Okay I have to admit up front this whole post is about how I totally avoided editing duties by changing up my pipeline. I know most people will vague out rather quickly with this post, but in a way I am okay with that. If you are the type of person who does not want tech to get in the way of your flow. Look away now. Come back for the next post.
If you are someone who is okay with going down some kind of rabbit hole that is possibly extremely unproductive, but also may provide efficiencies, keep reading. I have found most people would rather go the easy path.
So here we are, the few weird nerds who want to do weird nerdy stuff to make their workflow better and more efficient using technology. And I am not taliking about logging into Substack and creating a blog easy, because that stuff is made so easy, it should probably be illegal.
I am talking about producing a book.
Lets talk about the usual workflow of a usual author (I guess, I can hardly call myself an author). Its probably, write in Word or Scrivener. Then output to editors, get back report or track changes, and edit again. Perhaps the final version is sent to the publisher or submitted to Amazon or whatever, with whatever tweaks are required. That’s the way I did it the first time.
Then I came across this guy.
https://www.jaypenner.com/blog/ten-author-tools-and-resources
Now, I will admit I have read many of these things before. But this time it caught me at the perfect moment. This moment was when I was supposed to be editing my manuscript for my editor to do a final line edit through. Being the self saboteur I can sometimes be, I decided to go deep on this stuff.
Jay has this really cool process where he writes in Markdown. Now you may, or may not know what markdown is, what you need to know is that it is a way of writing that still leaves the words in their place, but allows for formatting to happen in and around that without distracting too much from the words (kinda).
I will admit, I think Markdown or .md as some may recognize it is pretty awesome. I really do. Its simple, it goes up on the screen as fast as you can type, and in the end it does the job.
What makes markdown really powerful is another awesome tool, its called Pandoc. This bit of software is like the Swiss army knife of converting some text to another bit of text with a different .xxx ending. This sounds trivial but its not. Markdown to doxx is not trivial, neither is ebook, or pdf, or about 30 other options. But the authors of Pandoc have done it.
In fact the authors of Pandoc have done it so well that it has so many options that you could spend a great deal of time working your way through them to make sure you truly get the most out of your amazing writing.
Instead of going down a rabbit hole of how to write command line scripts to make the most amazing Pandoc conversion from your current text format to the text format you want, how about someone else do the hard work.
Enter Dan. This elusive guy, who doesn’t seem to care too much about the limelight got a mention and a corner on Jay’s page. Why? Because he make this easy.
Not only did he make it easy, with Jay’s workflow its a whole new way of looking at writing.
Lets get serious here, I am probably some kind of nerd, whatever it takes to be in that club, I probably did it if it involved research and going down rabbit holes. Jay and Dan organized a piece of code, that converts your words into whatever format you want. They used Pandoc, and they used some cool coding of their own.
https://www.jaypenner.com/publishquickly/
There are two tips I can give you from reading this blog, 1) Jay’s tip of using Visual Studio Code, or VSCodium (same thing but one with Microsoft telemetry and one without), and 2) the publishquickly software to generate your docx and ebook is pretty quick and awesome once you have it set up.
Above you will see a paragraph of text. It doesn’t mean much to you, maybe you skimmed over it if you made it this far. But the impact of those words, the ease of those words, should not be lost. If you are not technically able to convert a .md file to a .docx and .ebook in a line of command line, then you have your actual solution already there for you.
So for anyone who has no idea what I am talking about but stuck around anyway, god bless you, I will attempt to explain it.
The publishquickly software once installed properly and run as per the example will export in about 1 second for a 100k document, a .docx file formatted already for upload to Amazon, and an ebook for upload to Amazon. Not only that it will, if you want, combine multiple books into a box set for all those formats.
Its still early days for me, but I was able to test the software and adapt my own manuscript into .md and then export it with the command line into whatever format I wanted.
Admittedly I still need to work out how to make it format my document in docx in the exact look I want, it was pretty damn good, and all I have to do is provide it with a template and it will do exactly that.
Sure, its totally nerdy, probably unnecessary, and for me at least avoidance of what I should be doing , editing my book, but it is awesome software that could also make your life a lot easier.
I have an Anthology to compile soon, I am tempted to try the sequence described above at least for the initial compilation. I will have to do another post if I make a successful attempt at this.
My updated post is in progress, and have I ever been down the rabbit hole.