blogaversary, indie author tip, writing

Indie Author Top Tip for Good Looking Books

One aspect of self publishing that can be particularly daunting is formatting your ebooks and print books for publication.

While you can pay someone to format your books for you, it can be expensive, and complicated should you want to update the front and back matter of your books as you continue to publish.

Kindle does provide a basic formatting tool that produces nice results but if you want to have more control over how your book looks and wish to produce a good looking product, you will want to use other software.

Those lucky enough to have access to a MAC can use Vellum, which is often lauded as the best formatting software for indie authors.

Until recently I had an arduous method of formatting my books that involved stripping all the formatting from word, setting up linked menus by hand, and wrangling pdfs into order.

Last year I bought Atticus software and it has made my formatting much quicker, easier, and with better results. Similar to Vellum, but with support for more platforms and almost half the price, Atticus has lots of templates and customizable options for making really beautiful ebooks and print books.

Atticus has lots of nice features for writing directly into the software as well, but I’m not too familiar with them as I use it mainly for formatting.

I’m still learning how to make the most out of the software, but it’s intuitive, easy to use, and cuts hours off my previous formatting time.

If you are self publishing and want a way to make your books shine, I highly recommend Atticus.


Just a note to say that all of these recommendations come from things I’ve used and found worthwhile. I’m not affiliated or associated with these companies in any way.

8 thoughts on “Indie Author Top Tip for Good Looking Books”

  1. Thanks for sharing your find, Iseult. I use Jutoh and have had good luck with it (for ten years), but it doesn’t carry forward all my fancy header fonts. That said, having a reliable software is essential. 🙂

    Liked by 1 person

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