Writing and formatting books in markdown
Practical guides for authors who write in plain text and want a professional ebook at the end. Start with the workflow, then the conversion.
Why plain text suits long-form, which editor to pick (Obsidian, iA Writer, Ulysses, Typora, VS Code, Zettlr), how to structure chapters and front matter, the honest limitations, and how to reach a finished ebook.
What an EPUB actually is, three conversion methods compared (Pandoc, online converters, hosted tools), and the Kindle-specific problems — scene breaks, table of contents, fonts, metadata — that trip authors up.
The reference for structuring your manuscript in EbookFormatter: chapter headings, special page types (title page, copyright, dedication, epigraph, table of contents), scene breaks, and front/back matter.
Every part of a book, in order — front matter, body, and back matter — what each is, who writes it, and the exact markdown annotation and EPUB 3 semantic that produce it.
The markdown to type between your scenes, what a scene break actually renders as inside the EPUB, choosing an ornament, and the Kindle failure modes — collapsed blank lines, tofu glyphs, page-edge misses — to avoid.
The float-based CSS Amazon actually documents, why drop caps render in Kindle Previewer but break on devices, the quotation-mark problem, accessibility trade-offs, and the raised-cap and small-caps alternatives.
What to include and what to skip, whether you need an ISBN (you don't, on Kindle) and why, copy-paste templates for fiction and nonfiction, and the one line of markdown that generates the page with the right EPUB semantics.
What RSC-005, RSC-012, PKG-007 and the other common EPUBCheck codes actually mean, the fix for each, the re-zip trap and its two-line recipe, and a sourced look at which stores — Amazon, Apple, Kobo — reject which errors.
Ready to convert? Upload your markdown file and download a Kindle-ready EPUB in seconds.