Happy Birthday to Me, Tech = Change, Change is Good

Of course, from down here in Oz it's a belated greeting.

I'm giving serious thought to self-publishing my next book. I hope you do. Scribus? TeX (+ friends)? or, for the true geek, groff?

Dunno yet, it depends on what I'm going to need to prep it for printing. I like LaTex, but I don't know where people get this "LaTex is easy!" idea. I don't think they ever used it. It is easy if someone else sets up the templates, but if you need to code your own that's real work. I want both downloadable and hard copy. Barbara Richard wrote and self-published a number of books (rather harrowing, don't read them if you have a weak stomach), http://www.dancingonhisgrave.com/pages/book.html She has done well and is generous with advice, so I am learning from her.

Tuxchick, is Docbook XML an option? It's quite easy to write with an editor that understands Docbook. Personally I use Vim with a couple of XML and Docbook plugins, but there are editors out there specifically for writing books in Docbook.

You can convert it to PDF, HTML, LaTeX and more, so that's a plus. The only downside is that if you want to go into extensive customisation, you need to understand XSLT.

Lyx is an option. I am writing a book currently with it and it is relatively straightforward. I am having a few issues with formatting text and figures together nicely but apart from that it is easy peasy. I like the way you can export to latex and fine tune format at the end of the writing.