Why notion is now the perfect tool to make your first book

An illustration showing how Notion can help create a full book from recording an interview to creating the PDF for print

Notion can now help you not only write your book but also create the layout and PDF files to send it to a print on demand service like Lulu and even create the marketing material so that people can discover it.

Notion for writing a book

Notion has always been a nice tool for writing. It's one of the best interfaces to write and think while you write. You don't have to think about formatting, it's a joy to write in it, and the system of moving blocks makes it very easy to adapt your book on the fly.

Notion to turn an interview into a book

Not everyone likes to write. Therefore many people who have ideas and experiences that would make a great book don't do it, because writing isn't easy. With the Notion Meeting notes, you can have Notion help you turn an interview of you chatting with a friend about all what you learned into a transcript. This transcript can then be used with Notion AI to write a first draft of your book.

Editing is much easier. You adapt things, remove things, add things. Yes it's a long process, but in terms of mental energy and stress level, editing a first draft is way more easy that the stress of writing your first draft.

A screenshot of the Notion document with the different interviews for the book concept, tone of voice and content with on the side a prompt for Notion AI to turn the interview in a first draft

Notion to create your book layout

Until a few days ago, you then had to to bring the text of your book into a design tool to transform it into a PDF that you could share or send to a printer.

Now you can do that directly within Notion with just a prompt:

Notion to create the marketing material for your book

Now that Notion can create PDFs and other design files, it's also very easy to create a landing page for a book, or social media post images and other marketing material around your book.

Notion is now a great book creation tool

I've been helping out a friend create the first shitty draft of her book, using only Notion. From interview, to design to even prototyping marketing material for it. And that workflow is really nice!

What makes this a great workflow for me:

  • It's all in one tool, there is no copy and paste from one tool to the other and no switching tools or having different subscriptions.
  • Notion UI is one I really like and it feels like a joy to work on it, therefore it makes the whole process also nicer.

This allows me to continue to help other friends create the first draft of their first book much more easily. I can just show them my process while we are doing it, and copy and paste the prompts I use so that they can redo it all by themselves.

written and sketched by hand

This article was written on a refurbished Remarkable II tablet with a type folio cover. The illustration was made drawn by hand on the same tablet.

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