Mark Book Builder

Use your Mac to publish books.

Mark Book Builder requires a Mac running macOS 10.12 or higher.

Current version: 1.0.1

Formatting Books Is Painful

Formatting books is tedious. You have to worry about things like fonts, line spacing, and margins. You create the file for your book, preview it at Amazon, and things are slightly off. The margins are off. The chapters don’t align. You go back, fix things, and try again. After doing this 5–10 times, you can finally publish your book.

And that’s just print books. If you want to publish a book on the Kindle, you have to dig into HTML and CSS code to correct the mistakes. You have to be a web developer just to publish a book.

Things get so bad you end up paying someone to format the book so you don’t have to deal with the pain anymore.

Mark Book Builder Comes to the Rescue

With Mark Book Builder you don’t have to worry about formatting details. Mark the parts of your book that aren’t body text, such as chapter titles and section headings. Mark Book Builder handles the rest, generating a book you can publish at Amazon, Apple’s Books Store, and other online bookstores. Spend more time writing books and less time formatting them.

Installation Instructions

  1. Download Mark Book Builder.
  2. Double-click the zip file to expand it.
  3. Drag the Mark Book Builder application to your Applications folder or wherever you want it to reside.
  4. Double-click the Mark Book Builder application icon to launch Mark Book Builder.

Quick Start Guide

Creating a Book

A new book should be created when you launch Mark Book Builder, but you can also choose File > New to create a new book.

Entering a Book Title and Author

Choose Book > Edit Metadata. A sheet opens to enter the book’s title, author, and unique identifier. If you have an ISBN number for your book, use that as the unique identifier. Click the Update Info button when you’re done to save the title and author.

Choosing a Book Cover

Choose Book > Edit Metadata. A sheet opens. Click the Choose Cover File button to choose the cover image file. Click the Update Info button when you’re done to save the cover.

Renaming a Chapter

Select a chapter from the list of chapters. Press the Return key. Type the new chapter name.

Adding a Chapter

Click the Add Chapter button in the toolbar or choose Chapter > Add Chapter.

Removing a Chapter

Select a chapter from the list of chapters and press the Delete key. You can also choose Chapter > Remove Chapter. If you accidentally remove a chapter, choose Edit > Undo Remove Chapter to restore the chapter.

Entering Text

Select a chapter to show its contents in the text view. Type in the text view.
You can also copy text from another application and paste it in Mark Book Builder. When pasting, it’s best to choose Edit > Paste and Match Style.

Tagging Text

Select the text you want to tag and choose a tag from the Tags menu. You can also use the toolbar buttons to apply tags.

Text is initially set to be body text (paragraph) so you don’t have to tag every paragraph in your book. Tag only things like chapter titles and section headings.

If you accidentally choose the wrong type of tag, remove the markup text using the text view.

You can also use Markdown syntax to tag text. For code blocks, the Markdown syntax of indenting the code block does not work. Enter three backticks in a line above and below the code block.

```
// Code block contents here
```

Publishing a Book

Choose Book > Publish or click the Publish button in the toolbar to publish your book. A save panel will open for you to choose a name for your book and a location to save it.

Helpful Articles

Current Bugs and Limitations

  • The only available publishing format is EPUB.
  • The table of contents contains chapter titles only.