gorsepub - poems in, EPUB out

I write poetry, and every "easy" publishing tool I tried was built for prose. They reflow your lines, justify your text, and think in chapters - everything a poem isn't. After paying good money for one that still couldn't set a poem properly, I wrote my own. One small program. It does a single thing. It's free.

Point it at a folder of plain-text poems and it builds a valid EPUB that reads the way verse should:

• One poem to a page
• Flush left, ragged right. Never justified
• Long lines wrap with a hanging indent instead of masquerading as new lines
• Blank lines become real stanza spacing
• A clean table of contents built from your titles
• Curly quotes and accents survive, however your editor saved the file

How it works is deliberately plain: one poem per text file, one folder. The filename becomes the poem's title, so Lichen Hush.txt gives you a poem titled "Lichen Hush". To set the running order, put a number on the front of each filename.01 Evenfall.txt, 02 Feral Relocation.txt, 03 Lichen Hush.txt and they'll appear in that order. The number is just for sorting; it's stripped off, so it never shows up in the book. You keep writing wherever you already write. This just turns what you've written into a book.

Built and tested for Kobo, but it's standard EPUB, so it opens on most e-readers, in Apple Books, Calibre, and the rest. It passes the official epubcheck validator with no errors.

In the download: a ready-to-run Windows program, the full C source (one file, no dependencies, change anything you like), and a one-page guide.

Pay what you want. Free, always. If it saved you the price of the bloated tool you nearly bought, the tip jar's open. It helps fund more poetry and the occasional escape to the Scottish Highlands. But take it, go make your book; that's payment enough.