Am I the only one here who finds this to be a ridiculous idea? The joy of reading doesn't exactly come from seeing your own name replacing Jane Eyre's.
As a passionate writer that knows he's not good the current gauntlet to self publishing turned me away despite the fact that I would willing pay $500 in a heartbeat to have a copy of one of my stories on my bookshelf.
I hope we will indeed ‘get it right’. I can tell you, it’s not something so trivial as ‘put a fancy GUI on top of LaTeX’. Instead, we are developing a complete typographic design engine, which involves natural language processing, file normalizations, drama parsing, complicated algorithms for type fitting, sectioning, page count quiring, color space conversions, Unicode common locale, multilingual hyphenation, opentype feature development, etc., etc.
12 meters of typographic literature are backing us, while we spend countless late nights in front of our code editor. My printing experience with my Original Heidelberg letterpresses in my garage puts some extra weight on the scale — I just love letters and books, the whole lot of typographic history!
It might assure you, if I tell you I am also methodically working my way through the Chicago Manual of Style, turning those prescriptive rules into working software.
So, do subscribe to our waiting list, and expect your invite coming soon: http://textus.io!