I’m Sam, solo builder trying to fix the “Google Docs pretending to be a book” problem

Hey everyone, I’m Sam 👋

I’m a solo builder and I spend a lot of time writing long-form stuff: guides, frameworks, SOPs, little ebooks.

Weirdly, the writing was never the hard part for me.

The pain always started right after I typed the last line.

Exporting to PDF.

I’d lose evenings fighting with margins, headings, weird page breaks, broken spacing, and that very specific “Google Docs pretending to be a real book” vibe. The content was solid, but the final PDF always looked a bit cheap.

The moment that really stung was when a friend asked:

“Can you send me the finished ebook? I want to show it to someone.”

And my first thought wasn’t “Great!” It was: “Damn, I don’t want anyone to see how this looks.”

That’s when it clicked: I’m trying to build things I’m proud of, but the last mile (design/layout) didn’t reflect the value inside. So instead of forcing myself into tools I don’t enjoy, I did what most devs do when they’re annoyed enough: I started hacking my own escape hatch.

Nothing fancy at first. No “startup idea”.

Just:

“What if I could describe a book in JSON and get a clean, consistent, print-ready PDF out of it?”

No Figma.
No dragging boxes around.
No 25 rounds of export → tweak → re-export.

That little hack eventually turned into what I’m now calling EbookForge.

It takes structured JSON and turns it into a professional-looking PDF ebook. I originally built it just for myself, but I’ve started cleaning it up and opening it up because people around me had the exact same pain.

Right now I’m trying to figure out a few things:

• Are there more people who actually write long-form and hate layout as much as I do?

• If you write ebooks, guides, or playbooks, how do you handle formatting today?

• Do you brute-force it, outsource it, or… just never ship because the design part drags on?

If this resonates with you, I’d genuinely love to hear how you handle the “last mile” of publishing.

And if you’re curious what this thing looks like in practice, here’s the live version I’m iterating on: https://ebookforge.app/

Happy to answer anything about the build, the workflow, or the pain that started it.