Books

Publish a book at its own address, with a public page and a reader for the whole text.

A book is a private draft until you publish it. Publishing turns on its public page under magpie.diy/books/, where anyone with the link can read the book online or download it as EPUB or PDF, without a Magpie account. Unpublish turns the page off and keeps the book.

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Publish, change and unpublish

  1. Publish

    Choose Publish on the Contents page or in Book Settings, and confirm. The book needs at least one section.

  2. Keep writing

    The public page and the reader show the book's sections as they are saved now, so a change you save to a published book will reach readers at once.

  3. Change the address

    A book's address is made from its title, and Web address in Book Settings changes it. The address it had before the change will still lead to the book.

  4. Unpublish

    Turns the public page and the reader off until you publish again. The book and its sections are kept, and its address is not given to another book.

The public book page

The public page is the address to give out. The web reader links back to it from About this book, at the foot of the text.

Cover and description
The cover, title, subtitle and author, the About this book text, Read online, and downloads of the EPUB and PDF.
Contents
The titles of the parts and sections in order, with chapter numbers.
About the author
Your bio from Book Settings. It belongs to your account, so every book you publish shows the same one.
More by the author
Your other published books, with their covers, each linking to its own page.
The edition
About how many pages, the word count and the number of chapters, the year it was first published, and the publisher, edition and ISBN when they are filled in.
Shared links
A link to the page shared in a message or on social media shows the book's title and author, and its cover when the cover is an image.

Cover and page background

Cover
The assigned design, One color with the title set on it, or An image from Your images, shown in a book's 2:3 shape. The same cover opens the reader, the PDF and the EPUB.
Page background
Paper, Cream, Sage, Mist, Blush or Ink, behind the public page.
Pictures
Pictures from Your images, on the cover and in sections, show on the published book for readers who are not signed in.

The web reader

Read online opens the whole book on one page: the cover, the title page, the dedication and epigraph, a contents list that links to each section, then the sections in order. The font, text size, line spacing and column width come from Book Settings.

Pages
The text laid out on sheets the shape of a letter-size page, each section starting on a new sheet, with page numbers where Book Settings puts them.
Flow
One continuous column. The reader's choice of Flow or Pages is remembered in their browser for every book.
Where they stopped
A reader who comes back is offered a link to the page or place they reached, saved in their own browser.

What is published

Only the front matter, chapters and back matter are published. Sections set aside, statuses and synopses are not shown to readers, and a draft book has no public page.

Delete book, at the foot of Book Settings, removes the book and its sections after you confirm, and its public page stops working. A deleted book does not go to Trash, so it cannot be restored from Trash. Notes imported into the book are not affected.

Publish your first book.

Create a Magpie account, write a book in Books, then choose Publish on its Contents page.

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