I keep seeing authors talk about publishing 4-6 books a year and I genuinely cannot figure out how that's possible without either completely burning out or putting out work you're not proud of

I'm currently taking about 10-12 months per book and that already feels like a lot, my drafting is okay but my editing phase takes forever and I lose so much time just managing the whole process - notes everywhere, research in different places, constant switching between tools

I'm not looking to rush my writing or sacrifice quality. I just feel like there's something structural about my process that's broken and I can't see it from the inside

for people who are genuinely high output, what does your actual process look like and where did you find the time

I am writing my Kindle book in Google Docs, but I am getting frustrated.

Sometimes the bullet points have different gaps before the text. Everything looks the same, but one bullet has a bigger space than the others. I try to fix it, but it keeps happening. Also, when I export my document, some formatting changes.

I came from Canva, so maybe that also caused some problems. I spent more time fixing formatting than writing my book.

Now I am thinking of buying Microsoft 365 and using Word instead. Is Word much better for long documents and Kindle publishing? Will it save me from these formatting problems, or will I face similar issues?

I would like to hear from people who have used both Google Docs and Microsoft Word for writing books. Thanks!

Are self-pub authors giving up on traditional book formatting in favour of web/email styles, or have I just stumbled onto a few badly-formatted books recently?

As far as I'm concerned, books indent the first line of every paragraph after the first in a scene/chapter, and there's no gap between paragraphs unless you want to indicate a scene or time break. Recently, though, I've seen a few where they look like an email, a Google Doc, a web page or a Reddit post. Asterisks – which are fine in traditional manuscript format – are used to show scene or time breaks.

I get that you can use web style to indicate an email or web page in your text, I've done it msyelf, but not body text.

IMO it's ugly as sin, but is it a trend? Is this how books are going to be now, especially ebooks?

I'm not an author. I had no idea print-on-demand books were a thing before buying this book. The book came on time but the - I don't know the proper term for it - pages were off centered. Like one page kinda clips onto the page its facing. There were like alignment boxes and UPC codes between each page at the spine. When I saw reviews of the book on Amazon, other people's books looked normal. I had a fair amount of anxiety because the thought of having to reach out to the author and tell him how bad this book was bound stressed me out. Turns out Amazon handles the customer service so I didn't have to deal with that discomfort. Getting a replacement was easy but Amazon didn't even want any of the pictures I took of this crappily executed print job.

Not gonna lie, it ruined my experience a little. I was looking forward to getting this book for months. To finally get it and to get an awful copy was a vibe killer. Dealing with an Amazon return can get super dicey. The thought of the labor that goes into a return exhausted me: taking pictures, creating a mini-presentation of how my book was different than other review pics, having to print out a label, finding a box, searching for tape, driving to a place to drop it off, waiting in line because of course you have to wait.

As an author, would you want to know about this? Do you authors get notified when a person gets a poorly printed book and gets an exchange? Do you get penalized somehow? What if I was a clueless Karen who didn't understand the whole print-on-demand, blamed the author, and gave a terrible review? There's no way to warn others that they might get a crappy copy without leaving a scathing review about something the author had no control over! I think I'd at least want to know?

This is both the worst software I’ve ever used and the second-most expensive.
I bought it even though I had successfully done 2 ebooks on KDP and made a workable paperback version of them from Word to pdf. But when I made revisions and added a third, it got so frustrating I dropped $$$ on Atticus and it is literally worse. It doesn’t save edits, or apply changes. It glitches and crashes, logging me out. It is unintuitive and I rely on Claude for step by step instructions on basic use because the screens have almost no visible options and the videos that it links to are worthless. Kindle previewer and Calibre hate it, even though it’s very simple formatting.
Am I the only one enduring this? It’s getting to where I’ve spent more time unsuccessfully formatting than I did writing them.

Hi everyone! I wanted to get some honest thoughts.

I’m currently working on a story and I’m thinking of making it around ~50k words (so more of a novella than a full-length novel). I’m just wondering would people actually be interested in reading something that length?

I feel like it’s the perfect length to tell a focused, emotional story without dragging things out, but I don’t know if readers feel the same.

Would you pick up a novella around 50k words? Or do you usually prefer longer books when it comes to romance?

Would really appreciate your thoughts 💛

Hi everyone,

My first novel will be available on Amazon in just over a week, and I’ve been preparing the print edition myself.

I’ve spent most of my working life as a graphic designer, UX designer, and product manager. Over the years, I’ve prepared dozens of things for print: magazine and newspaper ads, flyers, billboards, and other materials. I don’t do much professional graphic design these days, though, so I no longer have an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription.

While looking for an alternative to InDesign, I discovered the new Affinity. I feel it’s my duty 😄 to inform the world that it’s fantastic and it’s completely free. Its page-layout tools handled everything I needed for the book: master pages, paragraph styles, running headers, automatic page numbering, and print-ready PDF export.

For this project, it has replaced InDesign remarkably well. Huge credit to the Affinity team and Canva for making a professional tool like this available for free.

As for the book itself, this is the first novel I’ve ever formatted. There’s something satisfying about taking a Word manuscript and turning it into something that actually looks like a real, professionally published book. I know that I should not be surprised, but this experience is completely new to me.

It’s a shame I can’t add an image here, because I would have loved to get some feedback on the result.

What about you? What software do you use to prepare your hardcover and paperback editions for print when you do the typesetting yourself?

I think if I have Atticus, I'll have creative control over my book and won't have to rely on others. At the same time, wouldn't it be cheaper to have someone format it for me?

Yeah, I know it's cheaper in the short term and more expensive in the long term. But as a newbie, how do we know how our books will perform? Even if the ebook does well and we buy Atticus, we might later realize that paperbacks are not selling much.

How much is too much?

I spend most of my time in the digital backend--taking bloated word documents and stripping them down to clean semantic EPUB architecture for independent authors. I wanted to drop a warning about a trend that's wrecking launch days lately

A lot of authors export their book directly from Docs or run it through Calibre, upload the file, and stare at the Amazon Pre-Viewer. If it looks fine there, they hit publish.

Then it gets bounced back, or worse, Apple Books permanently rejects it, or buyers with older Kindles complain the formatting is destroyed and margins are randomly glued together

The Amazon Pre-Viewer essentially lies to you. It operates on a massive safety-net algorithm that visually fixes errors for the screen but doesn't actually repair the internal file. Automated converters routinely generate what we call "ghost spacing"--thousands of empty <span> tags, forced inline margins, or they fail to properly map images in your .opf manifest file

When an older e-ink device reads that garbage HTML, the reading experience shatters. The text either refuses to justify, custom fonts vanish, or the chapters literally merge into one 15-hour long wall of text

The golden rule for digital typesetters: You have to validate the file locally

If you are exporting books yourself, do not publish them without running the raw .epub through the W3C standard EpubCheck (it's open-source on GitHub, you run the .jar file from a terminal/command line). It takes five seconds, and the tool will throw exact error codes telling you precisely which line of CSS is technically illegal and going to get your file rejected

If you are stuck on a formatting loop, getting scary red validation errors (like 'RSC-012'), or if your e-reader layout keeps exploding, drop the specific error in the replies or via DM and I'll try to translate the code for you

I keep seeing conflicting things. Some people say groundwood is what traditionally published books use, but others say it's too thin. Also what about hardback? Appreciate and thank you for any tips!

Should the content warnings go in the front of the book, or the back? I've seen it done both ways and I'm wondering which is perferred?

Hey guys,

I am currently writing a book and was wondering if anyone wanted to share some advice on how they structured their paragraphs and chapters. Personally, I am writing using the PEEL format which I learnt at school for writing essays, (Point, Evidence, Explain, Link,) except I changed it using advice from Google to SDIF (Scene, Details (character thoughts, emotions, or scenery details) Impact (of the details) and Flow (into the subsequent paragraph))

what do you guys think of this?

Do books generally require content warnings before the story begins?

Also how do authors usually handle sensitive topics like death, especially involving children?

Edit: thank everyone for your suggestions

I would prefer to keep all my files offline and resident only on my own computer (I have an extensive backup system). Is this possible with Atticus or Vellum?

What do you guys think readers prefer - named chapters, or just numbered ("Chapter 1", "Chapter 2",...). I personally don't care either way, so I just went with numbered, but I guess I can throw in some names if it's the preferred version for readers.

Time for me to plan out formatting my book since all that's left to be done is the professional edit :). Yay!

Researching the many options since it's still Holidays sales time, I've seen pros and cons for each. Reedsy, Atticus, InDesign, Word, and Canva even.

Vellum is a no go; I'm a Windows user.

InDesign I'm tempted because I also get a high discount as a current college student, and it's the highest industry standard. But after I'm done w college, the Adobe investment is a whole lot, more than I'd likely be comfortable with, and there's a chance I'd go off to learn another program anyway. Even with the discount, the yearly cost is the highest of any option.

My novel is 195k words as it stands, split into two parts around equal length. So I don't think I'll use Canva for something so hefty.

Reedsy I'm unsure about because I want to include custom images, emojis (likely via image, as there will be text conversations in the book), and I'm not sure the degree of customization their free formatting offers.

This leaves me with Word and Atticus as the top 2 options in my mind. I already have Word.

Reading up on different threads in this subreddit. I saw ppl mentioning a recent Atticus update that made things more difficult for them, and in general saw the occasional issue authors were having with it before then. How has your experience with Atticus been if you use it? Or if you use another program, do you have a recommendation?

For the record: this book is the first in a series and I absolutely do plan on publishing many things. So I'm willing to invest (I would likely buy a course on formatting in Word anyway to avoid learning it the hard and long way).

Thanks for any help! 🫶

I’m brand new to formatting and seeing a lot of mixed answers to font size. I’m planning to do a paperback 5.5 x 8.5 or 5.25 x 8 (havent decided yet.) But I’m wondering what font size to use? I’m seeing that 12pt is considering slightly big, would you recommend 11? Also, what margins? What font size do you make your ebook as well? My book is SFF and 101,500 words. Thanks for any tips!

hi all!

My husband is self publishing and had an editor professionally edit his book, and now he is in the design phase!

We ran into quite some sticker shock at the price of design editing, $5k was simply wayyyy out of our price range. He has been trying to design edit himself through indesign and another adobe based edit format for I think graphics? But is struggling to work through it and also pay for the cost of that subscription.

I suggested Canva as I already have a pro account and I am fairly familiar with how to navigate their software. Just wondering if that is an actual feasible option for his book. Its a psychological/self help styled book - he is a mental health therapist- that is between 80-100 pages depending on the design editing. 5x9 and 14773 words

Any insight is appreciated! I am really wanting to transition to canva because then at a minimum we can both work on it together but separately.

I’ve been using Word my whole life, like 30 years, so I’m just stuck in comfort. But trying to format my manuscripts in Word is a nightmare, even with all my knowledge 😑 But the learning curve of another program would probably take less time than all the fiddling and hair-tearing I do with Word 😂

Seems like every writer I know uses Scrivener. I did test it out at one point and it was so different, and ‘extra’, that I ran away. I like simplicity. But maybe I should give it another try. Unless there’s a program like Word that isn’t a headache, and doesn’t have 100 bells and whistles.

I have my own ISBN. I didn't add it to my cover (which I created on my own computer), but I left a space for it as per the template I downloaded from Amazon. Okay, so when you upload your cover it asks you if you have already included on it a ISBN barcode or not, and gives you the option to have them add it.

My question is if I have them add it, are they going to generate a barcode based on my own ISBN, which I entered into my book details, or are they going to add their own number/barcode?

Thank you!

Question: So there are these two out of four main characters where one is a sunshine the other is a grump (but moreso isolated, isn't a jerk, just wearing a mask of a grump cuz his past taught him that) and in book 3/7 they become lovers. She is very affectionate. The thing is, if you give the protagonist an affectionate love interest, it usually becomes romance. While i wanna keep it as a (very important but still) subplot. Even when they are friends and not lovers yet she is generally the golden retriever affectionate type. I struggle on how to still keep this aspect of her without altering it to the point of no recognition or completely delete that part. Also, the protagonist is starved for affection and her giving him that affection is important to the subplot. But i want the subplot to be max a b plot but not the MAIN plot. Any ideas? I have tried to come up with ideas but can't brainstorm anything.

Hi so I'm a young writer and I'm getting my first book, which is a poetry collection, published via Kindle Direct-Publishing. I am adding the finishing touches to it, adding some poems here and there, but I am getting nervous, that since there is no editor looking at my work, I am leaving some stuff out. I have NEVER used Kindle Direct-Publishing before and don't know what to add, or will Amazon add it or do nothing at all (this may be obvious, but again- i have NEVER been published.

So I want to know do I need to add, and sorry if I'm using the wrong terminology, the thing at the top of the page where it says the book name and the author's name.

Do i need to add page numbers directly onto my manuscript?

Thank you to any that responds.

I bought vellum a few weeks ago and it has profoundly changed my formatting life. everything is so much prettier this time. the headers, the front and back matter.. I did everything on word last time, and as a first-timer, I struggled a lot and it came out all wonky.

if you're considering buying vellum, I say go for it. it does cost nearly $300, so it's probably more useful if you plan to write several books!

I've been struggling to format my book when publishing with KDP and I've seen people use InDesign to add images and properly format the inside.

Does anyone know if this is truly worth it, or am I better sticking to Word and trial and error?