Authors Together

When the much-beloved indie publisher A Book Apart closed in 2024, rights to all 50+ of their previously published titles — as well as 3-4 whose authors had signed but not yet published — reverted back to their authors. (That includes Bits&Letters founder/owner David Demaree, who wrote ABA’s seventeenth book, Git for Humans, published in 2016.) This left those authors free to republish or re-release their books however they wanted… but it also left readers without a convenient place to find where to buy and read these books, some of which are still essential titles on subjects like user research, content strategy, and sustainable/ethical design.

By late fall 2024, many authors had had a chance to set up new online homes for their books, and some readers had taken the initiative to set up mini-directories for where they’d ended up. But as Going Responsive author Karen McGrane raised in a private Slack group for former ABA authors, folks were still looking for something a little more official.

While the obvious best think would have been a big update to the main A Book Apart site, the next best was what became Authors Together: a canonical-ish, semi-official list of ABA authors’ preferred links to their books, rendered as simple HTML & CSS. Karen proposed a Slack channel called #your-link-here; authors, naturally, posted their links there.

The Authors Together site is built using Astro‘s Content Collections API, making it easy to turn Markdown and JSON to a future-proof, type-safe content management schema. While the site currently just presents names and single links, there’s plenty of room to include author bios, social media links, or other information as time goes on.

Visually, David created a simple responsive design inspired by Jason Santa Maria‘s ABA identity work, with slight tweaks like switching from commercial to open-source fonts (for obvious reasons). The highlights of the site design are the logomark based on the original ABA’s “olive branch” element, but multiplied and turned into a starburst, and a vibrant gradient bar made out of all 50 books’ cover colors (converted into OKLCH for tonal consistency).

And, because the site is open-source on GitHub, readers — as well as authors who (for whatever reasons) aren’t members of the original Slack group — have been able to contribute by filing issues or pull requests.