SPS 247 How To Format A Book + Atticus Overview & Deep Dive with Dave Chesson

After all of that , have somebody buy your book and they open up and it's blasé , it doesn't look great . There are some really amazing things that you can do that will give your reader a wow factor and it will tell them that , oh wow , this really is a legitimate book .

I can teach you how to do way better than that . And we got on a call and it just opened up my eyes to this whole world . If you don't know Dave , you're probably living under a rock or maybe just you haven't been in the book publishing industry . He's the creator of Kindlepreneur .

He's also the creator of Publisher Rocket Maybe you've heard of that tool and Atticus . Those are his author-specific tools . The guy runs a bunch of software development and about 17 bajillion companies . Every time we talk I can't keep up . I'm like wait , what you got that company too . He's just a really smart guy , great person .

Now you may remember he was on the episode back on episode 70 , we talked about all things Publisher Rocket . So if you're in the marketing phase of your book journey , check out Publisher Rocket . Pretty much all of our authors use it . We have a good episode there . Episode 70 , about keywords , categories how do you optimize your listing ?

How do you use really the fundamentals and principles of SEO with your book ? And so we're not going to talk about any of that stuff today . Love SEO with your book , right ? And so we're not going to talk about any of that stuff . Today , we're going to talk about Atticus and formatting and writing better books .

And so world's longest intro , dave , welcome , great to have you here .

And what is it ?

And what really stemmed my thought process on building Atticus was because before Atticus , what I was using was I was using Scrivener to write out my book , and I'd done that since they first came out , and then I would export to Word and then I'd email back and forth with my editor to get you know the changes , because even though I begged my editor to move

over to Google Docs so maybe , maybe Google Docs , maybe not I would use that to collaborate and then I would go put it into some formatting software like Judo or so , to so as to then turn it into a book . Now , this is problematic , because if you ask yourself what is , what is a good book writing software ?

The right answer is one where you can write , collaborate and format into a book , you know . And so for us authors , we were having to buy lots of different software . We were trying to learn how to use all the different software .

And I just started with the question of wouldn't it be nice if there was one place where I could hold my book , that I could collaborate with an editor and then I could format and turn it into something beautiful ? And the other thing , there were two real big pain points that I wanted to address .

The first one and I'm sure there's listeners out there that have run into this there was a time where I once I was working with my editor and we were sending the file back and forth , back and forth , and the funny thing is I never deleted the old file .

So when it came time to go pay a designer to format my book , I then sent them the wrong one , so they formatted a version that didn't have , like the last chapter edited , or actually there was one time where I was missing a chapter and the reviews destroyed me over that . It's one of those things it happens .

Version control is a problem because , let's face it , we've all probably listed it . This is the final , all caps , final , final , final edited this one right . And we never delete them . So there was . That was one pain point that I also had as a writer .

The second pain point that I had , too is that , like , for example , my first book I wrote , I paid somebody who formatted it and they sent it back to me . I know that I have things that I should change and edit .

The problem is is that if I go and oops , I made a mistake , let me change this word Ooh , I got this review that said that I misspelled something , got it . You know , I'll go in there . I didn't have to send that file back to the formatter to format . I got to pay all that money again . I was like man .

My goal was if you created one writing software that allowed you to write , collaborate and format , then if I have no version control problems anymore , there's no chance that I send the wrong file in . It's all right there .

And then , on top of that too , if , say , one year later , I want to change up the back matter , I want to add something , or I want to change my biography , switch out a picture , it takes me two seconds .

I just pull up the file and make the change and then I hit export , I upload it to Amazon and I'm good to go , and there's no more of this back and forth with someone . So with all of that in mind , we built out Atticus so as to be able to create that opportunity .

Now , when we started , we built out formatting , for you know the old adage right , how do you eat an elephant One bite at a time ? So we're like , great , let's focus on formatting .

And then we built that out , and now we've built out the writing component , and there's even more features that we're going to add over time to make writing just a more enjoyable thing . And this summer we will have a collaboration where you can then bring somebody in to co-write with you .

You can bring in an editor who can then do track changes and you can accept them right there inside of your Atticus . And you can even have commenters . You know people read what you're doing and leave comments , and you can control that and never have to leave the program .

All of our internal formatters , we format books all the time we use Atticus . So I mean , I think this probably goes without

saying , but I'll say it anyway we highly recommend it . It's a really awesome tool . It works very , very well .

And I'm glad you mentioned the version control collaboration part , because I think anyone who's ever written a book I was laughing when you're like final , okay , final , final , okay , final , final , for real , this time , final number seven , right , and so version control , if you're not familiar with it , it's okay .

When you're going and you're sending it to an editor and you're getting it back . Well , if you ever worked in Microsoft Word , which I did with my first book , I realized real quickly it was not a great idea , because if I send it to them and then hold up , I actually oh , I've got some , I want to add something to it , I can't really do it .

I have to wait until they send it back to me , because you know , if I I mean I can , but I got to be real meticulous about anything I add , making sure that when they send me that new version that it gets added in , et cetera .

So obviously I mean that was the big revolution for me moving to Google Docs , and that was like kind of like the okay , now I can chase my editor through the book , which I love they don't love as much , but we can work in real time and it's like all right , you've edited the first three chapters , cool .

Now I'm going to come right behind you and we can work through that so that there's not these big long delays of I'm writing for however long , you're editing for however long and now you're sending it back . And I guess what would that be ? Maybe concurrent events ? They can't happen at the same time .

I don't know if I'm using that word properly , but they can't happen at the same time . So I guess let's unpack the book writing side of things . How does that work with Atticus and why is it better than Google Docs ? Or why is it better than other writing tools like Scrivener or other writing tools that people might use ?

They have a lot more things , but I think in the next year or so and when we come out with new features and additions , that's no extra cost we're always coming out with .

There are a lot more things that I want to do , including outlining as well , as there's a couple of things , but I will say this though Um , one of the things that really triggered me to try to improve on kind of the Scrivener and the writing aspect is that I've always kind of chuckled about the fact that you uh , you pay $50 for the writing software which ,

by the way , every time they come out with a new version or so you got to upgrade and pay for that again . But then most people are paying like $200 to take a course on how to use it . You know , and there are a lot of courses out there that help to try to show you . I think it's not very intuitive and it's very hard .

Now , somebody who's used it for you know 15 years or so , you start to learn . But there's a lot of features that I never use because I just don't know they exist , I don't know how they work and they're a little detailed .

So , coming to the writing aspect , on that I will say , still , at this moment , scrivener is a better writing software , but you're not going to be able to collaborate with it and while it can format , it is read it .

There's another $50 course , I think , on formatting Justin Scrivener that I found online , but you're going to be incredibly limited in what you're , what you can do . Uh , you're not going to be able to see your book in real time , what it's going to look like , and verify . You just kind of do a whole bunch of things .

You kind of hope that this will look good , you click export and you have to open up and see did this work ? And if not , you got to go back and forth . Um , so that's kind of with Scrivener . With regards to Google Docs , that was one of the things I really switched over to , especially because of version control .

The moment you spend a couple hundred dollars in getting somebody to format your book for you and you realize they formatted the wrong version , like , let me tell you like that becomes like primary . You know , public enemy number one for me you know , is the .

It doesn't really work that way . It's all about the orphans and the widows and things like that making sure that your page shows up right . So , anyways , I switched over to Google Docs and I thought it was great . The problem I had with Google Docs is a couple of things .

Number one is that the writing for a book , for a large book , is not the most conducive in Google Docs . Google Docs was not made for books , it was made for , you know , shall we say , collaborative writing of all sorts . I would also say , too , that it starts to slow down when you have hundreds of pages , yeah , and that can be problematic .

The other thing , too , is there's a little bit of you know , there's ways to maintain privacy , but one of the other things is is that if you've given access to somebody , let's say you have beta readers , or so they can still download a copy and so you can have versions of your book out there in that respect , and so it is a great opportunity .

I do like the collaborative features . I still use it between my team when I write up a doc document , you know , or something for the team . But again , like I said , it's just not built for writers , with writers in mind . And then finally , you know , when we get to formatting . There's a lot of formatting options out there .

Vellum is one of the most popular ones , and really they were an inspiration you know for , and by inspiration what I mean is they took this concept of wouldn't be nice if authors could see what a book looks like in physical print , e-book on your phone , and that sort of thing . But the problem for them was they only worked on Mac .

They didn't work on all computers . Also , too , there are a lot of features that they weren't coming out with , and so we really kind of jumped on those , and that's why , coming back to those three that we just talked about , I would say we have .

With regards to Scrivener , we're not as good , but getting there in writing and then , and it's going to be a lot more or easier to use and more intuitive already with with Google Docs , when we have collaboration come out and again that comes out this summer of this recording , so in 2024 summer , in case somebody in the future is listening to this it's already

there , baby . That's right . No , but it's when that comes out . I think it's . I think it's going to be amazing for authors , because you're going to have way more .

You know you can see who has access to your books , and so you can then have almost like project management of who gets to do what , or if you want to work alongside with another writer and you want to use it , that will be incredible .

Um , and so there's that , and then , like I said , we're just been adding more features um for formatting , and I've got there's so many that are coming out in like the next couple of weeks that I'm just incredibly jazzed about . But we've we're keeping a little bit tight lip , but it's going to be excellent .

So the metaphor that came to mind is like kind of like putting somebody in the cockpit of a plane and they've never flown before , or putting somebody in a race car and they've never driven a car . It's , it can do a lot of things , but it's kind of confusing and cumbersome .

And then , on the simple side , you've got google docs , but again , it's not made specifically , uh for , uh , it's not made specifically for writing books and it slows down as you get bigger and all that stuff . So I know that you guys started solving the problem of formatting . I've kind of been working backwards and that's something that I just love .

Watching your approach to product development , your approach to software development is just always iterating , always getting better and developing features that people actually need and want . I think it's a superpower of yours . And so I know that all the writing stuff and the collaboration , I know it's going to get there .

If you say it's going to get there , it's going to get there . It's not the Elon approach where , hey , we're going to get a car and it's going to be shipping next year and it ships like five years from now , which is cool . I mean , I love Elon . He's doing a lot of amazing things , but I know that you're going to follow through on that .

So I guess let's zoom into formatting . You already kind of talked about some of the features there . I'll share a quick story and then I'll tee up a question for you .

So I remember when I published my first book , and so we're all geared up for launch and it's me and my co-author and we are it's a Friday or something and we're supposed to launch the book on that Monday or Tuesday and we pull up our KDP account , so Kindle Direct Publishing account , and go to upload the book .

We've got our Word doc ready , or maybe it's a Google doc and we're like all right , here we go , and then it's like an error message . I'm like what , what do you mean ? And it's like it doesn't accept this , doesn't accept Google docs or Word docs or whatever it was . You need a epub or mobi file .

So I'm Googling what's a epub and mobi file and realizing that I have to get my book formatted . This is something that I didn't even think of . So maybe let's start there . I know it's very simple and in our world everybody knows it , but what is book formatting and why is it important ?

So if you're printing through Amazon , okay , and they're print on demand , which means that when somebody goes to Amazon , they buy the book , amazon will then literally send the data to the PDF .

If you will to a printing press near the shopper , make that one book and then ship it , well , in order for their printing press to be able to do that effectively and efficiently , it has to be made a certain way . Margins have to be a certain thing , aspects have to be where they're supposed to be , everything needs to be pre-calculated .

There are a lot of steps to make that Word document , have all the things it needs and then turn it into the appropriate PDF form for Amazon to be like yep , got it , no problem . And that also means that it's a much better printed product . So you know , you don't have weird things going on With means that it's a much better printed product .

So you know , you don't have weird things going on With regards to e-books , though that's what happens is , if you think about it , when somebody is on a Kindle , or if they're on their iPhone , or if they're on a Nook or they're on an iPad , the screen sizes are different , and so you can't really or you shouldn't have a prefixed image or prefixed set of you

know words that will always look the same way on every device . It will change , and so what they did was they wanted a reflowable format , something where the words are dynamic , the images change

, everything sort of shifts the moment it gets on said e-reader device . And so , back in the day , amazon had their own file format called Moby , and they were the only ones in the industry and they recommended Moby . They did take EPUB , but they really , you know , try to tell you don't do it , do Moby .

But the rest of the entire industry is like EPUB , like and , by the way , what are you doing , amazon ? Epub is a way better file format . Finally , like it was maybe a year and a half ago or so , finally , amazon waved the white flag and gave up on Mobi and they pretty much sunset , and now they 100% recommend EPUB , if they haven't already .

There's going to come a point where they just won't accept the Mobi file . There's a little bit of internal things . We've actually worked with their programming team , especially on the Kindle side , to ensure that all of our files make them super happy .

But it was funny hearing the programmers talk in a very angry way about the whole Mobi EPUB shift , which was fun . So , to kind of come back to that , we have the print and we have the EPUB . You have to have your margins and everything set , your calculation set and you need to make sure that it looks good to you .

Then you have the EPUB file that's totally good with all of your devices and will work so that in case you have a reader that wants to read on their Nook , they're not complaining because , like , why did you do this to me ?

And so when you format it , you're making sure that your book and your ebook , that the rules and the requirements of all the markets so that they can do well with it . But then the last step to this is that you make sure that you're turning your work of art , the thing that you've spent hundreds of hours on , okay .

Making it what it is , you're going to format it so that it looks special and good . You don't want to , after all of that , have somebody buy your book and they open up and it's blasé , it doesn't look great .

There are some really amazing things that you can do that will give your reader a wow factor and it will tell them that oh , wow , this really is a legitimate you know book and it just gives more value across the board .

All right , let's implement what you're learning in this episode and let's see how we can help with your book . Go to selfpublishingcom forward slash schedule . And so and just one small example for folks who you know maybe haven't thought about the difference between formatting a print book and an ebook . I remember this was one of those things early on too .

This is like a hand to palm moment . I'm like what do you mean ? They can't have page numbers . It's like , oh well , to your point , say , I want to read it at 16 point font or 12 point or whatever . I mean there is no page numbers except for the page number customized to the actual device that they're reading on .

So there's a bunch of little things like that that are the difference . Now I want to ask maybe a two part question . One is how's the formatting different based on genre ? So , book formatting for fiction how is that different from nonfiction ? And then you mentioned there's a handful of things that you can do in the formatting to make your book pop .

What are those things ?

With Atticus you can do footnotes and endnotes . A lot of companies do not do footnote and , by the way , footnotes only work in print , they don't work in ebook , so it just automatically turns into end notes . There Just a heads up in case anybody's like where's my footnotes ? Reflowable won't do it , but we have footnotes .

Also , too , we've designed call-out boxes . So you see , in really good nonfiction books , if you're reading some of the big authors , they'll have this beautifully designed box that has a quote or a reminder or something of that magnitude , and so you can select , create certain call out boxes to make your book stick out .

Your message , that PowerPoint that you or that powerful statement that you want to put up there , have it show up just like that . And there's a lot of other edits that are given , including H1 through H6 . A lot of formatting software does not have that .

You can only have a , you know , a header of a certain size and that's it , whereas we can allow and I think it's super important for nonfiction writers to be able to have subsections and sub subsections and things like that , so as to really compartmentalize your information .

Very , very soon we're going to be adding just about every Google font that is out Matter of fact , like in the next week or two , from what we're recording right here , all of Google fonts will be a part of this . So now you can really design those headers , you know , one through six , to look exactly the way you want it , with your own style .

And so these are , I think , things that a lot of formatting softwares don't do and they should . So I'm very happy that we have that for nonfiction . But these are some of the things that really will make your book stand apart .

That only the big publishers have done in the past are the ones that are paying some you know , adobe InDesign creator to make look that way , and now you can do it with , you know , clicking a button , adding some things with ease .

Another wonderful thing too and this kind of falls into both nonfiction and fiction is that using just putting images into a book is a lot harder than it sounds there's , and it's especially hard with e-book . Ok , so if you do it in print book , you know you just want to make sure that it looks good in the print , the right size .

If you're using color , you know that the colors are correct . If it's not , then what is it going to look like when you have to change it to black and white ? These are all very important , but when it comes to e-book , this is a little harder because , remember , it's reflowable , ok . Little harder because , remember , it's reflowable , okay .

So the words will reflow , the , and if you don't set this correctly , the image might show up in the wrong spot , or the image will shrink down to something super small and somebody's um you know , we'll say cell phone when they're looking at it and the image is lost and then it looks unprofessional .

So making sure that the code is added to um , to the image to make it look good on all devices is incredibly important , and that's something that formatting softwares do behind the curtain , so that when you look at what the book will look like inside of , say , atticus , you will see okay , that's how the image is going to look like . Let me change this .

Let me go ahead and reduce the size , let me increase the size , let me align center . Oh , now .

But I really really love the look of a two page image , full bleed chapter , and so what that is is where you know , maybe you've used your artist or you've created something yourself . You can create this full page , two pages image . The words of the first chapter will start on one side and are over the image itself .

I've seen designs and this is something that you know we can send over for people to be able to see . We have it also on the homepage . I've seen designs that are just jaw dropping .

And I tell you , if I'm a fiction reader let's say I'm a sci-fi military fan and I pick up somebody's book and I get it and I start flipping through and I see these amazing images that are woven into the text . You know the way that some of these authors are easily doing with Atticus . It is incredible . It's an immediate like boost in value in my mind .

Like this is clearly not some you know first time author . You know that just kind of threw something together . This is really cool and it's very easy to together and so I've seen a lot of authors really enjoy using those two page full bleed image chat Got it .

Is it fiction formatting or is it nonfiction ?

And the reason for that is we created theme . These themes have all these certain characteristics and everything already pre applied in them . You just can select from our themes list and you can be like I like that one that looks good to go and click , and then after that it walks you through kind of a process to choose hey , do you want it to do this ?

Do you want drop caps ? Um , you know , do you want to choose a design for your um , uh , ornamental break Like and so , and then , by the time , and then choose your trim size . After you've done that , you've pretty much , it's done everything . The software has already calculated out . Okay , this is the right ratio , this is where the word should appear .

We don't want to have any widows and orphans , and that's where there's , like that one sentence that really shouldn't be there . It needs to be dropped into the new page or vice versa , and it's done that .

So then all you have to do is you can go ahead and just check and look at it and say , ah , yes , I love this , or , ooh , you know what , I should make this change , and that's it . So you can go through user themes and in three minutes you could be good to go and have a good looking professional format of book .

Okay , whereas it could be longer is , let's say , you want to build your own thing , you want to make something super unique to you . You know that , um , and you want to do you know special images and things like that . Then that's we'll start to add .

It really depends on how far you want to go , how much design you want to put into it , but that could any . That could range anywhere between you know , three or 30 minutes to you know three hours , depending on how hardcore or how fast you are in creating your designs and things like that .

cetera , that formatting is super quick and clean . If it's a nonfiction book that has tables , images , graphs , all the things like that is typically longer . So I guess is it safe to say , unless it's comprehensive fiction with a lot of images , that it's typically a lot faster and easier to go fiction than it is nonfiction , or is that not true ?

And if that's the case , that's that's almost the equivalence of like a normal , uh fiction book in terms of like its intensity of work , Whereas those that are doing those things absolutely You're . you know , and especially if you're not using a software like Atticus , that those those things could be incredibly time intensive ?

It's a weird answer because truth be told is , I don't think anybody's actually built a formatting software just for children's book , because there are certain things that children's author , children's authors , would love to do , and when I'm talking children's books , I'm talking like two , three , four , five year old level , not seven , eight , nine , where there's words .

I think that there's room for improvement , but that being said , though , is out of the other software options out there , atticus is probably the better option , because the key

is , I tell the children's authors hey , what you need to do is you need to format the , you need to figure out your trim size first , then you need to format the picture with the words inside the picture , and then , you know , bring over the image and then format it as a full bleed image each page . It's just more intensive .

I think there's a faster , better way to do it , but I don't think anybody's created that .

We actually have a person on staff Her name is Monique , and it's funny , as I'll go to like the conferences and like people run up to say , you know , she's just got her following just because she's constantly making videos and it's showing people how to do this following just because she's constantly making videos and it's showing people how to do this .

You can look over her shoulder as she builds . Also , too , she does YouTube lives where it's like let's build some , and so she really does a lot of incredible work making sure that authors can see and improve their skill at formatting , Like we talked about .

You can just jump right in there , you know , use one of our themes and build something , but over time you might want to gain more skill or you might want to gain more capability or you want to do something crazy . We've got those videos right there to do that .

One of the things I'll say that is usually a problem that somebody might run into is that we constantly recommend to authors to upload their Word document or their document into Atticus instead of copying and pasting . So if you didn't write inside of Atticus . It's just better to upload the doc .

The reason for this is that when you copy and paste from , say , Word or Google Doc or whatever you're using , when you do that , like 99% of the time you're copying over code OK , that's inside , you won't see it , but it's bringing over formatting code and then what that does is it can mess with .

So there's ways to clear out the code if you really want to do that . But we tell people look like nine times out of 10 , if somebody runs into a problem on trying to export , it's because they did a copy and paste and they brought over code . That , you know , is telling the system whoa , something weird here .

So that's my biggest thing to authors is hey , recommend not copying and pasting , just upload . And , by the way , you can upload chapter to chapter . So if you already uploaded what you thought was your book and then you wrote something else , you could just drag and drop that into your book as well and it will just pop it right in there as well .

But there's a lot of interesting components when it comes to how can you use it to up-level the quality of the book . So I guess my question is how do you see AI changing book formatting , if at all , and are there any AI features that you've already integrated or plan on integrating into Atticus ?

That being said , though , is like I've used it to generate a map . I've used it to showcase certain images , and what we talked about earlier is formatting those full bleed images inside of your chapter , or maybe making that your chapter . Theme is incredible .

It allows me to do something that I couldn't do before If I want to make my ornamental break be a sword , but a special sword that I had , super cool and easy to do , so I really love that aspect , because it just makes the book that much cooler , that much more exciting . Same thing with nonfiction , too .

You know you can generate images that highlight or help to , you know , lighten the mood , or , you know , if you're describing a story or a situation , you can generate something that kind of showcase .

With regards to AI , I like the idea of AI as being sort of like a muse or an assistant , and I think that there are some really interesting ways that that you know , legitimate great authors can improve their skill and their speed at writing by using something like that .

But I do recommend that people be not so much cautious , but just to make sure that they understand what those systems are doing and how they feel about them . In terms of Atticus , we don't have any intentions of making any AI anything inside of it .

I want it to kind of keep it clean and pure and let it be the author's choice if they want to introduce AI into it so we can integrate with a lot of the AI programs out there . It will work automatically and if that's something that you find is important for you , just know that it will work and it won't affect anybody else's , just your book .

And if you want to stay pure and clean , we absolutely acknowledge that and we will work to maintain that .

Whether or not you're thinking about buying it or that you've already bought it , even if you bought it years ago . And just to be clear , it is a one-time cost of one 47 . It is a one-time cost of $147 . It is not a subscription base . So when you buy it , you get it for life and you get access to our support team as well .

. Check it out , dave . You're amazing man , love you , appreciate you . Thank you for this episode . Absolutely , and again thanks for having me Thank you so much for watching , or listening to , this episode of the Self-Publishing School Podcast . I know there's so many places that you can be spending your time .

There's other podcasts that you can be listening to , youtube channels that you can be watching , so thank you so much . It means the world . Now I want you to do three things right now . If you found this episode helpful I don't know if you know this , but we've got a YouTube channel . It's a companion channel to this podcast .

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