From Markdown draft to published book: the whole pipeline

Plain text is a good place to have written a book. It is also, at first glance, an intimidating place to publish one from — the file has no pages, no cover and no ISBN, and the stores want all three. This is the map between the two.

It assumes the manuscript is done. Nothing here will help with that part.

1. Mark up by structure, not by appearance

The one decision that makes everything downstream easy. Use headings to mean *what a thing is*, not how it should look.

• # — the book title, once, at the top.
• ## — chapters.
• ### — sections inside a chapter.
• A page-break marker where a chapter must start on a fresh page.

Resist the temptation to use a bigger heading because a particular line "should be bigger". Size is a design decision and belongs to the design step; heading level is structure, and it is what generates your ebook's navigation. A book marked up by appearance produces an EPUB with a nonsensical table of contents, and the fix is going back through every chapter.

2. Front and back matter

The pages readers do not notice unless they are missing. Front matter, in the conventional order:

1. Half-title — the title alone on a page. Optional, and traditional.
2. Title page — title, subtitle, author.
3. Copyright page — the year, your name, the rights statement, the ISBN if you have one. A plain "© 2026 Your Name. All rights reserved." is sufficient.
4. Dedication — if there is one.
5. Contents — for non-fiction, generally. Fiction often omits it.

Back matter is shorter and does more work than people expect: an about-the-author page, an acknowledgements page, and — the one that actually matters commercially — a page telling a reader who just finished the book what to read or do next.

3. Design it once

Typefaces, sizes, colours, margins, page numbering. Six typography decisions has the numbers; the important part here is *once*. Save the combination, so book two starts from decisions you already made and already checked rather than from defaults.

Covers are their own job. A front cover for the storefront, and a back cover if the book will be printed. The front cover is doing most of the selling and it will be judged at thumbnail size, which is a strong argument for a large title and very little else on it.

4. Export what each channel wants

Print is the one that will not accept a generic export. Printers ask for specific trim sizes, bleed, and often CMYK rather than RGB. Get the specification from your printer before you finalise the design, not after — trim size determines the page size, and changing it late reflows the entire book.

5. ISBNs, briefly

You need one for print, and for listing in libraries and most retail channels. You do not need one to sell a PDF from your own website — and, more surprisingly, you do not need one for an ebook on Amazon KDP, where it is optional. Other stores vary, so check the ones you are actually publishing to rather than assuming the strictest case.

Each format needs its own: the EPUB, the paperback and the hardback are three different ISBNs. Some platforms will assign you a free one — KDP does, for paperback and hardback only — and there are two catches. The free number is locked to that platform, so it cannot follow the book if you also publish elsewhere, and the listed imprint becomes a generic one ("Independently published" in Amazon's case) rather than a name of yours.

If you intend to publish more than one book, or to sell the same book through more than one channel, buying your own is usually worth it. Where you buy depends on your country — each has a single designated agency, and prices differ enormously between them.

6. The proof pass

Do not skip this, and do not do it in the tool you wrote the book in. Export the real files and check them the way a reader would.

• Every chapter starts where it should. Page breaks move when you edit; a break that was right in draft three may not be in draft seven.
• No stranded headings at the foot of a page, and no single lines orphaned at the top.
• Tables keep their headers across page boundaries — see tables that survive the break.
• Fonts are embedded. Run pdffonts on the PDF; every row should say yes. Why this matters.
• The EPUB opens on a real device, not just in a desktop preview. Email it to yourself and open it on a phone.
• The cover reads at thumbnail size. Shrink it to 150 pixels wide and see whether the title survives.
• The copyright page has the right year and the right ISBN for that format.

A useful discipline: read the exported PDF end to end on a device you did not write it on. You will read it as a reader rather than as the author, and you will find things.

What this looks like in practice

The pipeline above is toolchain-agnostic — it holds whether you use Pandoc, a layout application, or something hosted. What changes is how much of stages three and four you do by hand.

In bukpress stages three and four are close to one step: the design is a set of controls rather than a template, and the same manuscript exports a paginated PDF and — on the Pro plan — a reflowable EPUB, with your typefaces embedded either way. Cover artwork and reusable Brand Kits start on Essentials, and pages are A4, so a specific print trim size is not something it sets (pricing has the full split). The preview paginates by the same rules as the export, which turns most of stage six into something you can see while writing rather than a surprise at the end.

The proof pass still matters. Nothing removes the value of reading the finished file.