Collection book maker: recipes, products or places, in one shape

What makes it a collection

A collection is read by dipping in. Someone looks up the lentil soup, or the one hotel near the station, and wants to find the same things in the same places every time. So Chapbook drafts every entry to one pattern: a heading with the entry’s name, one italic line introducing it, a list of three to six facts with their labels, then one to three short paragraphs.

Chapters only group the entries, three or four to a chapter, and the outline names which entries go where. Move an entry between chapters there, before anything is drafted.

This page starts from a brief because Chapbook has no sample collection to show yet. Open it, swap in your own entries, and the planner will show you the chapters first.

Who it is for

• Restaurants and food brands with recipes customers ask for.
• Shops and makers who want a lookbook or product guide people keep, written rather than listed.
• Local businesses, venues and guides with a list of places worth sending a visitor to.

A collection also suits a giveaway with a list at its heart: “twelve plants that survive a north-facing balcony” says more than “a guide to balconies”. If your entries are essays or past newsletter issues, you want newsletter to ebook instead.

Your entries, not invented ones

This is the kind of book where a made-up detail does the most harm. A wrong oven temperature ruins dinner, and a wrong price costs you a customer. The assistant is told never to invent facts, figures or sources, and a read-through flags claims your sources do not support, but neither knows your kitchen.

So write the entries down first, even roughly, and add them as a source: a document, a PDF or a page on your site. Up to 10 sources can go in one book. The prose around your facts is what Chapbook is good at. Whether the soup needs two onions is for you to check.

The pictures

An entry gets a picture by default, up to 4 in a chapter, at 5 credits each, painted in the art direction of your look. This makes a collection the most picture-heavy kind Chapbook has, and the pictures are most of its price. They are generated, so a dish will look like that dish in general, not your plate. Turn pictures off in the brief, or replace any with your own photo in the editor.

How it works

1. Write the brief. What the entries are, how they group, and what each fact list should carry. Add your real entries as a source.
2. Approve the outline. Planning uses 10 credits. Check that every entry you meant is named.
3. Choose the look. It sets the type, the colors and how the pictures are painted.
4. Draft, edit, export. Drafting uses 1 credit per 125 words and 5 credits per picture. Export a PDF, an EPUB 3, a Word document and a cover.

What it does not do

Chapbook does not connect to a store or a spreadsheet, so entries don’t update themselves: a changed price means editing the entry and exporting again. There is no paperback interior for a collection, and no shopping cart. It writes nonfiction only, in English, Spanish, German, French, Portuguese (Brazil), Italian and Dutch, so a collection of short stories or poems is not something it plans.