The Story of Inkwell

We are a team of authors, editors, and typesetters with decades of experience in the production of books. We know the publishing business inside out. Inkwell arose out of our frustration with existing book production technologies. We built our technology to produce books easily, quickly, and with complete professionalism in the final product.

If you write a typical report or article, you control the workflow from start to finish. If you write a book, especially something more complicated than a novel, you typically find yourself at the mercy of a book production process that actively prevents you, the author, from achieving your vision for your book. This is especially true of books that demand serious typesetting firepower—such as technical books that are notation heavy.

Two on our team discovered this failure in existing publishing technologies the hard way. Working on a book at the intersection of engineering and philosophy, we had one author (the engineer) who was comfortable with handling technical notation using the industry standard, LaTeX. The other author (the philosopher), however, was uncomfortable with using LaTeX. Collaboration on the project therefore occurred in Microsoft Word, using Word’s equation editor.

We were under contract with a small publisher and thought our task would simply be to deliver a polished draft in Word. But no, at the typesetting phase, our publisher wanted to use Adobe’s InDesign, which cannot read equations and math formulae from Word (nor from LaTeX for that matter). Instead, InDesign completely garbles technical notation. It was therefore on us to present the publisher with PDF and ePub versions of the book, putting the job of typesetting on us.

Transforming the book into LaTeX was not an option, so we had to typeset it in Word. With equations throughout the book, extensive endnotes, a bibliography, and the need for a detailed index, the entire book production process, even after the book had been completely copyedited, took an extra six weeks of full-time work by one or the other of us authors.

Word is buggy, so we couldn’t get clean PDFs that would be accepted with the major book distribution companies (Amazon and Ingram). Instead, we had to go into the PDFs generated by Word and then by hand substitute images with the right resolution to satisfy these companies.

Also, we found that the ePub version we were able to generate from Word and PDF was not good at handling equations, and so looked terrible on eBook readers. We therefore had to transform equations and formulae into SVGs (scalable vector graphics) in order to make the ePub version readable.

At the end of this ordeal, we had a book that looked reasonably good but was far from achieving the highest publishing standards. Word had limited font sizes in the range that we wanted. Its options were 11, 11.5, and 12 points. We would have preferred 11.25. Also, with only minimal typesetting abilities, Word required going through the book paragraph by paragraph to ensure that text did not look too loose (spread out) or too tight (too close together). And then there was endless orphan and widow controls that had to be done by hand.

Anything becomes easy if you can create the right tool for it. We therefore decided to create a tool that would allow us in a day or two (rather than over six grueling weeks) to typeset our book, and do so with a 100-percent professional look. That tool is Inkwell. As a proof of concept, we also started our own press, Inkwell Press, consisting exclusively of books produced through our technology.

What does Inkwell mean for you, as an author? Suppose you have a book that with a bit of copyediting can readily go into production. Why, then, should it take a year before your book is actually in print? This long time lag is the norm with many publishers.

The problem is that once you deliver a manuscript to a publisher, you, the author, are no longer in the driver’s seat. True, the publisher will circle back with you about your manuscript periodically. You’ll hear back after various stages in the book production process are completed, such as copyediting, typesetting, proofing, and index creation. But typically you won’t have access to the actual software that is running the show once you deliver your manuscript.

Inkwell changes this model. It eliminates the obstacles that authors encounter in getting their books into print. Inkwell puts you, the author, in the driver’s seat. Your book is a project in your Inkwell account, and with its powerful collaboration tools, you can monitor the entire production process.

Here are some of the capabilities that Inkwell puts into your hands:

1. A powerful WYSIWYG editor that is ideal for composing your manuscript along with a PDF preview feature that let’s you see exactly what your book looks like in real time.
2. Easy uploading of your manuscript from Word or Google docs if that’s where you decide to compose it.
3. Collaboration features that allow you to bring on helpers, but also give you full veto power over any changes others want to make. You as the author own your manuscript, and you do not need to cede ownership to editors.
4. Ability to handle the full range of typesetting needs. Many of our competitors are fine for handling books that demand little from typesetting. But say you need automated citation handling, both footnotes and endnotes in the same book, easy handling of STEM notation, semantically based AI-generated indexes, and exportability across a wide range of file formats (Word, Google docs, HTML, LaTeX, PDF, and ePub). Then Inkwell is the technology for you. And of course, because Inkwell can handle the difficult typesetting jobs, the easy ones are for it a snap.
5. Translatability of STEM notation across many file formats. You can copy and paste math equations and formulas from Word, LaTeX, Wikipedia, Grok, Open AI, etc. into Inkwell, and it will preserve them.
6. Inkwell is entirely browser driven, so it allows you to move easily among your various devices to work on your book. It’s powerful collaboration features also allow others easily to work on your book.
7. The power of LaTeX without the inconvenience. LaTeX is now over 40 years old and it shows. You can’t, for instance, in real time see what your LaTeX document looks like except by recompiling it. Inkwell gives you the responsiveness you’ve come to expect from 21st century software.
8. LaTeX compatibility. If you know and are comfortable with LaTeX, it is easily used within Inkwell (hit control-$ and start typing LaTeX commands). But those less comfortable with LaTeX can instead use our powerful user-friendly visual math editor.
9. STEM notation made readable for eBooks. For eBooks, Inkwell transforms STEM notation into SVGs (scalable vector graphics). This use of SVGs allows equations and formulae to work seamlessly for easy viewing in eBooks.
10. When you’re ready to publish your book, export to PDF and ePub. Also, you can back up all your work exactly as it appears in the Inkwell editor by downloading your files using the .inkwell file extension.

We created Inkwell to make book production easy and quick, and yet without sacrificing production quality. Authors without the means to pay for a top quality production job often find themselves using tools where their finished product looks cheesy. That’s a primary reason why self-published and vanity-press books have such a low reputation. Using Inkwell, your book can look as good as any book published by a New York trade press.

If you have a copyedited book, within a day or two, you should be able to have a completely typeset book that includes includes notes, bibliography, and index, should your book require these. In fact, the only thing that would slow you down are the following loose ends:

1. creating a book cover for uploading to Amazon and Ingram;
2. procuring ISBNs, or International Standard Book Numbers (you’ll need separate ISBNs for softback, hardback, and eBook);
3. procuring LCCNs, or Library of Congress Control Numbers, so that your book is registered with the Library of Congress (these numbers usually take about three weeks to get).

Through our resource guides at Inkwell.net, we help you to wrap up these final loose ends. We also offer Inkwell Studio to handle the entire book production process for you by means of our technology apart from you needing to learn and use it. We love to help customers with tough typesetting cases, and our technology is up to the task.

Provided your manuscript is copyedited and not crazy long or complicated, our team at Inkwell Studio is able to guarantee to have your book before the public in 30 days (i.e., our 30-Day Guarantee). Likewise, if you publish your book with Inkwell Press, we’ll handle the entire production process of your book, and get it quickly past the finish line.

Once you hand your manuscript to a conventional publisher, you lose immediate control of it. Not at Inkwell. In our view, authors are the primary stakeholder of their books, and so need to see their vision for their books realized. This is not to say that books won’t need to undergo rigorous editing, which can often be painful for authors. But it does mean that authors should always be in the book production loop. Inkwell’s book production technology makes that possible.

Our vision at Inkwell is that a book that’s reasonably well polished can, with our technology, undergo a rapid book production process so that it can be professionally typeset, published, and available for purchase within a span of 30 days.