Heyy everyone, I'm Aswin Mohan from Kerala, India and I'm building IndiePaper. It's an end to end platform for making and selling beautiful self-published books.

During university, the only notes we had were shabby scans of handwritten notes. I love typefaces and beautifully typeset documents, especially the ones made with LaTeX, so I decided to create a set of beautiful notes tailored to our university syllabus. I wrote a bunch of notes as a collection of markdown files in Vim, used Git for change tracking, Pandoc for conversion and LaTeX for typesetting. I set up a GitHub repo [0] and a CI/CD pipeline which would typeset and publish the notes online for students to download [1].

Fast forward a couple of months and I wanted to write my own book, I found out how hard self-publishing was, especially for non-technical authors. They had to juggle a multitude of tools and people to make a finished book to the hands of their readers. They would write the book in an editor like Word, then either use the PDF export or hire someone to typeset it, then set up a storefront and then spent most of their time handling payments and returns and refunds. Launching a print-on-demand version of the book meant doing all this again. I wanted all the authors to have the simplicity of the workflow I had with my typeset notes. Write your draft, click a button and you would have your own beautiful finished book ready for sale. That is how I came up with the idea of IndiePaper.

I have been working on it seriously for the last four months, and it is a vanilla Elixir Phoenix monolith hosted on Fly. It uses AlpineJS for lightweight client-side interactions and TipTap for the editor. I had shipped an initial version which enabled Authors to upload their already finished books as PDFs we would make it available on print-on-demand, but modifying different PDFs to fit the printing specification was not feasible. So I rewrote it from scratch to have the editor side done, so we have the raw text to typeset to the exact specifications for printing.

Currently, authors can write in the editor, add and rename chapters and when finished with their draft, publish it. A web readable version will be generated which is can be bought by readers and the amount will be transferred to the connected Stripe account of the author. Here is the entire flow with screenshots [2], the generated store front [3] and the online reader [4].

The platform is nowhere finished yet, consider this a first MVP, next on the list is image uploads, rebuilding the editor to make it more stable, typesetting engine, print-on-demand integration and word import. It's my first time building such a platform let alone a company and I'm figuring out a lot of things along the way (it's a whole lot of fun though).

I love books and authors and believe this would make the process of making beautiful self-published books a whole lot simpler, and the process of buying and reading them a lot more fun. What do you guys think? All feedback and questions are welcome :)

[0]: https://github.com/moot-books/moot-KTU

[1]: https://moot-books.github.io/moot-KTU/CSE/S6/CN_CS306.pdf

[2]: https://twitter.com/aswinmohanme/status/1444673276668616707

[3]: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FAyA76QVkBIe8fS?format=jpg&name=...

[4]: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FAyBeE3VIAQvggH?format=jpg&name=...