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Show HN: SelfPubKit – write, publish, monetize books on your own

13 points by kukabynd ↗ HN
Hi HN, I made a tool for self-publishing authors called SelfPubKit.com. The all-in-one editor allows you to write chapters, export them to epub, pdf. You can also publish product as a standalone website with direct payments set up with your Stripe account which means you get 100% of payments minus Stripe’s fee.

The idea came about when I wanted to write a short guide myself.

Anyhow, let me know what you think. I’ll share tech details in the comment below.

9 comments

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kukabynd
https://selfpubkit.com is where it’s hosted

Stack consists of: BE: Node.js, Postgres, Redis (queues and keyval), uWebSockets.js Infra: S3, Cloudflare R2, Ubuntu box VPS FE: React, Dexie.js as a database on the front end, immer for state management. Auth: basic redis+bcrypt. Editor is based on tiptap plus hocuspocus. I stream tokens from OAI using node streams. Let me know if you have any questions.

asicsp
May be add a link to your site/tool ;)

This sounds like self-hosted version of Leanpub (but they handle fees like VAT and act as merchant-of-record among other features).

kukabynd
Haha, yea. Added a link a moment ago. Kind of like Leanpub but more minimalistic and straightforward I think.
edent
Looks nice. A few pieces of feedback.

The AI voiceover is creepy and a bit naff. Either record yourself or pay someone to be enthusiastic. There's also no subtitles, which isn't very accessible.

On your self-published page, lots of the text appears scrambled? "Owh aynm tuefrsno erew adem?"

But, overall, looks like a very good GUI for people who aren't comfortable with things like PanDoc.

kukabynd
Thank you, yea I was hesitant about the voiceover too but figured it’s good enough to launch.

As for the scrambled text, that’s the contents that will be unscrambled the moment one purchases the product. I should make it clearer for sure.

Yeah, Pandoc is great and there’s lots of lower level tools but I figure simplicity has its own value, especially if it’s in the browser.

Thanks for the feedback!

KomoD
> As for the scrambled text, that’s the contents that will be unscrambled the moment one purchases the product. I should make it clearer for sure.

Can't someone unscramble it and get all the contents for free...? Since it very much seems like the real contents and not placeholders

edit: yeah someone totally can...

"Est up ilam afirowdngr" - Set up mail forwarding

"otscs $-1020 epr nhmto" - costs $10-20 per month

"Epno a S..U Bkan Uactocn" - Open a U.S. Bank Account

"Lpapy fro a Esecudr Dteicr Card" - Apply for a Secured Credit Card

"0$30 is ngheuo" - $300 is enough

kukabynd
Yeah short sentences can be but I mean, who wants to? GPT cannot do it from what I’ve tried.
valrix
Probably anyone willing to spend some time to save some money. They could also sell the tool for less than any of the books and make money while saving their customers the full price of the book. https://octagon-simon.github.io/projects/unscrambler/ Here's a word unscrambler that was made with a tutorial on what they did, so from there someone else only needs to consume the jumbled words, unscramble each one, and if there are multiple options for a word it can be in a select list or something so the user can choose the correct word. It's a novel trick, but isn't going to help for long.
kukabynd
Nice. Well, I hope it becomes a problem as that would mean I have that kind of demand.