Anthologize plugin for WordPress lets writers prep and publish their books

Pub­lish Your Own Book With Word­Press and the Anthol­o­gize Plugin

Years ago, liv­ing with the bril­liant @curtsiffert in Cal­i­for­nia, I got to play with his lit­tle pet pub­lish­ing project Sto­rysprawl. It was a ter­rific web app for writ­ers to col­lab­o­ra­tively build choose your own adven­ture sto­ries. Some of my most fun writ­ing was on Sto­rysprawl. At one point, I think I even made up some ban­ner ads for it when we were talk­ing about releas­ing it as a tool for schools and pub­lish­ers to use it white-labeled for build­ing their own books online and prep­ping them for pub­li­ca­tion. No, Sto­rysprawl isn’t live right now. But I hear rum­blings that it might be on the way back. Rum­ble… rum­ble… rumble…

While the Anthol­o­gize plu­gin for Word­Press 3.0 doesn’t appear to do the choose your own adven­ture thing, it sure does nail the prep-for-publication angle. I haven’t tested it yet, but I think I’ll test it to release my lat­est novel on my own site. Def­i­nitely worth check­ing out for all you would-be self pub­lish­ers out there.

Anthol­o­gize is a free, open-source, plu­gin that trans­forms Word­Press 3.0 into a plat­form for pub­lish­ing elec­tronic texts. Grab posts from your Word­Press blog, import feeds from exter­nal sites, or cre­ate new con­tent directly within Anthol­o­gize. Then out­line, order, and edit your work, craft­ing it into a sin­gle vol­ume for export in sev­eral for­mats, including—in this release—PDF, ePUB, TEI.

As an aside, this project comes out of the One Week | One Tool project, which is one of the coolest ini­tia­tives going to sup­port smart, open source devel­op­ment for the human­i­ties, crit­i­cal angle, that.

Gen­er­ously funded by the National Endow­ment for the Human­i­ties, One Week | One Tool is a unique sum­mer insti­tute, one that aims to teach par­tic­i­pants how to build an open source dig­i­tal tool for human­i­ties schol­ar­ship by actu­ally build­ing a tool, from incep­tion to launch, in a week.