The last time I published a book, it was through CreateSpace. CreateSpace was a very nice POD platform and I loved their formatting help especially, though it was super basic. At least it wasn’t anything that could be messed up.
And, then like most things pleasant on the internet, it was subsumed by Amazon.
This time, during my publishing journey, I wanted to do things myself. (I also wanted a functioning table of contents.) After digging and researching and asking around, I stumbled upon Atticus.
Atticus is a web-based program designed for formatting* manuscripts, for both epub and pdf (aka ebook and print) versions. It’s a one-time payment of $147 (though there are discount codes floating around from time to time) and it’s being frequently updated, which is nice. A lot of places would make you keep paying for updates.
*Atticus claims it can also be a writing program. It does, technically, have this feature. But it chugs and is kind of a pain to switch around, plus there’s no easy ctrl+f way to do things for a full manuscript, and as we all know, that’s how I write best. I suggest other writing programs over Atticus.
But formatting. Atticus is a breeze! There’s a small learning curve, but when I say small, I mean it. I figured out pretty much everything I needed in a short afternoon. (And I only ever had one thing that I contacted support about, and that was because my manuscript is really weird, so I’m an outlier and should not be counted.)
Firstly, Atticus is web-based, and as we all know, I love that shit. It means you can access it from anywhere with an internet browser. I probably wouldn’t recommend it on your phone, but hypothetically, sure.
But everything has a section or category or place in Atticus.
It auto-creates your table of contents, which is so nice. You can choose how your chapter titles appear in it, too, as well as on-page. There are about a dozen scene break images for you to choose from, but not only can you upload your own to use, they’ve also partnered with Book Brush for you to make your own for free with them. (I’ve bummed around Book Brush a bit, but ultimately did not use them. Also I prefer Canva for my graphic designing.)
There are 17 template choices you can use for your manuscript, with most of them running along genre lines. But you can also customize your own! They have a decent font selection and it’s a cinch to change your entire manuscript’s font and font size. They ask you what trim size your print edition is (and have markers for what’s accepted by various companies!) and have customizable margins within those frames. You can customize how you want your page number, title, chapter title, etc to appear on each page. (Sadly, no bottom page numbers?)
Atticus really is that easy. You upload your manuscript—chapter by chapter, though, which I found slightly irritating but that’s because I technically have a buttload of chapters since I have interstitials—and then it really is as easy as clicking a couple buttons, making a couple of choices, and bam. Formatted manuscript churned out for you. They currently offer epub and pdf exports, so that’ll cover your basic ebook and print versions. You can also preview it in whatever format you want to proof it!
Yes, there is merit to learning how to code and format things yourself, especially if you’ll be churning out a ton of books by yourself. That said, a) I love one-time purchases of things to make my life easier, and b) I did my time hand-coding stuff when ao3 refused to accept gdoc formatting. I hand-coded several hundred thousand words. I served my sentence. I am not doing it again, especially when I would have to do my own table of contents.
So I can’t recommend Atticus enough for those who are interested in self-publishing your work. It is seriously SO easy to use!
