We live at an awesome time to be a writer--particularly a self-published writer. It's never been easier to prepare our books for publication with tools like Scrivener, Vellum, and Atticus.

Or, you can kick it old school like I do with Microsoft Word and Jutoh.

But what's the different between them all and why the heck would you want to go the hard route with Microsoft Word when you could just upload and go like you can with some of the programs out there? I do it because I want the bottom of page to be equal to the bottom of all the other pages. I want the margins to be perfectly straight. In short, I don't trust any program to get it just the way I like it.

So I'm going to show you how I produce my version of a perfect book. It's tedious and time consuming, but not hard. If that doesn't sound like fun to you, here are some of your options:

InDesign is an Adobe software that's specifically for publication. Once you know how to use it, it can be quite easy--but there is a steep learning curve, and a steep price tag.

Vellum costs $249 for the ability to format both print and ebook formats with minimum effort and time investment. It does an excellent job, though it can't do perfect. Not yet, anyway. Also, it's only for the Mac, so...

Atticus is the PC's answer to Vellum and it costs half the price at $149 for the whole kit and kaboodle. As with Vellum, Atticus can format your print and ebook extremely well in minutes. If you want to customize things like the title page or chapter headings, it'll be a bit more hands-on, but it's still quick and easy. If I can learn to let go of my perfectionism, I'll move to Atticus, myself.

There are also many completely free programs out there like the book formatting tools at Reedsy, Lulu and Visme.

If the "set it and forget it" option sounds better to you (and really, it should--what are you? A massochist?), thank you for stopping by!

If, instead, you'd like to produce the perfect print book and ebook, stick around and I'll show you.

And I suppose I may as well show you how to format from start to finish with Atticus. You can skip ahead to that lesson, and then go.

The rest of you hard-headed people who like to do things the hard way, aka the perfectionist's way, head over to the next lesson.

Real Examples Formatted with Microsoft Word