The code and open-source tools I used to produce a science fiction anthology

Related: Think Weirder: The Year's Best SciFi Ideas - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45785154 - Nov 2025 (75 comments)

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A_D_E_P_T 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's quite an achievement.

I was once interested in publishing a SF anthology. Formatting and editing was nbd -- I was going to use Amazon's KDP software package for most of it, which can take a .docx and output an ebook in 5 minutes. I've done it before for non-anthology books I've published, and it couldn't be easier, though I understand why people might avoid Amazon in this day and age.

The real trouble was getting the rights to all of the different stories! Though everybody I was able to get in touch with was great -- in particular, Peter Watts, Alan Dean Foster, David Moles, and Walter Jon Williams -- many authors were totally impossible to reach! I ended up scrapping the idea after a few stories I was intent on collecting in the anthology were unobtainable. (And this after I had already paid an initial sum to many of the authors.) Finding alternates and embarking on more contract negotiations just seemed like too much work.

Anyway, I bought your anthology, will review when I'm done reading, and sincerely respect the hard work that went into it!

	▲	mojoe 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks, you're completely correct, rights acquisition was the most difficult part! The absolute hardest story in the anthology to get rights for was "Stars Don't Dream" by Chi Hui. It's a translation of a story that won an award in China, but Chi Hui doesn't speak English, and her contact info was extremely hard to obtain (I had to get help from the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine). We did the entire contract discussion via a combination of Google Translate and my very weak Mandarin I learned in college. (I'm a huge Peter Watts fan, btw)

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thangalin 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I developed my Markdown editor, KeenWrite[0], to replace the shell scripts described in the Typesetting Markdown series[1]. KeenWrite takes in YAML document metadata (for variables), (R) Markdown documents, and generates XHTML. The XHTML is passed to ConTeXt[2] for PDF typesetting.

A feature matrix[3] compares various text formats and ecosystems for generating PDF files.

[0]: https://keenwrite.com/

[1]: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/05/22/typesetting-markdow...

[2]: https://wiki.contextgarden.net

[3]: https://keenwrite.com/blog/2025/09/08/feature-matrix/

	▲	mojoe 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This looks cool, I'll check it out!

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m-hodges 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Very cool! How does licensing work with the included stories? What tools or systems contributed to the success of managing that?

	▲	mojoe 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The reprint rights agreements were all extremely manual, I did everything through email and SignNow. Mostly payments went through PayPal, although there was one author who wanted a physical check mailed.

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__mharrison__ 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I did this 10 or so years ago when I taught an ebook course to elementary students.

We learned about ebooks, HTML, and they each write a short story, which was included in an ebook (and a physical book).

Pretty amazing the tools we have access to. Of course, now I would use typst instead of latex for the physical book part.

	▲	bramadityaw 8 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		typst FTW