Publishing Pipeline · Free & Open Source

Your Obsidian vault,
print-ready.

Write in Obsidian. Get a press-ready PDF. AuthorKit typesets your Markdown through Quarto + Typst — chapters opening on a recto, binding margins, blank versos without folios — and reads your manuscript while you draft it, flagging the structural problems before they reach a proof.

One small book.yml per title, not a near-identical build script per book. Novels, picture books and workbooks from the same tool.

While you write

Structure, charted: Renders your manuscript's actual pacing — scene by scene, act by act — as a chart you can read in one look. Word counts come from the prose, not your intentions about it.
Measured against a shape: Compare that arc to a named structure: Freytag's Pyramid, or a rasa-cycle template for non-Western dramatic shape. Declare the climax you meant to write and see where it actually falls.
Continuity checks: Characters referenced but missing a note. Act and chapter drift. Scene files sitting in the folder but absent from the index — in the folder, not in the book.
Script-agnostic linking: Links each character's first mention to their note. Which scripts, and what inflected tail they carry, is declared per book — a Gujarati-only book and an English-only book configure differently without either touching the code.

When you print

Prose, typeset: Write Markdown; the build sets it. Trim size and bleed, a wider gutter for the binding, chapters opening on a right-hand page, blank versos carrying no folio, old-style figures. The defaults ship with Typst, so it renders with no fonts installed.
Illustrated layout: A picture book places its own art and type per scene, in a Typst block that stays readable in Obsidian. Bleed is applied on the way out, flipping edge by edge as the leaves demand.
Kindle from the same source: The ebook interior is built from the scenes that made the print file — no second manuscript to keep in step.
It asks first: Setup asks what kind of book this is before it writes anything, because a novel and a picture book want opposite page setups. Getting it wrong yields a valid PDF of the wrong shape.

In Claude Code

/book-new: Scaffolds a book vault — asks for title, format, manuscript status and target channels, then writes the structure.
/book-audit-vault: Checks the vault is sound: book.yml valid, Story/Index.md and Characters/ present, and refreshes the structure chart.
/book-audit-manuscript: Checks the manuscript itself — characters referenced but missing a note, act and chapter drift, first mentions that should be linked.
/book-build: Renders the print PDF and preps the Kindle interior from the same source.

Or without Claude Code

Every one of those is a command. The plugin is a convenience, not the product.

python3 authoring/cli.py init       # interview, then scaffold
python3 authoring/cli.py skeleton   # structure + pacing chart
python3 authoring/cli.py link       # first mentions -> character notes
python3 authoring/cli.py check      # continuity and unlisted scenes
python3 pipeline/build.py           # -> Deliver/<title>.pdf

Two runnable example vaults ship with it — a nested novel and a flat picture book, both public-domain text, under 14 KB together. The kit self-tests in 47 checks.

Install

/plugin marketplace add maulikmehta/obsidian-book-pipeline
/plugin install obsidian-book-pipeline@authorkit

Free, MIT licensed. Source on GitHub.

This tool is actively being developed. Results may occasionally be unexpected — always verify your output before submitting to a distributor.

Requirements

Quarto — renders .qmd to Typst to PDF
Python 3
ImageMagick, for cover cropping
A typeface, if you want one — type is your book’s design, not the pipeline’s

AuthorKit is an initiative by Swati Joshi. She publishes 6 titles across 13 live editions — Amazon.com, Amazon.in, IngramSpark and Barnes & Noble — using this pipeline.