In trawling around looking for somebody who has tips on WordPress workflows for writers (a much more enticing task than actually writing blog posts!) I found a couple of interesting extensions of WordPress.
The first is PressBooks, which seems to be a gussied up WordPress implementation designed to output books in any format you could want. The “about” blurb from their web site:
“Pressbooks is a simple book publishing tool that makes it easy for authors and editorial teams to generate clean, well-formatted books in multiple outputs: .epub, print-ready PDF, InDesign-ready XML, and of course HTML. We’re in public beta, meaning PressBooks is good enough for professional book production, but we’re still improving things.”
They also have a sample book, which, with almost inevitable “meta-ness,” is called Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto. Comprising a collection of readings, it has, I report more in sorrow than in anger, one chapter titled, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Metadata.” (I’m pretty into metadata, but I think it’s a no-no to rip off Raymond Carver’s great title, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” unless you are in Nathan Englander’s league as a writer. Although, as unpoetic literary pilfering goes, I suppose Paul Krugman’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Quantitative Easing” takes the cake.)
Back to the topic, PressBooks seems an interesting gizmo, although I wonder if this current advent of so many tools to get digital content into print form will be short-lived. It seems like middleware that could very well be obsolete as digital and print publishing formats settle down.
The other one I found is Anthologize, which seems to be a lo-fi version of the same idea, but is the engine behind National Novel Writing Month (how’s your training going? It’s this November), and seems oriented towards local history, family use, and a wonderfully described category of “artists, writers, and enthusiasts!”
Still didn’t find anybody who has worked out a good workflow for writing in WordPress, though, my original quest.
A Few Reasonable Words 