- My latest book, coming out in 2023,
was written on the new writing
and formatting software, Atticus.
If you're thinking of making a purchase
but wondering if you should,
well this video is for you.
(upbeat music)
Hey there, I'm Julie, the Book Broad.
I'm a three time, soon-to-be four time, Author
and the Founder of the fabulous
self-publishing services firm called Book Launchers.
At 20Books to 50K in 2021, Dave Chesson of Kindlepreneur
or Publisher Rocket unveiled his new software, Atticus.
In my mind, it was like Scrivener, Word and Vellum
all got mashed up into one software and I was smitten.
I bought my copy that night
and declared to my team the following week
that we were going to get an enterprise license
and give versions to all our clients
and use it as our standard as soon as
they rolled out the collaboration feature.
You see, this software will,
when they finally finish programming all of it,
will potentially be the perfect solution
to a lot of the woes we experience as authors
and a self-publishing services platform
that work with a lot of different people on a project.
So first, let me share the things that I loved
and still love about Atticus.
Besides the super cute dog for an icon,
it gives me some of the functionality
of Scrivener that I liked, without giving me
the complications that made my head spin.
Here, let me show you quickly what I mean.
See these things on the left?
They are chapters.
So we can move them around, add a chapter, manipulate them.
It gives you a visual look at your book the whole time.
I really like that versus being lost
in the middle of a Word document.
That's a lot like Scrivener.
Each chapter has a word count too,
which I found really useful because I would be able to see
oh boy, this chapter's getting too big.
Or, ooh, this chapter's a little too small.
It also looks and functions a lot like Word
where I am very comfortable.
Instead of the built-in Microsoft spell check,
it's got ProWriting Aid integrated for spell check
and other writing tools,
which is a huge upgrade over Word I think.
You also have this front matter section
so you can start planning some of those pieces
that a lot of authors forget about
until they go to layout and then go,
Ooh I need to have a title page and a copyright page.
It also creates a table of contents right here for you.
And finally, my other favorite feature
was this book goal and word count.
You can see how many days in a row you've been writing
and kind of gamify your writing journey.
And there's also a built-in timer.
So whether you're doing writing sprints,
or you're just trying to make yourself focused
for a set amount of time,
the timer can be a really useful way to do that.
As you can see, the marketing book
is a bit of a beast, but don't worry,
we've been cutting it down since this draft.
I had some glitches with writing the book
when I had big paragraphs that I imported from video scripts
but largely that was fixed by turning Grammarly off
of my computer and hitting return a few times
to split the paragraph up.
I did send that issue to support though,
and likely they've even resolved it
since I've been writing the book.
Overall, I enjoyed my experience
writing the book in the software.
Unfortunately, they don't have the collaboration feature
built in yet so an editor can't hop in and track changes,
which we were really excited about for many reasons.
But one of them was because you can have
version control and lock the document.
Because it's an app, it lives in the cloud
and it's not a piece of software
sitting on your computer with the file
only being on your computer or in your own personal cloud.
It has some exciting features that would give us an option
over people using Google, which is a problematic piece
for editing and entering layout,
as we've talked about before.
So having it live in the cloud does allow
to have some features that authors like with Google Docs.
And once it has collaboration, would give us,
as an organization, more control over the manuscript.
You'd be able to lock access
and also make sure the document
doesn't get lost in a computer crash on anyone's side.
So I'm really excited for those things,
but without this ready to go,
I was forced to export my file to Word.
Easy enough to do.
Watch how quick and easy it is.
Oh, and you can see a lot of the other features here
which are important to set up
if you are using Atticus to lay out your book.
And, you can then export to a PDF and an EPUB.
All wonderful attributes
and tools that continue to make me so excited
for this software as a way to simplify our process
and give our authors more tools
to edit their own books in the future.
But again, without a way to have an editor
work on this file, you have to export it.
And here's what it looked like when I exported it.
The table of contents didn't come over
and the book has no spacing, so it looks horrible.
I lost my paragraphs and the entire book was like this.
It was such a pain for me to read through.
And then when I handed it to our book marketing manager
for her to read through, she commented on how hard
that made it to get through it.
She had to read the book a second time,
which, at a hundred thousand words,
well, that's not a small job.
So that wasn't cool.
And it would stop me from writing in the software again
until I could collaborate with others within the software.
And of course, if you plan to use Atticus
for the layout of your book,
you would export it to edit it and then import it back in.
The good news is that was pretty easy to do.
Check it out.
(playful music)
- Easy peasy lemon squeezy.
- Oh, and this is after I edited it.
So look how much we've already cut it down now.
We're down to 80,000 words.
Still a big book though, it's better than it was.
Okay, an Atticus is a great little system
for someone who is not a designer to lay out a book.
It's not going to be as quick as you would like
and it still requires you to be patient
and review line-by-line what's happening in your book.
But it's much easier to do
than in a program like Adobe InDesign.
See, check this out.
Head in here.
And they have some built-in templates
or you can make custom templates.
The preview window on the right is gold
as someone, me, who has no interest
in ever doing my own book layout,
because I know how nitpicky it is to get right,
this sure makes it look easy.
What it really does is simplify the process
so an expensive designer isn't required.
You'll need to make some choices on this page
but that allows you to get it closer to the look you want.
It still doesn't quite customize the level
most of our books get customized to,
but again, that's the difference between
a template or a customized template,
versus software that is used by a professional designer.
You can add images and do a lot of that work here
and the output of this is really strong.
Once you have all the elements
and the design pieces set up,
it's really as simple as clicking EPUB or PDF.
Just for kicks, I'll hit export PDF
so you can see what it looks like.
(playful music)
We don't use this for design yet,
but we are excited about incorporating it
for the simpler books in the future
when we have an enterprise license,
because then our authors will be empowered
to make their own tweaks postlaunch,
or post Book Launchers life
versus needing to get a designer to go back
into their InDesign files and make a small change.
Because when you do that with InDesign,
you then have to scour the manuscript
to see if it introduced anything else weird
because it often does.
So I think this has the power to reduce our costs
and our time, which in turn
can reduce what we have to charge in our process.
And as an author, if you are doing a do-it-yourself book,
this is a really powerful tool.
And again, because it's cloud-based,
you can use it on Mac or PC.
Vellum, which is also a good design tool
is only for Mac users.
Again, you'll still need to go through
to check for orphans and widows
and all the proofread checks after you've laid it out.
But it's a powerful tool to get you to a good design.
I'm anxiously awaiting so many future additions
so we can fully use it and I can fully recommend it.
As of the filming of this video
collaboration is no longer in their short-term view.
So I'm going to keep watching it and keep cheering them on
but it's not something I can really fully get behind
just yet because that collaboration feature is so vital
and the export function makes your book so hard
to work in for editors.
But the software's only $147.
I mean, this is a steal of a deal,
and I couldn't be more excited that it's been created
and it's only going to get better and better.
Have you used Atticus?
Let me know your thoughts below,
and if you want my updates on this,
make sure you've subscribe to the channel
and turn notifications on so you find out
when my new videos are out.
And I have a lot of videos I could send you to after this,
but if you saw the epigraph on the left column,
maybe you're wondering what the heck that is.
So why don't you watch this video right here on epigraphs
or if you're wondering what I'm talking about
with regards to watching out for orphans and widows
and all that fun, well, these videos right here
and here are on layout or interior formatting.
So go ahead, watch one of those three videos.
I'm waiting for you.