Most of the thoughts I share on this blog are related to the Orthodox Faith. I’m going to diverge a bit and talk a little bit about my experience formatting a book for self-publishing.
As anyone who has followed this project knows, I have used Google Docs as my word processor, because I wanted the process to be public and I wanted people to be able to contribute. I had at least one extremely helpful person (hat tip to Diego) so I would consider this approach to be a success.
When I first set out to publish this book, I figured formatting would be pretty straightforward. It seemed that there was always some new tool showing up and things were getting easier by the day, so I didn’t bother too much about it. When the time came, I had done a little digging around and had a few software packages or services on my short list that I planned to try. I found a few others as I dug deeper. The list of tools I ended up trying or at least strongly considering were:
Before I give you my reasons for rejecting every one of these, I’ll cut to the chase and tell you that I ended up using a very old technology called LaTeX. I used LaTeX to write papers in college in the early ’90s, and it had already been around for a while then.
Vellum
I had been watching Vellum for years and was hoping that it would be the one. It’s not exactly cheap, but it seemed to be one of the most rubust and well respected tools available. Alas, it (last I checked) still does not support footnotes. It does support endnotes, but that was a dealbreaker for me. If you are writing a novel (which is what Vellum is geared toward), this won’t be an issue for you.
Apple Pages
Pages was actually pretty decent, and I got a long way with it. But as I was digging deeper, I found that it cannot create print-ready PDFs that a company like Ingram-Spark requires. This would have been OK for starters because my initial plan was to start only on Amazon and then eventually expand to Ingram, Lulu, or similar. But what I didn’t want to have to do was reformat the book multiple times in different software, so I set Pages aside and went on to another candidate.
Scrivener
I tried out Scrivener once many years ago. It seemed very complex and geared more toward the process of writing than formatting a book. I had already done that part, so half of the software was of no use to me. I didn’t try it again this round. Many reviewers seemed to think it was overly complex and hard to use.
Reedsy
Reedsy seemed so promising at first. I tried it off and on over the last several years and it kept getting better. But it seemed to plateau at one point and it plateaued before it got to where I needed it to get. First, it only offers three styles and no custom font choices. I could have lived with that since one of the choices was Crimson Text, which I would have settled for (I ended up using EB Garamond). However, it had other deficiencies. It doesn’t support tables, and I have two appendices with rather large tables in them. Likewise, I couldn’t bend it to my will enough to allow me to set off the scripture readings from the commentary in a way I was happy with. I think Reedsy would be a great place to write a first novel, but it’s not sufficient for more academic pursuits.
Papyrus Author
I went a long way with this tool. It seemed to have a lot of potential and power and was probably capable of formatting the book in a way I would have found acceptable. But in the end, it had a fatal flaw that scared me away. The first time it crashed, I thought I’d give it a second chance. But it told me to save my work in another file and restart, which made me very nervous. This is a book I just spent hours formatting. I don’t want to do it all over again. The second time it crashed, I uninstalled it. I simply couldn’t trust it to safely handle my words. It seems like a decent piece of software but is obviously not very robust. Note that I was using the unpaid version, not the paid version. I am also using a Mac, so your mileage may vary on other platforms.
Scribus
Scribus felt very clumsy running on a Mac. I finally figured out how to set the mouse speed so I could actually scroll, but it’s still very awkward. This is a tool that is modeled after full-fledged desktop publishing applications like InDesign, which is what I understand many publishing houses use. So I figured this might be the one. But after watching some videos on YouTube and learning what a manual process book layout is in one of these tools, I was simply astounded that this is how it’s done. I’m a software engineer. All good software engineers are lazy. We automate boring tasks that we don’t like to do over and over again so that we don’t have to do them over and over again. Maybe I’m missing something, but if this is the type of tool that has to be used, I’ll just have to pay someone to do it for me.
I did use Scribus for the cover. It supports conversion to CMYK and the generation of print-ready PDFs, so that was helpful. And it’s much better at formatting text than the Gimp, so the text on the back cover and the spine were done by Scribus while the background, cover art, and front title text and effects were done with Gimp. While better than Gimp at formatting text, it still doesn’t do as nice a job as LaTeX.
Atticus
Atticus cost more than I wanted to pay, but I was getting tired of trying out software, so I coughed up the $150 or so and gave it a spin. It feels a smidge like Reedsy with less polish but a bit more power. This could also be a good place to write novels, but Atticus does not support tables, which as I mentioned above was a showstopper for me. I sent an email to customer support and they promptly refunded my money without any questions. This seems like a decent platform, but again, not sufficient for a more academically focused book.
Affinity Publisher
I strongly considered buying a copy of Affinity Publisher after I found Scribus to be so clunky. However, I figured it would be more of the same manual process I had experienced with Scribus, so I didn’t bother. I will note that if I do need a professional desktop publishing system like InDesign someday, this is what I will buy. I refuse to pay the Adobe tax.
To be Continued…
That’s enough for one round. I will add some detail on my experience using LaTeX in a later post.
parochianus 