eSpotlight – Pressbooks

Become a Published Author

New year, new you, new book? Whether you have a ready manuscript, or you want to start backwards by designing a cover and layout, Pressbooks is your ticket to self publishing.

How Pressbooks Can Help

• Design Your Book: Are you fresh off a month of writing and have a manuscript you want to make ready for publication? Pressbooks allows you to do text (and image!) layout, organize chapters, and get a preview of what the book would look like on an e-reader, or in physical form if printed.
• Start Your Novel: Pressbooks' chapter organizing can be used to establish a structure, whether just putting together ideas or plotting a definite beginning, middle and end.
• Collaborate with Others: You can assign multiple users to have access to the book. Each writer could create a chapter based on a prompt into an anthology, or your co-writer or editor can have a look at your progress.
• Create Your Next Book — a Textbook: This is where Pressbooks really shines! Many have created entire open source textbooks using the site, and they are even used at the likes of UC Berkeley and other major universities.
• Add Glossaries and More: Pressbooks has support for creating glossaries too, either for a how-to guide, or if you have a particularly rich amount of lore and backstory to your book. J. R. R. Tolkien's Return of the King had many appendices, as did George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four and Frank Herbert's Dune. There is plenty of support for footnotes as well, as in Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell ¹.
• Get Extra Help from PressBooks: PressBooks' YouTube channel has various long form video tutorials on their product, and they also have an extensive guidebook (made, of course, in Pressbooks itself!) on all the features offered.

Get Your Work Promoted

Want to get your work out there? Consider using Pressbooks to prepare your work for the Indie Author Project:

"Share your eBooks with patrons of SJPL and libraries throughout California. The best submissions are curated, featured, and promoted by Library Journal, Overdrive, and other notable organizations and businesses."

How to Get Started - From Pressbooks

"Pressbooks is a do-it-yourself book design and production platform that you can use to beautifully format your books for eBook stores and print-on-demand services, allowing you to easily get your writing into a form you can share and sell while avoiding the costs of expensive eBook developers and book designers."

What's Your Next Move?

What will you do with Pressbooks? Let us know in the comments!

¹A book known as much for its footnotes as the main story!