Someone mentioned I should take all my nonsense short stories I post and make them into an Ebook.
This has always been at the back of my mind, one of those oh this might be cool to do kinds. Which is basically anything and everything for me, and inherently means I will never do it.
So I guess thanx to Someone you get this post blabbering about what possibly doing it in the most drawn-out way possible.
Firstly the simple elevator pitch.
Merge all your "fiction" or "whatever" Hive blog posts into a easy to download "Ebook".
Simple right? Now the manual and perfectly okay and rather preferred way once I give up on my way will be to use the Hive Post downloader by Blockz - https://hive-export.blokz.io/
You get a pretty Zip file filled with all your posts as Markdown text files. Take those files and pop it into a Obsidian vault and you can comfortably clean them all up and copy them one by one to Google Docs or Publish them to PDF from inside Obsidian and then merge all those using ILovePDF... as an example.
Once you have your pretty PDF then you can be done or you can go the Google Docs route and prep the file for Amazon Kindle Publishing.
Your choice.
Simple right?
Now my way, is similar except I wrote a thingy that so far, will download my posts to the browsers internal database (indexDb) then I can select the ones I want in my "book" and then...
Well I did some research today and honestly providing an interface like Google Docs to remove all peoples shitty footer content etc to clean up the posts so they continue the chapters without bullshit marketing and promotion content as you see on Hive. It is a hassle.
The fact is if you are publishing to Amazon KDP you need something like Google Docs to get precise margins, bleed etc. I don't want to deal with that.
So my MVP would likely just be to just dump all posts in order to the page and I can copy the output to a Google Doc for advanced editing and cleanup.
Even if I add editing it would also be mainly for the cleanup of filler text so the content is easily copied over and then ready for adding an index and pretty much Docs or Word or whatever would just do the precision margin, bleed and page size stuff.
Anyhow, that is just step one. The other benefit of having the posts in the browser via IndexDb is the bonus that it can be used offline, albeit more ideal would be a local app but seriously that is a later worry.
The long form of this is something I have always called Bondel. That is where this same thing is across any posts on Hive, and anyone can publish collections for normal viewing or as a E-book but the posts that the person does not own will get a majority share of the sale unless they opted out.
Since content is public the opt-out is more a sign of good faith on behalf of the service, because if people want they will sell your content if it is worth a dime.