I’ve come to believe that writing in markdown is the right choice for any writer who wants to publish their work. Not just the technically right choice. Philosophically the right choice. And I want to try to convince you.
I used to be a Microsoft Word purist. Then I became a Scrivener convert. Now I think both are the wrong answer, and I’ll tell you why.
The Problem with Microsoft Word
The Word workflow for a publishing writer goes roughly like this.
You write your book in Word. Your words and the presentation of those words, the fonts, the spacing, the formatting, are all bundled together in the same document. Then you decide what to do with it.
If you want to submit to a magazine, you need to reformat the whole thing into manuscript format. If you want an ebook, you either duplicate the file or import it into conversion software. If you want a print book, you do the same again in something else.
By the end of this process you have three or more versions of your manuscript with no clear source of truth. If you spot a typo, which file do you fix? All of them. Change a scene, same problem multiplied.
Word is familiar, universal, and easy to share. But it conflates your writing and its presentation in a way that creates enormous overhead the moment you want to do more than one thing with your work.
The Problem with Scrivener
Scrivener exists precisely because those Word problems are real and well-known. It’s a more thoughtful solution.
Everything lives inside a Scrivener project: your manuscript, your research, your notes, your metadata. You write within that structure and then compile. One source of truth, multiple outputs. That’s genuinely better than Word, and the compile feature is powerful enough to deserve its reputation.
I want to be fair here. Scrivener is a one-time purchase, it exports to most formats you’d need, and the company has been around long enough to have earned some trust. The “completely closed system” label I’ve seen thrown at it is a bit strong.
My objection is more about philosophy than practicality.
Your content in Scrivener lives inside a .scriv package: a bundle of RTF files held together by Scrivener’s own metadata and structure. When you’re in Scrivener, this is seamless. When you want to leave, you need to export deliberately, and the more you’ve leaned on Scrivener’s organisational features — the binder hierarchy, research notes, scene metadata — the more of that context doesn’t transfer cleanly anywhere else.
The corkboard, the scene structure, the way your chapters relate to each other in the binder: that belongs to Scrivener. The content can escape. The organisation mostly can’t.
I used Scrivener at university and then moved away from it. Getting my work into a usable form elsewhere wasn’t impossible, but it involved more friction than I’d have had if my files had just been text files all along. That friction, small as it was, stuck with me. Not because the format is evil, but because it felt like it shouldn’t be there at all.
Why Markdown Solves Both Problems
Markdown is, at its core, just plain text files in a folder.
Your book is a folder. Inside it are your chapters, each a text file with a small amount of lightweight formatting: a heading here, some italics there, a few metadata fields at the top. That’s it. That’s the actual content of your book, completely separate from how it looks when it’s presented.
On top of that base, you stack whatever tools you like. A writing app — I use Obsidian, but anything that reads plain text works. An analytics layer if you want to track your output. Export tools that turn your markdown into a manuscript, an ebook, or a print-ready PDF.
None of those tools are tied to your content. If Obsidian disappeared tomorrow, my files would be completely unaffected. If I wanted to switch writing apps next year, I’d just switch. My intellectual property stays mine, always, in a format that will be readable on any device indefinitely.
Content and presentation should be separate. Your words are the source of truth. Everything else is a layer on top.
The Practical Objection
The most common pushback I hear is: “That’s fine if you’re a developer, but I can’t build my own tools.”
That’s fair. Markdown by itself isn’t a publishing pipeline. You do need tooling to get from plain text to a formatted manuscript or an ebook.
But the ecosystem around this is better than it used to be. Free, open-source plugins handle most of the heavy lifting. And there are systems built specifically for writers — like the one I’ve been working on for the past six months — that abstract all of that away entirely. You write in markdown, and the export layer does the rest, without you needing to understand how it works under the hood.
Your files stay yours, forever, in a format that works anywhere. You still get every output you need.
If you write and you want to publish, give markdown a serious look. Try Obsidian for a month. See what the plugin ecosystem offers. I think, once you’ve worked in it for a while, it’ll be hard to go back.