I am writing two books, and I intend to publish them in .pdf.
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Compilation of my ideas expressed on Russian Language forums.
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Compilation of my ideas expressed on English Language forums.
Why not publish them through Amazon? You would have a chance of greater exposure and they handle all the hosting and distribution. Furthermore, if you plan to sell them, Amazon has a store and system already set up. There are a few people here in the dope that have published ebooks on Amazon and might give you advice if you asked them.
Anyway, if you refuse to go the ebook on Amazon route, then what website service I would recommend depends on whether you plan to sell or give away the PDF.
After your other threads, it sounds good that you have been doing something so productive.
I have been writing for years – so I would like to organize my writing as two books. I just want first editions to be free .pdf files.
Do you need an actual website, or just links to the PDF’s that are accessible on the internet?
If the latter, you can get a free Dropbox account, upload the two PDF’s, and make them shareable. Then, in an email or newsletter, (or whatever) you can send people links to the PDF’s.
If you wanted an actual web site, you could sign up with a company like BlueHost or GoDaddy, install a package called WordPress, and host your files there or use the BlueHost or GoDaddy’s simple site creation tools. This second option is obviously more involved than the first as you would also want to get a domain name.
Thanks for references – not a real website, just a list of a few books.
I agree with the DropBox suggestion, very simple. The only problem is that I think DropBox is not searchable, so if you want something where people searching for the concepts you discuss, you might want to go the website direction. Getting a domain name is pretty easy also.
Or, you might want to start a blog at one of the blogging sites, and link from that to DropBox. So there are plenty of cheap and simple ways to do this.
Thank you. Could I refer to a DropBox file via a forum link?
Yeah. Just put it in the “Public” folder and then when you right-click it (if you’ve installed the Dropbox client - or if via the web interface find the button for it) you get a shareable link.
You can either specifically share with a person, and send a link, or share the link with everyone. You can also set permissions on the files - it seems to default to letting others modify directories (I share links to directories mostly) so the OP might want to check on that.
Thanks – DropBox is mine.
What’s your budget like?
A fairly comprehensive hosting package with GoDaddy can be had for around $100 USD per year (actually less than that, but given the incremental cost is so low, I normally go for more than less)
Do you want anymore out of this than just sharing the files?
I’d actually go for a fairly simple blog / website pairing - inclusive of purchasing a suitable domain and hosting - the cost is minimal.
There’s plenty of free ways to set up a suitable site - or get someone to do it for you for $200-$300 that can include some discussion - as well as your own biography / background / bonafides.
This could also make the website searchable, allow it to collect donations, and get you personally some small amount of publicity.
My parents give me an allowance of $240/month.
Great! And it’s free, free, free!
I second (third? Fourth?) the Dropbox suggestion. Near zero setup and zero cost. I did exactly this when I wanted to make a digital file available to members of a forum.
One tip is that - for minimal extra effort, you can use a link shortening service like bit.ly - these give you a short link, which they “convert” to the real dropbox URL for your file. This has the useful side effect that you can track how often you documents are being viewed - something that’s not possible with Dropbox itself. You can shorten links for free, but I’m not sure if there’s a charge for the stats.
Thanks – bookmarked Bitly.