Foliant Start a book

Your archive is already a book

It just isn’t shaped like one. Fifty letters written over a year have an order, a beginning, and things you’d cut on a second pass — which is most of what a book is. What they don’t have is a cover, a table of contents, and a way to read them that isn’t scrolling backwards through a feed.

Here is the whole path, end to end. It takes an evening, and you can walk it before making an account — the editor at /create saves to your own browser until you decide to keep the result.

Four steps

  1. Get the letters out of your provider

    Most platforms have an export, though what falls out is usually a pile of HTML or JSON rather than something you can hand to an importer. Foliant reads .txt, .docx, .epub and .fb2, so either convert the export into one of those, or — and this is the honest advice — open the letters you actually want and paste them in one at a time. You’re about to throw most of them out anyway, so bulk import saves less than you’d think.

  2. Choose, don’t dump

    This is the step that decides whether the book is worth anything. An archive is everything you wrote; a book is what you’d hand someone who hasn’t read you yet. Twelve letters that hold together beat fifty in chronological order. Drop the news items, the “sorry for the delay”, the seasonal jokes. A book holds up to 200 sections — that is a ceiling, not a target.

  3. Give it a cover and a name

    Upload a cover image or set the title and author on a plain one, then pick the paper, the typeface and — if you want it — the sound a page makes when it turns. It looks finished from the first upload; you change only what bothers you.

  4. Publish, and choose how public

    Published puts the book on your public shelf at /your-name and into search. Unlisted gives you a working link and nothing else — right for a welcome gift you send to new subscribers, or a draft you want two friends to read. Either way it’s a link, not an attachment, so it can’t bounce off anyone’s mail server.

Putting it in your own page

A link is enough to send in a letter. But your archive page, your about page, the post announcing the book — those are places where the book should open, not lead somewhere else. Two ways, depending on what your platform allows.

If your platform expands links

Paste the book’s address on its own line. Ghost, Medium and Notion resolve it and put the reading frame right in the post — Foliant answers the oEmbed request they make behind the scenes. Somewhere that only shows a preview card instead, you’ll get your cover, your title and your description, which is not nothing.

If you control the HTML

Your own site, a self-hosted blog, a landing page — paste the frame directly. The Publishing tab in your Foliant cabinet generates this for your book, with the size you pick: 

<iframe src="https://foliant.studio/embed/your-name/your-book"
        title="Your book"
        width="800" height="600"
        style="border:0;" loading="lazy" allowfullscreen></iframe>

loading="lazy" is there on purpose: the frame costs a visitor nothing until they scroll to it. The book inside an embed is the real one — it counts reads and lets people thank you, exactly as it does on its own page.

Then: give it away on purpose

The archive book earns its keep as the thing a new subscriber gets on day one. It’s a link in your welcome email, so it costs nothing to send and nothing to host, and it works on a phone in a queue — no download, no app, no “open in which reader?”.

A reader who finishes it lands on a page that lets them thank you, write you a letter, and subscribe to hear about the next one. You’ll see how many opened it, how far they got, and where they came from.

What to expect it not to do

Open the editor

No account needed to start — the draft lives in this browser until you keep it.