Writing a novel in Markdown

As a prolific author, I am able to test and tweak my methods to come up with my own workflow and best practices more quickly than most.

I used Scrivener for drafting and formatting books for about seven years. That workflow involved generating a docx file which I then manually tweaked with drop caps and other formatting features I could not accomplish directly within Scrivener, then using that file to create the other sizes/bindings that I needed. Then, of course, save them as pdf files for upload to my distributors. If I had changes to make to a book, I had to change the three or more docx files individually, as well as the Scrivener file which I still used to generate the epub and mobi versions. It was quite intensive. I was also running into problems with files becoming corrupted, taking huge lengths of time to open/close, and not converting properly from version 2.0 to version 3.0.

I finally broke down and purchased Vellum in the summer of 2020, and at that point, began to rejig my workflow to eliminate Scrivener. (I have not completely eliminated it, as I still use it as a tool for formatting large print and my WordPress portfolio files, but I no longer write in it, I just import a Vellum rtf export file for that purpose.)

It took a few different attempts at using docx or odt files for my first draft before I landed on using Markdown files…