Hey hello, self-hosting noob here. I just want to know if anyone would know a good way to host my writing. Something akin to those webcomic sites, except for writing. Multiple stories with their own “sections” (?) and a chapter selection for each. Maybe a home page or profile page to just briefly detail myself or whatever, I don’t know. It doesn’t have to be fancy, and I apologize for not knowing how to describe this well. I’ve just been searching and searching and I don’t know what to look up to find what I want, it’s extremely frustrating. Any help is greatly appreciated.
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Just find a static host for free instead of dealing with it yourself. Million out there.
I don’t have a direct answer to your question. But I advise caution in putting your creative works online in the way you are planning. Between people plagiarizing it (either word for word or just the broader concepts) and AIs doing similar things, you could find that your work gets stolen.
Self-publishing might at least give you a bit of inherent copyright protection. Then at least you will have an ISBN associated to it, and you can always host your stories somewhere (WordPress, Medium, etc.).
If you want to self-publish your stories a free service like Smash Words would work.
Thank you for the advice. Honestly, I’m a young 20 something that just wants to output creative stuff for people to read and enjoy. None of this really popped in my head, so thanks.
I still want to host my own site for it though, but I will consider the self publishing angle as well. Thanks for the advice.
If you want a fancy multi-user site, the source code for archiveofourown.org is on github or gitlab (idr which). But for a small single user site I’d just go static. You could go full nerdy and write in texinfo then run an html converter. Texinfo is actually for computer manuals so it has chapters, sections, cross references, indexes, link navigation between pages, the whole bit. It is a markup language which I think is better than a wysiwyg formatter for documents that will be read in more than one way. I think there is a way to make epubs from texinfo docs.
In a sort of similar spirit there is Org mode (org-mode.org) but you have to be or become an Emacs zealot to use it.
Look also at pandoc.org which converts between lots of formats.
https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ If it’s just text, you can probably make a static HTML website and accomplish your goals. I’m not sure what format it’s in now but Markdown is what I use and then just export to HTML.
If you just want to host epub (or equivalent files), you can still make a static page and link to them with Cloudflare Pages, GitHub.io, or one of many free static page hosting sites.
If I understand correctly, you want a self hosted version of Wattpad or Inkitt for posting stories. I don’t know if there is a 1:1 software that can do exactly that.
As a starting point, you could try building a static website. They easiest ones follow a blog format and store the text on a markdown file. Many have recommended Hugo on this thread, but I’d like to recommend Zola instead. Paired with the well documented tabi theme, you could spawn a new “blog” for each story and use the archive view to have the chapter selection.
It’s not exactly the best solution, but I think it’s a good starting point to try it out.
P.S. Zola is inspired in Hugo. The creator thought Hugo was too complicated.
I haven’t used an out-of-the-box self-hosted solution for this, but I agree with others that blog or static site generator software could work. I think the main challenges you’ll find though are: 1. Formatting the content/site for long-form readability, and 2. Adding a table of contents and previous/next chapter links without a bunch of manual work.
Fortunately blog and static site software have plugins that can add missing functionality like this. Here’s one for WordPress (that I have no first-hand experience with): https://wordpress.org/plugins/book-press/
I also want to ask: What’s your plan for discovery/marketing? Because one of the benefits of the non-self-hosted web novel sites is that readers can theoretically discover your story there. But if you instead just post it on your own site, how will readers ever find it?
Obsidian is awesome, and obsidian publish costs money but it’s very easy to use.
There are obsidian plugins that export into static pages.
Also a great idea, I didn’t know that.
Others have suggested Markdown formats, if you’re willing to do that you might want to look at Silverbullet.
Grav.
I am currently using this to do exactly what you are doing. I moved from Ghost cause of many reasons. Can share links in PM if you want.
I’m sorry. I thought I had replied to this. Yes. That Grav.
https://ghost.org/ would probably work pretty well for you.
What part of that is self hosted?
The part where you self host it? I don’t understand the question.
Sorry, I didn’t find the self hosting option when I looked at the site. I see it now. Thanks!
Oh that’s what you mean, yeah they don’t make it easy to find. I only linked their site so OP could see the feature set. I run it in docker, and remove all the nonsense membership and newsletter features and buttons.
I cannot reply to everyone, but genuinely thank you all so much for the help. I’ll be going with a simplistic zola setup suggested by one of the commentors. I barely expected a handful, let alone all these comments. It really means a lot, especially to a noob who felt like this was a really dumb question.
