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The Best Formatting Tools for Your Book · The Daily Writer

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hey my friend, welcome to The Daily Writer, where we help writers become authors of their own lives.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Email subscriber Jane Anderson sent in two questions related to book formatting, and I will share both of these right here.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: Number one, she says, What book formatting tools do you use, and which do you recommend?
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: And number two, she says, Are there jobs for individuals who want a career in book formatting?
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: This assumes the person wants to support writers, but not write themselves.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Jane, thanks so much for those questions.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to tackle these questions in order.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: So let's talk about formatting tools first.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Professional book designers typically use Adobe InDesign, which is a really robust and complicated app that personally I have zero interest in learning.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, I'm laughing at myself because my one and only experience with Adobe InDesign was years ago, probably seven or eight years ago.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um I subscribed to Adobe Creative Cloud.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: I really only use a couple things on in that whole suite, um, which is kind of crazy because it's sort of expensive, honestly.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: But I only use a couple things on it.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: But I remember years ago, um, and I've been subscribing to it for a long time, I opened up Adobe InDesign, and I thought, you know, I'm gonna try to dive into this and see maybe if I can learn a little bit of book formatting.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: I opened it up for five minutes and I couldn't make heads or tails out of it, so I shut it down and I've never opened it up since then.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: So therefore, for my own books, I almost always hire a professional designer because the book is probably gonna look better than anything that popular formatting apps like Atticus or Vellum can do.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: And honestly, I can instantly spot when an author has used Vellum or Atticus for one of their books.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, there's an author that I ordered a couple books from.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, this has been probably six or eight weeks ago.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, I ordered two books and got both of them and I opened them up.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: And because I have a lot of experience with Vellum in particular, it was instantly obvious that they had used Vellum to format their book.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: And the funny thing is that an app like Vellum, and I assume this is, and in fact, I know this is true of Atticus, they have lots and lots of different templates, but it's funny because most people who use those apps don't seem to really spend much time trying to make their design for their book look unique or most of the time interesting, to be totally frank with you.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so, and that's not a knock on those books necessarily, it's just that when you see lots and lots of self-published books using the exact same fonts and sort of the out-of-the-box settings of those apps, it's a little bit disappointing and and all that because I like books to look really, really good.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I love for their I love for books to have put a little bit of pizzazz into their design and a little bit of creativity and originality and those kinds of things.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm not saying that I think less of authors who use Vellum or Atticus.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's just that those apps have limited templates, and most authors who use those tools don't really seem to customize those templates very much.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: Now, however, both of those tools do exactly the same thing, and I think they can be really useful.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: I have, as I mentioned, I have used Vellum extensively.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, Vellum used to be one of my podcast sponsors.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: They're really, really fantastic people.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: And again, this is not a knock on Vellum at all.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: But most authors who use those apps don't seem to really take advantage of how robust that they actually are.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: They're fantastic apps if you want to dive into book formatting yourself.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: But if you do that, I would encourage you to really learn them inside and out as much as possible and make your book look as much like a really professionally formatted book as you possibly can.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: So, in short, I think that if you can afford a professional designer, you should always go that route because it's going to save you time, and your book is probably going to look better because a true pro is designing it.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: But if you can't afford a professional designer, then Vellum and Atticus are really great options, and I know a lot of authors who use those.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: Now, just as a side note, I do want to say that I formatted my artist suitcase book with Vellum years ago, and I was really happy with the result.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: That's all that I could afford at the time.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: But probably I will do a second edition of that book and maybe add a couple of other books in the suitcase series, and eventually that'll become a series.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I will use a professional designer when I do that because I want it to look really, really great.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: Now let me address your question about making money as a book formatter or book designer.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: I'm using those terms interchangeably, as you can tell.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: And yes, you can absolutely create income from offering this as a service.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, I know I could probably name uh I can name three people off the top of my head who offer that as a service and they use those tools to do that.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: They use one or the other, Vellum or Atticus.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: But keep in mind that if you offer that, there's a lot of competition out there for people who are offering that service, and you really have to like design and be really good at it in order to stand out.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: So if that's a direction that you want to go, I would recommend actually learning something like InDesign, because that's a whole different level of service, and it's what really the truly professional designers use for books.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: However, that being said, if you want to offer a more template-based design service that's more straightforward, it's less expensive and simpler, you can definitely use Vellum and Atticus and offer formatting services using one or maybe even both of those tools.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: But the issue with using those apps is that, again, they are not highly customizable in the same way that a real professional designer can completely customize a book's design from the ground up.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: So, whatever level of service that you want to offer, there are likely buyers in the price range that you want to offer who will be willing customers.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: I do want to say this, however, this is very, very important.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: Just remember that the less that you charge for a personalized service and the less money that somebody invests, the chances of them being a high maintenance client or customer are very, very high.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: This has this has been a pattern, and everybody who offers any kind of a service like this will probably say the same thing that the less people pay for something, the more high maintenance they oftentimes are.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's just something to keep in mind.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're gonna charge a couple hundred bucks to throw together a design in Vellum or Atticus, um, and you're not gonna really customize it very much, then just know that many of those customers are probably gonna be high maintenance and they're gonna request a lot more changes than you probably want to do.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um, again, just something to keep in mind that's not really related to what we're talking about with book formatting.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's more of a service business little tip in general, but I found that to be true.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Jane, thanks so much.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: I appreciate these questions and I hope that that helps.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for listening.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: Keep writing, keep showing up, and I'll see you tomorrow.