1. A dead-simple web IDE for asciidoc with live preview[1]
2. A script for checking for common AsciiDoc mistakes (e.g. an unterminated table will mess up all text following it).
3. A script which enforces the house style.
4. A makefile which runs docker (of course) to build the book with Manning styling.
5. A buildbot configuration on my server to run 2, 3 and 4 above on `git push` and move the generated pdf and docx into a directory served by nginx.
Though it may seem like a lot, this investment has been totally worth it - the ability to push a change and be viewing the updated pdf in ~1 minute is very liberating. I can't imagine what it'd be like to not have this kind of thing in place. I can share some more of the above if there's interest.
If you're ever thinking of writing a book yourself, I'd highly recommend making the investment into a process like the above (or a tool like GitBook, though I've never tried it and it seems to be more than just a build tool) so you can get the boring stuff out of the way and focus on what you want to be doing - writing.
[0] http://docker-in-practice.github.io/ [1] https://github.com/aidanhs/AsciiDocIde