← Menu

Setting up a new book

The process of setting up a new book is covered very briefly in our quick-start section. This is a slightly longer explanation. For much more detail, read the various sections listed on the docs starting page.

Once you’ve followed the instructions below to set up your book (or at any point if you’re curious), and you want to actually output a book, run the run- script for your operating system, which you’ll find in the main project folder. In Windows and Mac, you can just double-click it. (On Mac and Linux, you do need to give it permission first.) The first time you run it, start with the ‘Install or update dependencies’ option.

Creating a new book

To create a new book in a new project:

  1. Download electric-book.zip from the latest release and extract it. This is now your project folder. You can rename it for your project. (We recommend avoiding spaces in the folder name.) Let’s call our example project my-sci-fi.

    Technical note: the latest release may not contain the most recent changes to the template. If you want those, make a copy of the template repo’s master branch, and discard its Git history (i.e. delete the .git folder in your copy).

  2. An Electric Book repo, or project folder, can hold one book or many, like a series of books that share similar metadata or features (e.g. they’re all by the same author).
  3. Inside my-sci-fi, open and edit these three files:
    • _config.yml: Edit the values there for your Jekyll setup. The comments will guide you.
    • index.md: Replace our template text with your own. Usually, a link to each book is useful, e.g. [Space Potatoes](space-potatoes).
    • README.md: Replace our template text with any notes your collaborators might need to know about your project. (The README file is usually only read in the context of editing the files in your folder/repo.)
  4. Optionally, rename the book folder with a one-word, lowercase version of your book’s title (e.g. space-potatoes). Use only lowercase letters and no spaces. If you’re creating more than one book, make a folder for each book. (In one-book projects, we usually just leave it called book.)
  5. In _data, edit the meta.yml file, filling in your project info and info about at least your first book.
  6. Inside a book’s text folder, add a markdown file for each piece of your book, e.g. one file per chapter. Our template contains files we consider minimum requirements for most books: a cover, a title page, a copyright page, a contents page, and a chapter.
  7. Inside each book’s folder, store images in the images/_source folder. Add a cover.jpg image of your book’s front cover there, too.
  8. In each book’s styles folder, edit the values in print-pdf.scss, screen-pdf.scss, web.scss and epub.scss.

Creating book content

Each markdown file in space-potatoes is a part of a book, such as a table of contents or a chapter. Each file must start with:

---
---

And between those ---s, we can and should specify some information about that part. This information is called YAML frontmatter.

In each file’s YAML frontmatter (the info between ---s at the top) we specify the book-part’s title and (sometimes) the book-part’s style to use for that part. The style specifies what kind of book-part it is, such as a title-page or chapter.

Technical note: the style YAML sets the class attribute of the output HTML’s <body> element. Themes use that class to control CSS and page structure.

When you create your book, we recommend following these conventions for file naming and YAML frontmatter style settings:

Book section Sample file Style in YAML
Front cover (for the ebook) 0-0-cover.md cover
Title page 0-1-titlepage.md title-page
Copyright page 0-2-copyright.md copyright-page
Table of contents 0-3-contents.md contents-page
Acknowledgements 0-4-acknowledgements.md frontmatter
A first chapter 1.md chapter
A second chapter 2.md chapter

If you don’t set the style, the page will default to style: chapter. So you actually don’t need to ever set style: chapter in a YAML header. For most chapters in a book, then, your YAML frontmatter will simply include a chapter title:

---
title: "Chapter One: What are Space Potatoes?"
---

Page styles we’ve built into the template include:

You can also invent your own page styles, and use them in your custom CSS instead of these, though you may get unexpected results if you’ve been relying on a theme for existing styles like chapter.

Set ‘page number one’

Many books have two ‘page ones’:

  1. the half-title or title page and,
  2. if the prelims have roman-numeral page numbers, the first chapter.

You should specify those pages so that Prince knows where to start numbering when creating PDFs.

Why? Well, for example, in print output if you use frontmatter on a book-part, by default it will have roman-numeral page numbers. When the first chapter starts, it will have decimal page numbers. However, the page numbering will be consecutive from roman through decimal. That is, it will run ‘ix, x, 11, 12’. You reset the numbering to 1 at the start of the first chapter to avoid this.

You reset page numbering by adding the class page-1 to the first block-level element on the relevant page.

You can do this in two ways:

  1. If a markdown document starts at ‘page one’, add the class to the style YAML header. E.g.

    ---
title: Half-title page
style: halftitle-page page-1
---

    And at the first chapter:

    ---
title: Chapter One
style: chapter page-1
---

    Remember that chapter is the default, so you normally don’t have to specify it. But if you want to add a class in addition to chapter, you must specify both classes. This is because, if you were to use style: page-1 in a YAML header, the class page-1 would override the default style: chapter, not add to it.

  2. Alternatively, add the page-1 class to the first block-level element in the chapter by adding the tag {:.page-1} in the line immediately after it. But for this to work, the element must not have a CSS float applied to it. So often this doesn’t work as well as specifying page-1 in YAML frontmatter.

File naming

We recommend naming each book’s markdown files in alphabetical order. This is easiest using a numbering system, where prelims (frontmatter) files start with 0 or 00, e.g. 0-1-titlepage.md, 0-2-copyright.md, and chapter files are numbered for their chapter number, e.g. 01.md, 02.md, and so on. The alphabetical order makes it easy to see the documents in the right order at all times.

We recommend adding a few descriptive words to your filenames after the numbers (or other alphabetising prefix). E.g. 02-growing-potatoes-on-saturn.md. There are two reasons for this:

Note: We recommend using leading zeros in file-name numbers – that is, 02.md rather than 2.md – because that sorts correctly in most file browsers. Otherwise, some file browsers will sort 10.md before 2.md. In the rare event that you have over 99 chapters, use two leading zeros: 001.md.

The images folder

Alongside the content files in a book’s folder is an images folder, for images that belong to that book only.

A book’s folder should only ever need to contain markdown files and images. If you’re embedding other kinds of media you could add folders for that alongside images. We don’t recommend sharing images or media between books, in case you want to move a book from one project to another later. (So, for example, copy the publisher logo into each book’s images folder separately.)

If your project home page requires images, keep those in /assets/images, so that you can link to them from any page.