You don't have too - almost nobody remembers this, but Microsofts entire office suite can be fully used by a COM client. Granted the COM API is one ugly son of a bitch, but the Python implementation isn't nearly as bad.<p>So my suggestion would be to write the book in a format that you like and then write a quick Python program that uses the COM API of MS Word to compile it into a .doc which you can then send to the publisher.