QuillDrop is No Longer Available

The QuillDrop service has been discontinued. Thank you for your interest.

Many readers come to this page from my article on using Visual Studio Code for writing. You can read that post here.

What was QuillDrop?

QuillDrop was a web-based tool designed for indie authors to quickly and easily convert their manuscripts from plain text (using Markdown) into a KDP-ready Microsoft Word document. It was built to simplify the formatting process for publishing on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) platform.

The goal of QuillDrop was to allow writers to focus on writing, not on the technical details of document formatting. Users could paste their manuscript, choose a book size template, and get a professionally formatted document in seconds, without needing to create an account or install any software.

While the tool is no longer active, the principle of using simple, plain-text-based writing workflows remains a powerful and efficient way for authors to produce their work.

But it lives on in my personal workflow

The core logic of QuillDrop has been enhanced and now lives on as a powerful command-line tool I use to produce all my books. It’s a script that processes my Markdown manuscripts and converts them into professionally formatted documents for production.

Some of its capabilities include:

• Processing Markdown manuscripts with YAML frontmatter for configuration.
• Converting manuscripts to DOCX and TXT formats using Pandoc.
• Tracking statistics like word count, processing time, and chapter summaries.

Here is an example of the output when I process The Curse of Ammon:

→ Books git:(master)cd Scripts→ Scripts git:(master)./mp.js -k coa
✓ Config loaded successfully
Quilldrop Manuscript Processor
Version 6.0.0
Book:     The Curse of Ammon (v8)
Key:      curse.of.ammon
Source:   ../WOA/curse.of.ammon.md
Series:   The Whispers of Atlantis
✓ Manuscript loaded
Stage 1: Processing ChaptersStage 2: Generating Production Manuscript
▲ Excluding chapter: un1_d1
✓ Final manuscript assembled
✓ Pandoc conversion complete
✨ PROCESSING COMPLETE ✨
Duration      3.25s
Word Count    77,214 words
Chapters      86 processed | 1 excluded
Warnings      0
Output Files:
output/cleaned.curse.of.ammon.v8.md
output/prod.curse.of.ammon.v8.md
output/prod.curse.of.ammon.v8.docx
output/prod.curse.of.ammon.v8.txt