Poetica.com
Whether you’re a self-publisher, small press or major publisher, one thing you’re going to have to do is collaborate. Email has become the default tool for communication and, more by accident rather than design, for collaboration as well. But sadly, email often makes working together harder rather than easier. Sending versions of books back and forth amongst editors and beta readers for comments just ends up with lots of documents that have to be merged together by hand, a tedious process that's prone to error.
Although tools specifically for book creation are still scarce, there are some useful ones around, and, of course, we can always repurpose general collaborative tools for our own uses.
I’m currently working on an anthology of essays about women in science, technology and maths, which will be released as part of this year’s annual Ada Lovelace Day celebration on October 15. Some of the pieces have multiple authors and, to make the feedback and editing process easier, the content was copied into Google Docs. This allows simultaneous editing and discussions about specific points via either comments or realtime chat.
Google Docs isn’t very good for long documents or the collation of individual chapters, however, and there’s no quick and easy way to generate an ebook from your content. For that, I’m lucky to have been given access to a specialised platform called Atlas from tech publisher O’Reilly Media. Chapters are copied into the platform, my editorial volunteers are given access and can edit the text directly, and the authors can leave comments on a proof view of their chapter which show up directly in the editorial interface.
A similar tool is SourceFabric’s Booktype, a free and open source book production platform that anyone can download and run if they have access to a webserver and a bit of programming knowledge. If you don’t have those, then there’s a hosted option, Booktype Pro, which starts at just under $16 pcm. That price point might be a bit steep for an author producing one book a year, but isn’t too bad for small publishers producing multiple books simultaneously or communities who need to collaborate.
Booktype features “collaborative editing, live chat and messaging tools to engage proofreaders, editors and contributors” and you can keep track of your book’s progress via “individual book histories, versions [and] clones” as well as manage permissions and content licences. It also automatically builds key file formats such as pdf, epub, mobi and HTML.
If your collaboration is not in the writing but in the editing, then you may want to keep an eye on new start-up Poetica. With its highly skeuomorphic interface, Poetica allows you to upload your work and invite editors to mark it up as if it was a printed manuscript, using old-fashioned editorial marks.
As someone who spent two years translating the marks on manuscripts into electronic edits, I’m quite at home with this idea, but Poetica’s skeuomorphism does more than just look pretty: Whilst editors can simply change the text where they see an error, they can also make suggestions, which stand out clearly and don’t alter the text underneath. That makes it much easier to spot changes which can then be evaluated, and accepted or rejected. Poetica is still in beta, but it is a very promising platform and well worth signing up to their waiting list.
Another one to watch is Penflip (sign-up for info page only), which is still under development so impossible to evaluate. Penflip will be based on the code repository GitHub, as O’Reilly’s Atlas is, so that it can take advantage of GitHub’s version control. The devil is in the details of course, and it will be interesting to see how well Penflip serves the needs of writers as opposed to the coders GitHub normally serves.
Overall, the book production platform market is still in its infancy. I want to see much more robust and usable version control, and particularly character-by-character differences. Clear and customisable workflow management and simple collaborator settings are essential, as is word- or even character-level commenting. I also want to see much more sophisticated social functionality which helps project owners to develop their relationships with collaborators, especially volunteers where you are often really working on blind trust.
As the self-publishing and small press world develops, however, so will demand for such collaborative platforms, and early entrants in to the market will have a big advantage. I am very much looking forward to seeing what new tools are developed over the next few years and how the existing crop develop.
