Rising costs should not stop us from publishing. Technology is not the enemy of publishing.

When I worked in independent publishing, I learnt a very practical movement: put the ideal on the left side of the desk, put the budget on the right, and then find a way through for the book in the middle. The author wanted a stronger cover. The editor wanted one more round. The designer wanted more time to breathe through the layout. The printer sent a new quote. A distribution channel asked for a new file requirement. Everyone was doing serious work, and the invoices kept rising like water.

Later, in an advertising agency, I saw a similar pressure in another form. Small brands, small studios, and independent creators all needed to look professional. They needed steady output. They needed to deliver work that was good enough, often very quickly. Yet they were repeatedly pushed between two choices: use expensive, complex industry software, or stitch together a barely workable result with a collection of temporary tools. The first option makes people tense. The second exhausts them. Both can drain confidence from the work.

I also write fantasy romance. The writer in me knows how vulnerable a project feels before it leaves the computer. You spend a long time building a world, reshaping relationships, repairing pacing, rewriting endings. Then you arrive at publishing prep and suddenly face layout, formats, images, metadata, exports, cover materials, emails, landing pages. Rising costs turn every one of those steps into a question. Should we still make a print edition? Should we delay release? Should we give up on a better interior? Should one person carry all of it alone?

When people talk about publishing costs, they usually think first of printing, advertising, and distribution. Those matter, of course. But I often see a quieter cost: the cost of the file flow. A small team checks two sets of files again and again to keep the ebook and print edition aligned. A single chapter-title change triggers several re-exports. The same material gets broken into different versions that no longer recognise each other. None of these tasks looks dramatic on its own, but together they eat the team’s time every day.

When time is eaten away, emotion follows. Editors begin to dread the last round of changes. Authors start postponing file updates. Designers hunt through outdated versions for the correct image. Marketing people ask, again, “Is this the final final?” Much of the fatigue in publishing does not come from the work itself. It comes from these hidden handoffs. If tools can reduce that friction, small teams get a little more room to breathe.

I do not accept the conclusion that rising costs mean fewer people deserve to publish. Publishing should hold many voices. Genre fiction, small-language projects, cross-cultural writing, independent nonfiction, experimental small-press work: these projects often do not have the largest budgets, but they bring real life into the field. If tools become more centralised, workflows more closed, and entry points higher, creators with the fewest resources are often the first to be pushed out.

That is why I am sensitive to software monopoly in creative industries. Mature tools have real value. Many professional standards come from years of accumulated work, and those tools support many serious projects. I respect them, and I respect the people who use them well. The problem appears when an entire industry starts behaving as if only one road exists. Small teams lose room to negotiate. Creators lose room to try. Young editors and independent authors start mistaking a tool barrier for an industry barrier.

Technology should not stand opposite publishing. Good technology should preserve more choices: let authors organise manuscripts on their own devices, let editors see versions more clearly, let small teams reduce repeated labour, and let one text move more steadily towards ebooks, documents, images, or print files. When technology builds only new closed systems, it makes people anxious. When it explains the workflow, it helps more people dare to keep moving the work forward.

I am very sensitive to that feeling of “daring to continue”. Many projects do not stop because of one grand failure. They slow down through a string of small resistances: today we will leave the print file alone, tomorrow we will not re-export the ebook, next week we will sort out the promotional material. By the time the work really needs to go out, the team has been worn down by the fragments. Better tools cannot make every decision for people, but they can make the next step easier to begin.

Catalpas Atelier’s work on Scribe is tied to what I saw in publishing houses, advertising agencies, and independent marketing. Scribe is our first public desktop long-form writing, typesetting, and publishing-output tool, built for Windows, macOS, and Linux. It brings Markdown writing, preview, layout, and export into one desktop workspace for long-form authors, editors, and small publishing teams.

I like the phrase “desktop workspace”. It does not turn the official site into a writing environment, and it does not ask authors to send the whole work somewhere invisible. It lets the project stay on the writer’s own machine and file system, with a clearer relationship between writing, preview, and output. For a small team with a tight budget, clarity matters. You know where the file is. You know which version is being exported. You know when you need to return to the source manuscript. Clarity saves time, and it reduces emotional wear.

When I say costs should not stop us from publishing, I do not mean publishing should have no cost. Editing, design, proofreading, illustration, printing, and marketing all require professional labour, and all of that labour deserves respect. I mean that software workflows should not add unnecessary costs to every stage. A small team is already carrying responsibility for the quality of the work. It should not also exhaust its limited energy on file migration, repeated layout, version tracking, and multi-format output chaos.

I care deeply about diversity and equality. If publishing only lets well-resourced people speak, it loses many small, strange, brave, local, and cross-cultural voices. Independent software cannot fix every structural problem, but it can open a few gaps: more operating systems can be seen, more language and layout needs can be taken seriously, small teams can maintain sustainable workflows, and creators do not have to be discouraged by tools before they reach a professional process.

Those gaps matter. A romance novelist may need stable chapters and ebook output. A local nonfiction project may need print proofs and long-form notes. A multilingual project may need more careful handling of writing direction, ruby, or image captions. Mainstream workflows do not have to turn around for every small need, but independent software can begin from those concrete needs and treat them as the centre of the product, not as a footnote.

As an independent marketing specialist, I also want more people to see the value of good independent software. Large software ecosystems have scale and history. Independent software has another way of being close to users. It can start from a specific pain point, listen more quickly to edge needs, and place a small group’s long-tolerated problem at the centre of the product. Catalpas Atelier wants to be part of that ecosystem: no exaggerated promises, no tearing down other tools, just serious work to make publishing prep clearer for authors and small teams.

I once saw a book lose interior details because the budget had to be cut. I have also seen a small client sacrifice too much time just to look “professional enough”. I do not want creators to keep treating that sacrifice as normal. Books need craft. Publishing needs judgement. Technology can help us move repeated labour into the workflow, leave professional judgement to people, and return more opportunity to those who have already written, edited, and prepared work for the world.

That is why I want to work with our team. Costs will rise. The industry will change. Tool ecosystems will keep rearranging themselves. But as long as authors, editors, and small teams still want to finish the work, we should leave more accessible paths open for them. Technology is not the enemy of publishing. It can become a wider table, where more work has a chance to be laid out, checked, repaired, and sent towards readers.