Writing with Markdown

We are going to explore what Markdown is and why you should care when writing fiction and nonfiction ebooks.

What is Markdown?

Markdown is an easy to use markup language. A markup language is a system to annotate a text document, such as a novel, with structural hints, i.e. emphasis, making text bold or adding lists. The annotations are included in the text, but in the case of Markdown in a way that it still feels very natural and can easily be read without any knowledge of Markdowns at all. The document you write is only plain text, and you can write it with any text editor. How your work looks at the end is separated from the text document and is defined by templates/layouts. But more on that later.

Here is an example of Markdown

# This is my first header

He is the prince of the land of fife

Looks pretty natural.

Why should I care?

This separation is different from traditional word processors like Word. In a traditional word processor you have one document and in it, your body content and your formatting are intertwined. Changing one influences the other, and it can happen that you mess up the whole document. Not so with Markdown. As it separates your body content from the actual formatting you can change one but it does not affect the other. So for writing a novel, it means you can focus on your text and only your text and stop worrying about formatting. When finished, you just publish your work with a layout and get a beautiful finished book. And without changing anything in your content, you could just select a new format and republish.

When writing nonfictional, you can mark words in your text as bold or add lists or maybe links. These are structural annotations, but they do not define if your links are blue, red or green, nor how a list should look.

Here’s an example of a list.

- First is my first bullet point
- and this is my second

It still looks like text, does not enforce a style to the list and everyone realizes it is a list.

Markdown and some enhancements do support a lot, and you are pretty flexible. Best is, it still feels like text, and you can edit it in any text editor.

How does it work with the layout?

When working with Markdown, we have a publishing step. For that, we need a tool. The good thing is there are plenty of existing tools, command line or UI. The job of a tool is to take your Markdown text join it with a template and publish your final work. This can be a HTML page, a LaTeX document, an ebook or even a Word document. Not all tools support each output document format. And generally, it is one Markdown text results in one output document.

How does Moopato eBook Writer help?

Moopato eBook Writer specializes on creating ebooks and ease of use. You work on multiple markdown documents, called chapter, which are published in one ebook; ePub 2 and Kindle at the same time. ePub 2 is the defacto industry standard and is supported by all major distributors. And it is still perfect for fictional and nonfictional eBooks which focus on text.

It comes pre-bundled with different templates. The templates define the look of your eBook. As with Markdown typically you can change it anytime without changing anything in a chapter. But sometimes more control is needed. In those cases, you can either write a template for Moopato or take advantage of the possibility to add HTML, the basis of pages in ePub, in a chapter directly.

Conclusion

Markdown is a powerful tool, and you should definitely give it a try for your next work.