ReadWriteWeb

Writing a book will never be easy, but FastPencil's mission is to make things easier for authors by bringing this process online and to collaborate with others. FastPencil takes writers from idea to published book. The service offers features for collaboration, editing and design, as well as professional consulting services for authors. One cool feature of FastPencil is that it can import blog posts and turn them into books and e-books that bloggers can then sell through all the major book distribution channels.

Volunteer-run organizations often spend thousands of dollars on quarterly newsletters and direct mail solicitations. While the groups have the best of intentions, they often lack the in-house graphic designers and high-quality printers to actually produce these goods. Nevertheless, they almost always have blogs, websites and social media profiles for outreach purposes. In the past few months ReadWriteWeb has seen an influx of blog-to-newsletter media solutions. While many technologists have criticized print as a dead medium, blog-to-newsletter tools may be fantastic for advocates and service orgs. Below are a few companies to help get you started:

You could write a novel in binary, but it's hard enough getting people to pay attention to your words in plain English. Futurists and programmers like Paul Graham, Eric S. Raymond and Ray Kurzweil may be prolific thinkers, but if they hadn't bothered to write down their ideas, many of us would have never found them. All of us have stories to tell, and Fast Pencil offers us a chance to format and publish them.