Publish a book as your own website

Turn a book into a small website of your own: a zip of plain web pages that you put on GitHub Pages, Netlify or any web host. Rescriptus makes the files in your browser and hosts nothing, so your book is never sent to us. It suits a web serial, or a finished book you want to give away.

Make the website

Open Export on a book, choose Website (zip) and press Download. You get a zip named for the book and ending in -website.zip. Unzip it, open index.html in your browser to look it over, then put every file on your web host (see below).

The zip holds:

• index.html, the front page: the cover picture, the title, the subtitle and author, the description, a Start reading button and the contents, with the book's parts as headings and its front and back matter pages;
• a page for each chapter, and for each front or back matter page, each with Previous, Contents and Next links that follow the reading order;
• style.css, the look of the site;
• the cover picture, if the book has one (see Publishing);
• README.txt, with these steps in short;
• feed.xml, if you gave the website's address (see below).

The pages have no scripts, no cookies and no tracking, and ask for nothing from anywhere but their own folder. Every link between them is relative, so the site works at any address, and from a file on your own computer. They are light or dark to match the reader's device, they read well on a phone, and they work with a keyboard and a screen reader.

The text is what the other exports hold: the live version of each passage, with your notes, status marks, other versions of a passage, scene plans and comments left out, a [[wiki link]] shown as the words it shows, and footnotes kept as notes at the end of the page. Straight quotes become curly quotes on the pages; your chapters are not changed. The details you gave for a manuscript (legal name, address, phone, email) are never used. The book's language (Edit details) is put on every page, and a book in a language written from right to left is laid out from the right. The pages use the fonts already on the reader's device, so nothing is downloaded.

Which chapters

Choose All chapters or Only released chapters; the dialog says how many each means. The second is for a serial: the website holds only the chapters that are released, numbered from 1, with Previous and Next links that skip the others. Front and back matter pages are always included.

A chapter is released once it has a Released on day (in its Details tab, or with Mark released on the plan's Schedule), or when all of its text is marked Published (see Statuses explained). A chapter with only some of its text marked Published is not released until it has a day. This is the rule the schedule uses, so the website and the schedule always agree on what is out: see A release schedule for a web serial. If your book has its own name for the last status, the dialog uses it.

The feed

A feed lets readers hear about a new chapter in a feed reader. A feed needs full web addresses, so type the Website address, for example https://yourname.github.io/my-book/, and the site includes feed.xml, listing the newest 20 chapters with the newest first. Without an address there is no feed, and the dialog says so. A chapter with a Released on day is dated that day, so the feed shows when you put the chapter out and not when you last mended a typo in it. Any other chapter is dated by when your storage last saw its file change, where storage says (a folder, Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive and this browser do; GitHub does not, so those chapters are dated the day you made the site). Put the site at the address you typed, because the feed points there.

Put it online

• GitHub Pages: make a repository, add the files and turn on Pages in its settings.
• Netlify: drag the unzipped folder onto Netlify Drop.
• Any web host: upload the files with its file manager or FTP into the folder it serves.

Keep the files together in one folder. To update the site after you change the book, export it again and upload the new files over the old ones. The pages are named after your chapters' files, not their numbers, so adding a chapter does not change another's address.

To change how it looks, edit style.css. Each page carries a short Content-Security-Policy that stops it loading anything but its own folder; if you add something of your own, such as a visitor counter, change that line in each page too.

Anyone with the address can read what you put online, so read the website's pages before you share the address.