How and why I'm building a tool to turn notion docs into books I can print
In short: With a tiny tool built with Replit I can turn in a few clicks a full biography written in Notion in a PDF formatted for printing. Without having to do manual copy and paste with another design tool.
The problem
In the last few months I have turned interviews and notes I took for years into books with the help of Notion, Reedsy, and Lulu.
This is a great setup but it has one problem I'm playing around. Notion is great to create the book content. Reedsy is great to format a book quickly. But these two don't speak together. So once you have your book in Reedsy you can't use anymore all the power of Notion to mass edit texts.
The prototype
To fix this I'm creating a tiny tool that turns automatically a Notion page that contains a book into a fully formatted PDF I can import directly in Lulu to then have it there as a pocket book. A pocket book with a hardcover and that others can buy.
Screenshots of the Notion to Book tool I've created with Replit
To create this tool I've used Replit For now with it I can :
- import /sync a book from notion to PDF
- preview the book
- make quick layout changes with a few buttons
What next
Now I'm in the full prototype phase. The goal is to have this tool ready for the next book I'll create with an interview setup.
Let's see how that goes.
This article was written and illustrated by hand on a refurbished Remarkable II tablet. The handwritten text was converted to typed text with the Connect Service by Remarkable. If you are curious you can download the original note below.
