I’ve been using the very cool, free platform PressBooks for a few months to work on several book projects in process and highly recommend it. PressBooks allows you to write a book and instantly export it into epub-compatible formats. Almost as good is the workflow, which enables you to write a book almost as though it was a blog, keeping individual “chapters” private or public as you develop them and rearranging them with ease. The end result is almost like a merger of Scrivener and WordPress, which made it the most conducive writing tool I’ve ever used in terms of concentration and motivation.

A few weeks ago, PressBooks announced it was going open source as a WordPress plug-in, which means if you have your own dot.com with WordPress installed, by end of January, you’ll be able to get it there, rather than paying PressBooks to have your own domain with them, which was previously possible but rather unattractive at the price point offered.

Rather than being the medium for distributing your books into the various online epub stores (Kindle, Nook, etc.), PressBooks has partnered with BookBaby, where you can pay for them to get the ISBN number and then distribute the ebook and send you money when anyone buys it. (They don’t take royalties either, which is extra awesome.)

So far, I’m pretty pleased with the service, which even lets you buy the book-publishing credits ahead-of-time. This came in super-handy when I was three chapters away from completion with one day left to make 2012 tax deductions. Overall, I’d recommend the two services to other authors writing books for which they want to own the publishing and marketing process.