As I mentioned in my September post, I purchased Atticus this month, to give it a try.
Back when I was using the SFWA forums, in 2016 or so, Vellum was the publishing software for self-pub authors. It offered quick, easy, painless generation of ebook and print book files from a Microsoft Word doc. Users described it as “format your book in Microsoft Word, upload it to Vellum, and five minutes later Vellum generates a book file for you.” The catch?
Well, the big one is that the software is only available for the Mac.
The other disadvantage is that Vellum had limited customization options. You got an e-pub out of Vellum that looked crisp and professional and like everyone else’s e-pub out of Vellum. But most readers are not that attentive to the little details that go into the book-making process. They want to read the book, not admire the layout choices. (To be honest, sometimes when publishers do fuss about the details, like making sure to use a specific unusual font for an epub, I will override their decision and use one I prefer). Numerous indie authors recommended Vellum. People who didn’t use Macs recommended Vellum and renting time on Mac-in-the-Cloud to use it. I never saw anyone recommend a different software package. Don’t get me wrong: there were people using other publishing software.
But they didn’t recommend what they were using.
The combination of “Alinsa likes formatting my books for me” and “I don’t want to learn how to use Mac-in-the-Cloud in order to format my books” deterred me from investigating Vellum personally.
Then, perhaps a year and a half ago, I heard about Atticus. It was new (note: I hadn’t heard it recommended before because it didn’t exist before). It promised to do the same thing that Vellum did only better, cheaper, and -- most importantly to me -- available on Windows (also Linux, Mac, and Chromebook).
Now, I’ve never used Vellum, and I can’t speak for what it’s like or whether Atticus is better or worse. My experience with Atticus is also the first time I have formatted my own book for publishing. So this is my experience as a total noob to the process.
My personal workflow also presents some particular challenges to formatting. First, I don’t use Microsoft Word for writing at all. Second, I haven’t consistently used any platform for writing. I do most of my writing in Google Docs, but I’ve also used writing gamification sites: 4thewords.com and soulscribesgame.com. The formatting in my work is wildly inconsistent. If you use Microsoft Word to write, it will automatically make many small formatting changes without you noticing, unless you disable them. Two hyphens in a row will be turned into an en-dash character. Three periods in a row will be turned into an ellipsis character. Straight quote marks will be turned into curly quotes, usually facing the correct direction. (These are some of the reasons no one wants to write code in MS Word.)
Most of the software I use doesn’t do any of that -- or if it did, copy-pasting it from one program to another undid it.
Alinsa gave me a checklist of the steps she’s always gone through for me:
- find places where a word in the middle of an italic phrase is unitalicized as an emphasis, and replace with bold italic as the emphasis
- make sure all straight quotes are correctly replaced with 'smart' quotes
- replace -- and --- with appropriate en-dash and em-dash characters
- make sure em-dashes are used consistently (interruptions and start and end of quoted speech, interrupted sentences at end or start of paragraphs
- make sure there's no spaces between em-dash and closing quote in these cases
- make sure ... turns into proper ellipsis characters
- find places there are four or more periods in a row and make sure that's intended (could be ellipsis + period, but could also be a typo)
- also check for places there are two (and exactly two) periods in a row, since that's almost always a typo
- make sure ellipsis characters followed by a punctuation mark are formatted correctly (I have a layout macro that does this for me) since in print layouts at least things don't always look quite right with default spacing if you just do ellipsis character + punctuation
- Replace space with non-breaking space anywhere there is a space + en-dash, so that line wraps always happen after the dash, not before
- Make sure spaces after "Mr." "Mrs." etc are correctly marked as normal spaces and not sentence-ending ones (to get the spacing right during typesetting) -- you 99% probably don't care about this, but just for completeness
- Make sure places where there's an apostrophe followed by a quote mark, or visa versa, are marked to render correctly and look ok in print
- When there are punctuation in the middle of apostrophe-then-quote, make sure it happens in the right place (e.g. generally ’,” looks better (especially in print) than ,’”
- check for wayward backtick (`) characters
- check for instances of two capital letters in a row followed by a lower case letter, which probably indicates a word that was supposed to be CApitalized but had a minor excess of shift key when being typed
- make sure any tables (e.g. for Wisteria's list of pros and cons of her suitors) lay out correctly in all readers & print
- make sure & characters didn't get accidentally interpreted as HTML or other markup
- check for periods without spaces following (usually wrong unless part of an acronym/initialism)
- verify correct title case on chapter headings
I exported my Google doc to MS Word (so I could use VBA macros) and addressed most of the above using macros or find & replace (or MS Word’s spell/grammar check, which caught approximately a million correct things but also the occasional error. I felt like it asked a hundred times “Are you sure you meant 'its' and not 'it's'?” or vice versa, and its suggestion was correct exactly zero of these times. NOT EVEN ONCE).
In addition to the steps above, to import to Atticus, I prepared the document by having it contain only the book contents (no front or back matter; Atticus handles those inside the software and says not to import them), and by turning all my section breaks into * . (Atticus calls the image used for the section break an “ornamental break”. These come up when you have a break within a chapter.) Chapter breaks are indicated by using the “Header 1” style for the chapter title, which I already do so that required no change.
Much of my initial experience with Atticus was “upload document, look at epub, realize I’d forgotten to convert something because I hadn’t thought to ask Alinsa for a checklist yet, fix it in Word, repeat.”
Doing front and back matter in Atticus was a little fussy because Atticus doesn’t like formatting from other software packages. So for my “Also by” section, I’d copy-paste the blurbs with no formatting, and then reformat them in Atticus.
I also discovered that Atticus centered all text in the “Also by” section, which absolutely mystified me at first. And looked terrible, since I had several book blurbs listed. Eventually, I realized that Atticus expected me to list only titles. Ohhh.
I thought about listing only titles, but instead I copied my blurbs into a different back matter type and retitled it as “Other Books by L. Rowyn”. (Atticus has a bunch of specific back matter types but it’s perfectly happy to let you rename them as whatever you like). I like picking a handful of books and highlighting their contents, instead of listing all of them by title only. I admit, though, the prospect of a list of titles that I could easily standardize across all books is tempting. I may yet go that route.
Atticus allows you to import templates for front/back matter. So if you always have the same Author Bio or the same Also By or whatever, you can write it once and import it to any new books. You can also update it once and tell Atticus to update it in all books, which is pretty nice if you’re doing something like the above-mentioned “list of all your books in the Also by”.
Atticus’s intention is to make a consistent epub across a variety of contemporary, popular platforms. It has previews of what your book should look like on a number of different devices from Amazon/Apple/B&N/Kobo/etc.
But being who I am, my favorite e-reader is Google Play Books (it has a great night mode) for my 6-year-old Android phone. So I imported my new e-pub to Google Play Books, and went “huh, the space between lines is excessive, but it’s otherwise fine.” Next I took a look at it in the other e-reader I already had installed, which was an old copy of B&N’s Nook for Desktop. Where it was spaced normally, but the chapter titles were in the same font as the text and squashed right next to it.
I asked Atticus support about these issues. Atticus support answered promptly. They looked into it, could not find issues on their end, and gently suggested that perhaps the epub would perform better in an e-reader used by more than 0.01% of the reading population.
I mean, okay, fair.
I tested it in the Kindle Previewer, where it looked great. Alinsa tested it on two of her devices. While it had a few oddities on those, they were very minor. In all cases, the text was readable and looked fine overall.
On my first read-through, I found only one formatting error that I could possibly construe as Atticus’s fault: one instance of * had not been converted to an ornamental break. This seemed to be because it was at the bottom of a page in MS Word, and it didn’t have a blank line below it like all the other section breaks. I adjusted it in MS Word and reuploaded (because I had to fix a bunch of other formatting things that were my fault and easier to do in MS Word, like turning three periods into an ellipsis and using em-dashes instead of en-dashes where appropriate).
Demon’s Alliance contains four pieces of correspondence, which posed special challenges to formatting. On my first pass, I forgot to do anything with them in Atticus, and they were just several paragraphs of italicized text.
On subsequent passes, I selected each of the blocks of text with correspondence, marked it as “block quote”, and took a look at the result.
On Google Play Books (where the line height was already high), they looked fine: all of the correspondence text was uniformly indented, with paragraphs separated by a blank line instead of being individually indented. This is how Alinsa formatted the correspondence in other books, so I was happy with it.
I did notice that it had some blank lines between places where I didn’t want blank lines, like between the date and the greeting line. I dug around in Atticus and discovered I could replace the “hard breaks” (enter key) between those lines with “soft breaks” (ctrl-enter) and that would eliminate the blank line. Perfect!
Then I looked at it in other e-readers and in the pdf for the print version. Both Kindle and the print version had enormous amounts of space between each paragraph, like three blank lines instead of one. What. Why.
At this point I contacted Atticus support again. They recommended that I make the block quotes for each piece of correspondence into a “single block quote” instead of “multiple block quotes”. I inferred from this that when you select several consecutive paragraphs and tell Atticus to turn them into a block quote, it defaults to making each paragraph into a separate block quote. To make them one block quote, I combined each paragraph on each letter and then separated them again with two soft breaks (ctrl-enter twice). This seemed clunky? I have asked if this is how it’s supposed to work or if there’s an easy way that I overlooked, but haven’t heard back yet.
In any case, it worked. Yay!
I should note that editing text in Atticus, as a general matter, is easy and intuitive. So, for example, when I need to fix a typo or something I can just fix it in Atticus. However, Atticus does not, so far as I can tell, have a find-and-replace function, which surprised me.
Another thing I spent some time on was making a custom section break for my book in ArtRage, just because I could. I haven’t fussed about section breaks in ages. It was fun to do so again. (This was by no means required; Atticus had several different built-in ornamental breaks to choose from if I didn’t want to make my own).
All told, I spent several hours working on the layout in one fashion or another (not counting time spent on the final read-through). Some of this was spent learning to use Atticus. Most of it felt more like time spent learning what a published book is supposed to look like when you use formatting in a normal, consistent way instead of writing in several different products, each with their own distinctive styles. Plus a chunk of time assembling front/back matter text, which I had to do even when Alinsa did all the formatting stuff for me.
Overall, I feel like Atticus did its job well and that the next book I format in it will be pretty quick. I am pleased by its ease-of-use. Yes, I stumbled a few times, but I didn’t need to tear into the epub or learn code to fix issues. I am delighted by the response time from Atticus support -- when I email with an issue, they’ve responded within hours. Including the email I sent at 9PM CDT on a Friday.
As I said, I haven’t used anything else, so I don’t know how it compares. Based on what I’ve heard, I suspect the Atticus experience is similar to Vellum. I doubt Vellum would have saved me from my own formatting inconsistencies either. (Alinsa would have, tho. Best wuff. ♥) I am happy with the product and look forward to putting everything I learned to use when I layout Angel’s Grace. (Soooooon.)
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