.
Methods to organize your ideas and not get lost in details so that you can write a comprehensive but to-the-point book.
What working with a professional editor or writing coach is like.
And how to:
Convert a LaTeX document into a Kindle ebook to sell it on Amazon.
Structure your book (foreword, preface, publisher information, TOC, glossary, …) within a LaTeX project.
Better manage bibliographical references to save time and reduce mistakes.
Better manage indexes to save time during index creation and after page changes.
Reuse glossary items and other text blocks to save time when writing a series.
Create a book cover, add LaTeX graphics, and how a designer can help you create an appealing and selling book.
Properly cite to respect the work of others.
Do market research for books and incorporate your findings into the writing process to sell more books.
Determine your book’s potential sales to better plan your expenses (and manage your own expectations).
Incorporate your book into your professional career and benefit from it beyond book sales.
Create a network of readers, stay in contact with them, and increase future sales.
Collaborate easily with other authors and get early feedback.
Get early feedback for your book from your potential readers.
Work more efficiently with your editor to speed up the writing and editing processes.
- The trial session (by default via video conference, but we also offer text chat on request) is free and non-binding. - You can ask specific questions about our coaching and how we'll work together. - During the meeting, we will discuss what steps are required to reach your goal. - If you do not have a goal yet, that is fine, too. We can discuss various topics; you select what path to pursue.
- If you are happy with the session, you can book individual coaching sessions. - If applicable, we will send you an estimate with a summary of the planned work outside the coaching sessions.
➤ About Our Coaching Sessions
Clemens Lode
Hello! My name is Clemens and I am based in Düsseldorf, Germany. I’m an author of books on philosophy, science, and project management, and coach people to publish their books and improve their approach to leadership.
I like visiting the gym, learning to sing, observing animals, and creating videos on science and philosophy. I enjoy learning from nature and love the idea of optimizing systems.
In my youth, I was an active chess player reaching the national championship in Germany, and an active pen&paper player leading groups of adventurers on mental journeys. These activities align with my calm approach to moderating meetings, leading meetups, and focusing on details. My personality type in socionics is IEE/ENFp.
Hire us to teach you to work iteratively and collaboratively
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The purpose of agile coaching is to cut wasteful loops in your processes. First, cut out the middleman, then connect people and build trust with your clients.
We can take your Word file, HTML document, LaTeX document, Google Doc, or (with some editing) even your text document and publish it as a soft- or hardcover.
Professional Proofreading to Make Your Book Flawless
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Our proofreaders will skillfully correct spelling, word choice, grammar, punctuation, and formatting issues. Don't leave your book's success to chance!
The best time to get a coach on board? At the beginning of your writing process or once you have decided on your topic and tried your hand at an outline.
Every page of your book should be totally error-free
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This facet of editing ensures that your manuscript has been "double-checked" to make sure that details are accurate and consistent throughout the book.
Kanban Remastered, Agile Lessons from Strategy Games: 8 Essays on Comparing Kanban with StarCraft
How Strategy Games can be used to Teach Agility
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8 Essays on Comparing Kanban with StarCraft. Unterstand agility from a gamer's perspective and improve your team's collaboration and effectiveness.
With Kanban Remastered, being an Agile coach, I realized that especially in industries with teams with a gaming background, coaching lessons could benefit if I could show the relationship between games and Agile methodology. Likewise, you can start explaining management methodology in a language that your tech-savvy audience understands.
Scrum Your JIRA! Your Waterfall Organization Transformed into Multidisciplinary Teams, 10 Essays on Using Online Tools to Improve an Offline Technique
Need Ideas to improve your JIRA for agility?
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Scrum Your JIRA! Your Waterfall Organization Transformed into Multidisciplinary Teams, 10 Essays on Using Online Tools to Improve an Offline Technique
This book challenges two illusions that can get in the way of your company’s road to being genuinely Agile: first, that your Scrum is “special,” and second, that you can hide behind project management software. JIRA is powerful—and this book will show you how to use it more effectively—but it makes it easy to forget that the first idea of Agile is: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
Hierarchies can help you to organize your company, but they also come with problems. Here, I explain the necessary leadership style for efficient projects.
As an exercise, try to completely eliminate your project's backlog and think about what effects this would have on your team. Could this be a way to improve?
The basics of setting up an account on Overleaf, importing the book template, and exporting your project into a HTML file that you can turn into an e-book.
Free Template to Convert Your Book into a LaTeX project
Using this template will help you to turn your manuscript into an e-book and print-ready LaTeX project within hours. This article describes its structure.
All Basic Commands to Create Your Own LaTeX-based Book
This article will cover the basics of LaTeX. Using a pre-made template, you will have all the necessary tools to create and publish your own LaTeX-based book.
A simple way of writing books in LaTeX is using Overleaf and our template. In this article, I describe each file of the template with a list of items to adapt.
