Authoring books

A book is a bundle of markdown your readers' agents read as context. As a publisher, you create one from /dashboard/books/new. This page covers both ways to do that — pasting markdown and uploading a multi-chapter .zip.

The New Book form is the only authoring surface. There is no separate books index and no per-book edit page.

The form

Every book takes the same fields, whichever upload mode you use:

• Title — 1 to 255 characters.
• Slug — 1 to 128 characters; lowercase letters, digits, and hyphens only. Auto-derived from the title until you edit it; must be unique within your account.
• Domain — a short free-text category (for example reference or runbook), used as a storefront filter.
• Description — up to 5000 characters. Optional, but it is what buyers read in the catalog. Front-load the important part; the catalog truncates long descriptions.
• Content — the book body. Required.
• Price — US dollars, minimum $0.50. See Pricing.

Paste mode

For a single-document book, choose the paste mode and paste markdown straight into the Content field. Standard markdown renders — headings, code blocks, tables, lists, links.

When you submit, your book is run through the automated submission scan. A book that passes is written — its first version, its price, your publisher grant, the Stripe product — and is live on its storefront page immediately. A submission the scan flags or rejects does not list; see Becoming a publisher for the three outcomes.

Upload a .zip — multi-chapter books

For a book that spans several chapters, switch the upload mode to Upload a .zip folder.

What goes in the zip:

• Chapter files — one .md or .markdown file per chapter, typically under a chapters/ directory.
• An optional manifest.yaml at the zip root. If present, it declares the ordered chapter list and book-level metadata. Its one required field is chapters:, a non-empty ordered list. With no manifest, bkstr derives the chapter order from the filenames.

A manifest chapter entry accepts a file: path, a slug:, or both:

chapters:
  - file: chapters/ch00-core.md
  - slug: appendix-a
  - file: chapters/ch01-intro.md
    slug: introduction

A few rules the zip path enforces:

• Wrapping is transparent. If your zip wraps everything in a single top-level folder — the usual result of compressing a folder — bkstr detects the wrapper and treats its contents as the root. Up to three levels of single-folder nesting are unwrapped. macOS __MACOSX/ entries are dropped.
• Caps: the zip is at most 10 MB; each chapter at most 1 MB; the uncompressed total at most 20 MB; at most 500 chapters.
• Re-uploading is idempotent. An identical re-upload returns the existing version unchanged. A zip with edited content creates the next version (v2, v3, and so on) of the same book.
• Skill bundles are rejected. A zip whose root holds a SKILL.md is refused by the book path — to publish a skill, see Authoring skills.

A book that passes the submission scan is live on its storefront page right away.

After you publish

A book that passes the submission scan is live the moment the form succeeds — it appears in the catalog's Browse tab for every signed-in subscriber. The scan catches secrets and malformed submissions, not content quality; there is no preview step.

Two things to know before you submit:

• Proof your content first. Whatever you submit, buyers see right away. Preview your markdown in your own editor before you paste or zip it.
• Only the price is editable later. Once a book is published, the title, slug, description, domain, and content cannot be changed from the dashboard — only the price, on the Pricing page. Decide the title and slug, and proofread the content, before you submit.

To re-price, archive, or check the catalog ledger, see Pricing and Catalog management.