Let's Make Great Software For Writers, Together

JWD is just a text editor. It is meant to be a platform for training people to complete writing projects. The un-distracted writing format was a big win for my friends. It was difficult to keep up with the project after NaNoWriMo finished and my friends weren't writing anymore, emailing me all the time, bugging me for updates :)

Some of the feedback I got early on was that some people really wanted to do some basic formatting. I think what they really meant was that they wanted basic organizing, the formatting was just how they knew how to do it. There is no point in letting them choose fonts, for example, because once the book is on the Kindle it will only be readable in a select few fonts, chosen by the user, anyway. Simple interface. Get the writer to stop futzing around with meaningless activity. Get them focused on writing.

I think the next "big win" in that respect would be to make the ePub package. It should be dead-simple for a user to go from editor to saved document to uploading to Kindle Direct Publishing. And they should have a reasonable expectation of what that document will look like.

Semantic markup in the back end, a default style sheet on top of it, and yes, perhaps a Markdown-style interface for the user.