There’s a moment every indie author knows. You’ve been writing your book for months, maybe years. You’ve revised it more times than you can count. And finally, it’s ready.

Now you need to turn it into a book. This should be the easy part, right?

It never is.

The book publishing tools that exist right now all look promising until you’re knee-deep in one. Some produce gorgeous output but lock you into a handful of built-in styles with no way around them. Some are wonderful for writing but stop short of production. Others can do anything you’d ever need… if you’re willing to pay a monthly subscription and learn software designed for graphic designers, not authors. And a few are genuinely approachable, but they run in a browser, and your manuscript ends up on someone else’s servers.

I don’t want to diminish any of them. They’re real tools built by talented people. But each of them asks you to give something up — money, control, privacy, or simplicity — and after trying them all, I decided to stop compromising and start building.

My name is Tammy. I’ve spent a lot of time in publishing. Most recently, as the managing editor at The Pragmatic Bookshelf. These days, I’m writing more and editing less. When I started working on my latest book, I ran into every one of these problems firsthand. So I started building the tool I wished existed, and I gave myself three rules.

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Rule One: Make it easy

Publishing software has a reputation for being difficult, and it’s earned. The learning curves are steep, the interfaces are cluttered, and the moment something breaks, you’re on your own.

I wanted something that works the way authors think. You open a workspace. You write in a clean editor that lets you preview your work. You pick a professionally designed template that handles the typography, margins, headers, footers — all the fine details that separate a polished book from a DIY project. When you’re done, you click Build, and your book comes out the other side.

I won’t pretend to know whether I’ve nailed this. That’s for you to tell me. But every decision I’ve made has pointed in the same direction: if the tool gets in the way of the work or is incredibly difficult to use, then the tool is wrong.

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Rule Two: Make it flexible

A book isn’t one format anymore. Readers find you in different places, on different devices, and your production tool should meet them everywhere — from a single manuscript, without asking you to start over each time.

Mockingbird Press builds multiple formats from one source:

• Accessible EPUB –  fully EPUB 3.0 compliant, with clean semantic structure and proper navigation. Ready for every major e-reader.
• PDF – clean and ready to upload to KDP, IngramSpark, Lulu, or wherever you distribute. The Professional edition adds print-ready output with recto-verso page layout for authors and publishers working with professional printers.

And, if your printer or distributor needs PDF/X, Mockingbird PDFx — a free, open-source converter — will be available later this month. It takes any standard PDF and makes it ready for print specifications.

Your files stay on your machine. There’s no cloud, no subscription, no account to create. You choose a template or customize your own down to the last detail. You organize books into workspaces, share assets across projects, and build everything from one place. And if you want Git version control or a command-line interface to automate your builds, those are there too — but they never get in the way if you don’t need them.

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Rule Three: Make it for every reader

Here’s a question most publishing tools never bother to ask: can everyone who wants to read your book read it?

Millions of readers depend on screen readers, assistive technology, and Braille displays. They buy books. They want your book. But most of the time, the ebook they download doesn’t work for them — the navigation is broken, the reading order is wrong, the structure that assistive devices depend on just isn’t there.

This isn’t because authors don’t care. It’s because no tool has ever made accessibility part of the process. It’s always been an afterthought — expensive, specialized, something you deal with later. If you deal with it at all.

I think that’s backwards. Accessibility should be built in from the beginning, just as margins and font choices are. You shouldn’t have to think about it. It should just be how books get made.

So that’s how Mockingbird Press works. Every EPUB it produces is accessible by default — structural navigation, proper reading order, rich metadata, all of it. Not as a premium feature. Not as an add-on you configure. It’s just what the Build button does.

And this is where I’m headed next: Braille-ready output. Same workflow, same simplicity, but now your book is ready for digital Braille readers. Getting a book into Braille today is expensive and rare, and I want to change that. I can’t promise a timeline yet, but it’s the first thing I’m working on after launch.

Every format Mockingbird Press supports is a door that opens for readers who’ve been standing outside. That’s the work I care about most, and it’s nowhere close to done.

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