I have used Apple computers at home for thirty-five years, entirely by choice, and in that time I have arrived at exactly one strong opinion about tools: the right one disappears. My indie author tech stack 2026 is built on that single principle. Every app I run for the writing business is there because it does one job, does it quietly, and then gets out of the way. Nothing earns a place by being clever. It earns a place by being invisible while I work and reliable when I come back.
That sounds like a low bar. It isn't. Most software wants to be a lifestyle. It wants you to build a system, configure a workspace, join a community, and watch a forty-minute onboarding video before you've written a word. I have a different test. If a tool needs more managing than the thing it's supposed to manage, it's overhead wearing a costume. So the whole stack is deliberately small: one tool per phase, owned or lean wherever possible, and Apple-coherent so nothing argues with anything else.
Here's the entire thing, job by job.
Planning lives in Bear. Every book starts as a mess - half a character, a line of dialogue I overheard, a structural idea that won't survive contact with chapter four. Bear is where that mess goes. It's plain text underneath, it tags instead of foldering me into a filing cabinet, and it syncs across every device without ceremony. The reason it works is that it asks nothing of me. I'm not building a second-brain cathedral; I'm jotting. A planning app that makes you plan how to plan is one you'll have abandoned by Act Two.
Drafting happens in Ulysses. One window, no formatting chrome, a word count and a blank sheet. That's the whole point. A drafting environment should remove decisions, not add them - fonts, margins and export are problems for a future, more confident version of me. While the words are still arriving, I don't want choices. I want a clean surface and nowhere to hide. Markdown keeps the prose portable, so the text is never trapped inside the app that happened to birth it.
Tasks go in Linear. Most authors would call a software issue-tracker wild overkill for writing novels, and on the face of it they're right. But releasing on a schedule is the entire game when you're solo, and a release isn't a vibe - it's a project with dependencies. Cover, formatting, blurb, upload, launch email, the lot. Linear treats a book launch like the small software project it actually is, which suits a brain that thinks in tickets and dependencies even when it's feeling things deeply. Velocity is the lever. A tracker keeps the lever from slipping.
The website runs on Cloudflare. Fast, owned, and free of the monthly platform tax you pay to rent space on someone else's terms. The author site and this very blog live there, which means the words and the audience sit on ground I control rather than ground I'm leasing until the rules change. Owning your platform is unglamorous and occasionally annoying. It is also the difference between a business and a tenancy.
The newsletter lives in Kit. Email is the one channel nobody can quietly throttle, reshuffle or switch off between you and the people who actually want your books. Social platforms lend you an audience and can repossess it at any time. A list is yours. For an indie author, that distinction is close to everything.
Publishing is KDP. The last mile. It costs nothing to put a book on the shelf, and I do the covers, editing and formatting myself, which keeps production cost at precisely zero. People treat that as a constraint. I treat it as a feature. Every pound I don't spend producing a book is a pound the book doesn't have to earn back before it's profitable, and learning to do the work yourself means never waiting on someone else's calendar to ship.
That's the stack. Six tools, one desktop, no drama. It's boring on purpose, because boring is what ships books - and a stack you have to think about is a stack that's thinking about itself instead of working for you. The whole arrangement is designed to vanish the moment I sit down, so the only interesting thing left in the room is the page.
A novel about this
If you want the comedy version of trusting machines more than people, I wrote a whole book about it. In Significant Other Machine, Sam Oldfield is twenty-seven, runs her own IT outfit, and would genuinely rather debug a misbehaving network than make small talk at a party. People are unpredictable. Systems behave. So when her mother gives her a deeply unwanted gadget for her birthday, Sam being Sam, she does the only sensible thing and hacks it into something that listens, remembers, and always knows the right thing to say.
I understand her completely. The difference is that my stack only has to organise my work, not my heart - and on the days it all syncs first time, I'd be lying if I said the temptation to ask for more wasn't there.
FAQ
What's the best tech stack for an indie author in 2026?
The best stack is the smallest one that covers the whole journey - planning, drafting, tasks, website, email, publishing - without getting in your way. Tool count is a cost, not a flex. If an app needs a weekend of setup before it earns its keep, it's the wrong app. Pick one tool per job, learn it once, and spend the saved hours writing.
Do you need expensive software to self-publish a book?
No. The publishing platform itself costs nothing up front, and most of the writing tools sit in the affordable or one-off-purchase tier rather than the enterprise one. The real spend in self-publishing is usually covers, editing and formatting - and even those are optional outgoings if you're willing to learn to do them yourself. Zero production cost isn't a limitation; it's a margin.
Why build everything around Apple?
Coherence. When the planning app, the drafting app and the devices all sync the same plain text without me thinking about it, the friction disappears, and friction is the enemy of finishing a book. I've used Apple machines at home for decades by choice, so the ecosystem is a known quantity rather than a religious position. The point isn't the badge on the lid. It's that I never lose ten minutes to a tool arguing with itself.
Which of your novels is actually about technology?
Significant Other Machine is the one. Sam Oldfield runs a small IT business and trusts systems that behave predictably, because people don't - then she hacks an unwanted birthday gadget into something that talks back. It's a comedy about preferring the machine, which, on the days my own stack behaves, I understand completely.
Do you use AI anywhere in the stack?
Around the writing, never in the prose. AI is useful for the admin that surrounds a book - research, formatting chores, the dull scaffolding - but the sentences stay mine. If you want the fictional version of that anxiety, Significant Other Machine is a whole novel about what happens when you let the machine do the talking for you.