Software Engineer to Novelist: Writing a Book Like Coding
Details
- External ID
- 47998570
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Software Engineer to Novelist: Writing a Book Like Coding
- Website domain
- frequal.com
- Launched
- May 3, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 22
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.7568659127625202
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
I just published my first book, Means and Motive. ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GYCZJVGX )As a software engineer, I approached writing like a software project. I used familiar tools (Emacs and HTML) for the primary writing.I built my own tool (EPublish) to transform the HTML manuscript into an .epub file, the source for the ebook version. And I wrote shell scripts to reliably and repeatably transform the .epub version into PDF files for the printed editions.I wrote 'design' and 'architecture' docs, describing the world, key actors, and timelines. I kept a task list of chapters and key scenes that needed to be written, in priority order. Along the way, I kept my files version-controlled so I could see the progress of the novel and edit mercilessly, without worrying about keeping old text around in backup files should I want it back for some reason.If you've thought about writing a book, I highly recommend it. There are many similarities to the software engineering process. You'll also gain a newfound appreciation of the design, layout, and typesetting world, exactly how much work goes into each book you read.
Enrichment
- Theme
- typography and unicode text tools
- Vertical
- Education
- Function
- Content generation
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- guide to writing books like coding
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes This is a blog post discussing a personal writing workflow and a script/tool (EPublish) that transforms HTML files into EPUB and PDF via Calibre. Building an HTML-to-EPUB conversion script and publishing guide is trivial to vibe-code.
Discussion
11 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Pandoc (AOSA books pipeline), Obsidian (for notes/writing)
Concerns raised: Not open source yet, Complexity compared to simpler alternatives needed
Feature requests: Open source the tool, Blog/document tooling and process details
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 138 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #27 of 139 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 162 days after the earliest competitor.
- Startup sci-fi novel that took me 5 years to write · hn · 2026-06-08 · 27 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Markdown-to-Book · hn · 2026-03-06 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- B-Maker · ph · 2026-09-08 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Story Builder · ph · 2026-09-24 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Brooks-Lint · hn · 2026-06-11 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Scenewright · ph · 2026-09-30 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- 1667, a terminal UI for writing fiction with language models · hn · 2026-08-17 · 37 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Cloud Book Publishers · ph · 2026-09-14 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.42
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a content generation tool for Government yet.