Browing through Writing Meta, I found a couple posts about the Writing SE e-book, which looked intresting.
Is it (the Writing SE e-book) published? Drafted? Planned? Or dismissed?
Who is/was/will take/taking charge over it?
What would next steps be?
Any other updates on it?
See the writing-se-ebook tag.
This is not urgent, nor do I have the capacity right now to help publish it currently (maybe some day though).
I was just curious about its status.
Looking through the tag, the status of the e-book was last brought up in 2015, and Monica Cellio, one of our moderators at the time, had this to say on the subject:
My guess is that nobody has been sufficiently motivated to move it from "idea" to "first stages of an actual plan". Anybody who'd like to work on that (or any other) project should feel free to step up!
...and evidently, nobody did.
It's a shame, but it does seem as though nothing more came of this project since its initial announcement back in 2012. I wouldn't say it's been cancelled or dismissed, more like... forgotten about. Especially since most of the people involved in its creation left the site following Monica's dismissal.
This is the first I'm hearing about this project, but I'll echo Monica: this could be a great idea, and if anyone wants to pick it back up again, I'm sure the original creators won't mind. But... realistically, this probably isn't going to happen.
The idea was initially mine. I did noodle around with it for a bit, but a few things kept me from moving forward.
One was that, looking at a list of questions and answers, I wasn't very happy with the format. It didn't feel appealing or fun to read, to me. Kind of like reading a compilation of Facebook posts -- you might hugely enjoy a Facebook post, but reading 10 in a row from the same person on related topics is kind of a weird experience.
A second, and kind of the overriding reason, was that Amazon disabled the option for publishing free ebooks. At the time I originally suggested the idea, freebies were a very popular marketing tool -- people browsed freebies and used them as introductions to larger series, or to individual creators. But... this also turned Amazon's free ebooks into, pretty much, a collection of ads. So they instituted a minimum price. The avenue of "set up a FREE ebook at Amazon" was closed off.
We could, to be sure, still make an ebook. Sell it for 99 cents, or give it away on Amazon Unlimited, or just host it somewhere off Amazon for free. But that's definitely a lot less exposure than I'd originally hoped for, and that made the effort seem a lot less worthwhile, at least to me.
