From The Book Designer:
If you are looking to write a book, you know how important it is to have a good writing and formatting tool.
Atticus is a writing tool that lets you create print and digital books all within one writing software. The Atticus templates are great for authors to simply fill in and then have a book ready to go.
If you’ve been looking for a tool to make your book writing even easier, in this article we’ll be going over what Atticus is, how much it costs, why you should use it, and take a look at the templates they offer.
Why Use Atticus Templates?
Atticus was built by authors, for authors. So that means they have your needs and concerns in mind for each and every book.
They made sure that it’s easy to use and won’t be in the way of your writing. You just need to focus on the creativity and let their software do the rest.
If you don’t use templates when it comes to publishing your book, you’re going to have a hard time getting the format to fit in the guidelines of some publishing companies.
That means your book could end up looking a little off on some reading devices or with the actual physical print version.
Templates save you from having to format and fix everything yourself, which can take countless hours to do and customize. If you are not proficient with technology, you might even have to hire someone to put it together. That is why templates are almost always worth it for book publishing.
What Atticus Offers
Since Atticus was built by authors, they know what you need.
Some of these examples include:
- Being able to drag and drop chapters for easy switches
- Book reading level
- Word count
- Goal tracking so you can make sure you’re hitting your word counts
You can also choose to simply use their formatting editors or templates if you prefer to do your writing in other software.
Atticus can import books from a wide variety of sources, including Scrivener, Microsoft Word, and Google Docs, just to name a few.
After you import your book, you have thousands of ways to customize the overall look and feel of your book, so you can make the exact book you’ve always wanted to publish. We’ll cover that more down below when we get to the templates.
Before you hit publish, you will also be able to see what your book looks like on different devices, so you won’t have any errors in your final draft.
. . . .
Upload your book or start from scratch
The first thing you’ll want to do once you buy Atticus and login is to either upload your book or start one from scratch.
If you start one from scratch, you will be able to pick from a variety of templates.
. . . .
Some examples:
- Delphini could be for a romance novel
- Aether could be for a science fiction book
- Scarlett could be for a memoir
- Bonkers Books could be for a YA novel
For almost any kind of book you want to write, there is an Atticus template ready for you to use and put together.
There is no huge learning curve to get you started on the path to writing your book. All you need to do is follow a few simple prompts and you are on your way.
. . . .
See how it looks on different devices
Due to how good the Atticus template formatting software is, you can quickly see how your book will look across various devices.
You can see how it looks on a Kindle, eBook, as a printed copy, and more.
This can also help you catch any formatting errors you need to fix so it looks good on every platform.
Export your book and publish it
The Atticus templates work with a ton of markets and platforms.
. . . .
How Much Does Atticus Cost?
As of the time of writing this article, Atticus has a one-time fee of $147 which covers both eBooks and printed book templates and formatting.
Depending on your budget, that might sound expensive, but there are not too many tools out there that can format your book so quickly and easily.
Not to mention, many authors have to hire people to format their books for them, which can often cost way more than $147.
It also helps that it’s not a subscription service. Some platforms charge a monthly fee and if you stop paying it, you can lose access to your work. Instead, you pay once and you own it forever. You also receive every future update, template, or added on features for free.
If you are not thrilled, they do offer a 30-day refund if you decide it’s not the right software for you.
Link to the rest at The Book Designer
In a world where every little app designer wants to charge you a monthly or annual subscription fee, a one-time fee of $147 sounds pretty reasonable to PG. He’s going to take a look at Atticus for Mrs. PG’s upcoming book.
His present book formatting approach creates nicely-formatted books, but the range of different looks/themes is more limited than PG would prefer.
Mrs. PG is headed down the home stretch with her next book, so PG will give Atticus a try and likely report on his experience.
Atticus couldn’t handle the way I format my interior, nor use the fonts I license. So I can’t use it – I LIKE my formatting and my fonts (the fonts are simple; Atticus doesn’t allow you to bring in any).
If you’re happy with its very limited templates, go for it.
And Scrivener tells you over and over is it NOT a word processor. It has many/most of the features, and may get more complete with further iterations, but it is a content management system that accepts text. And will create simple ebooks, etc. Not fair to judge it as a word processor when it isn’t. I use it for EVERYTHING now, and then apply a few last bits with my Word 2011 for Mac, and publish.
I paid for Atticus to give it a try. I can say it’s not my cuppa in the slightest. I am so accustomed to Scrivener after years of using it that I can’t make the switch to something with fewer features.
Scrivener’s label coloring comes to mind. I can give a chapter or a scene a color that represents the major character in said scene. Occasionally I will write an entire character to the end of their part in the novel, and then insert the color-coded chapters/scenes throughout the novel. Obvi some editing is required. And that’s only one example.
Of course, one should always use what one feels is adequate for their own writing process. I’m quite certain my process to production as outlined above is convoluted for some, but it works for me after so many years, and that’s why I use it. Others quite happily use their own processes, whatever they are.
Use whatever works to get output.
I’m always attracted to the next shiny thing, but my system works well enough to save the money…at least for now. I compose in Scrivener, export to Atlantis word processor, fix it up by applying styles, etc., convert to epub (one of the features I love about Atlantis), and do any further tinkering in Sigil. I know that sounds like a lot of steps, but it’s really not. I could just compose in Atlantis but I like the organizational features of Scrivener. Still, if Atticus is ever put on a really good sale, I just might bite.
I’ve tried Scrivener for formatting for print and gave up. Tried Atticus and it’s been rather better and easier to work with. All I want to do is format an existing (very long, over 526K words) document with images and poetry. Scrivener couldn’t do it. Wouldn’t let me specify images always on the right, or chapters always start on the right hand page. Atticus does. I still have to do some tweaking – especially of the verse – but when I asked how to handle the verse I got an immediate response from an Atticus person. So far I’m in favor of Atticus over Scrivener. Now I just have to get back into the project which got derailed due to … let’s just say, life.
I hasten to add that I do text-only POD and e-book products, with the occasional b&w image somewhere in the preface. I do not produce output with multiple images of any kind, and further admit that I have no desire to do so. I produce my covers with Affinity Photo.
My Scrivener text export goes into a .docx file that is formatted by Word. I use calibre to produce an .epub from the Word .docx for both Google Play Books and Kobo. Again, there are no images involved in my interiors. The .docx file is dumped into Affinity Publisher, where I have a Master Pages setup for either 5.25×8, or 4.25×7, depending on the number of pages in the print book
I’ve been doing this for almost 30 years, so it is all second nature by now.
If Atticus, or anything else, works for you, all the better. I’m not selling anything, just outlining what works for me, to produce text-only POD, over the long term.
Two years ago I discovered Version 1 of Affinity Photo, Publisher, and Designer on sale. I use Photo for my print and e-book covers (although Publisher could be used for those, too). I now use Publisher for all of my POD print book interiors at Ingram Spark and Amazon. I can’t speak to content, but my POD interiors rival that of the Big 5.
(Well, actually, I can speak to content. In an average year I get anywhere from 10,000 to 12,000 downloads a year, every year, so there’s that.)