BookStack:
Turning Your Substack Into a Book (How I’m Building It)
A Building-In-Public Story
For the past two years, I’ve been writing regularly on Gita For Everyone.
I’ve crossed 280+ posts and have a community of 400+ subscribers. Creating and touching numerous people there has been one of the most meaningful practices of my life.
A few weeks ago, my teacher suggested something beautiful:
“Why don’t you turn about sixty of your posts into a book for your birthday?”
I loved the idea.
I also thought it would be simple.
It wasn’t.
I looked everywhere for a tool that could take a Substack, ingest hundreds of posts, help me curate them, organize them into chapters, and produce a book-ready manuscript. There were beautiful writing tools out there—but none that performed the complete workflow I needed. Not one that fit a newsletter writer’s actual realities.
So I decided to build it myself.
And that is how BookStack was born.
The Problem I Wanted to Solve
A Substack is chronological.
A book is thematic.
The magic—and the challenge—is converting one to the other.
When you have 280 posts, trying to manually scan, categorize, and cluster them is almost impossible. I needed a system that could:
Ingest all my posts
Embed them into a high-dimensional vector space
Cluster them by theme
Summarize each cluster
And finally give me a Kanban-like board where I could drag and curate the final 60 posts
This wasn’t a simple “export to PDF” job. It required AI that actually understood my writing.
So I started building.
The BookStack Approach
Here’s the end-to-end flow BookStack uses:
1. Ingest
BookStack automatically pulls in your Substack posts—titles, tags, and body content.
2. Embed
The text is encoded into high-dimensional embeddings.
This allows the system to understand subtle themes: devotion, discipline, stories, routines, reflections, etc.
3. Cluster
Using AI clustering, BookStack groups the posts by topic—not by date.
Now the structure begins to emerge:
“Attention & Stillness”
“Wisdom in Everyday Life”
“The Gita Applied”
“Stories from the Road”
—and so on.
4. Auto-Label & Summarize
Each cluster gets:
A label
A short summary
A list of included posts
All AI-generated, all editable.
5. Curate via Kanban
Now comes the magic:
I can drag posts across a Kanban board—Include, Maybe, Skip, Chapter 1, Chapter 2, and so on.
In a few minutes, I can see the book forming visually.
The Issues I Ran Into (and How I Solved Them)
Building in public means being honest about the bumps.
1. Bolt struggled with the embedding model
Bolt.new is magical for fast prototyping, but it has limited understanding of the various complex AI models for embedding.
Fortunately, I had finished the 5-Day Google Gen AI course, and I knew exactly how to implement it properly. So I pasted the correct code into Bolt manually, forced it to use the right model, and verified that the embeddings worked using Google AI Studio.
Once that was fixed, the clustering immediately improved.
2. Needed experimentation playgrounds
Google AI Studio became my sandbox.
I tried building smaller compoentns there. Trying different embedding sizes, clustering methods, and summarization prompts until the results felt right.
That’s the beauty of AI right now: you can try twenty ideas before lunch.
Why I’m Sharing This
I’m building BookStack because I needed it.
But I’m sharing this because I know I’m not the only one.
So many Substack writers have:
years of writing
hundreds of posts
a unique voice
a desire to turn it into something lasting
But no workflow to convert that into a book.
If BookStack works the way I envision, it will help not just me—but many creators.
And the best part?
This entire thing started because my teacher gave me a simple, loving suggestion:
“Make a book.”
I’m building it for myself.
I’m building it for others.
And I’m building it in public.
If you would like to collaborate on it let me know.
If You Want to Follow the Journey
I’ll continue to post updates here on How I Solved It—from architecture choices to UI sketches to the final book that emerges.
If you want early access to BookStack when I release the prototype, drop a comment or hit reply.
Love
Suresh
Day 1-3 Build Video