I want to start typesetting my own novels and stories so I can publish them myself, but I don't want to use LaTeX.

The MOM macros for GNU troff (groff) look like they might be straightforward.

http://www.schaffter.ca/mom/mom-01.html

@starbreaker I recently discovered asciidoc (and the tool asciidoctor) and it seems cool. Powerful, plain text, but with much more features than plain markdown. And you can generate PDFs without having to go via LaTeX