How to Format Books for Self-Publishing, with Monique from Atticus.io
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How to Format Books for Self-Publishing, with Monique from Atticus.io – Full Transcript
Intro:
Well, hey there, Writer. Welcome to The Resilient Writers Radio Show. I'm your host, Rhonda Douglas. And this is the podcast for writers who want to create and sustain a writing life they love. Because let's face it, the writing life has its ups and downs, and we want to not just write, but also to be able to enjoy the process so that we'll spend more time with our butt-in-chair getting those words on the page.
This podcast is for writers who love books and everything that goes into the making of them. For writers who want to learn and grow in their craft and improve their writing skills. Writers who want to finish their books and get them out into the world so their ideal readers can enjoy them. Writers who want to spend more time in that flow state. Writers who want to connect with other writers to celebrate and be in community, in this crazy roller coaster ride, we call the writing life.
We are resilient writers. We're writing for the rest of our lives and we're having a good time doing it. So welcome writer. I'm so glad you're here. Let's jump right into today's show.
Rhonda:
Hey everyone. So welcome. So today we have Monique Danielle here from Atticus. So Atticus is the software we were talking about before, which allows you to lay out your print books and your ebooks for publishing. And so I reached out to them and Monique agreed to come in and talk to us. So we're gonna have a little chat and then she said she would give us a bit of a demonstration which I'm really excited about.
So Monique, just so that you know, several of us here are either already self-publishing books, planning to self-publish books, or are just kind of considering our options, you know? We haven't kind of made the final decision yet.
So the first thing I wanted to ask Monique, is in your estimation, like, how long does it take? Let's say I have a novel. Let's say I have a 350 page mystery novel. How long does it take using Atticus to, you know, get it formatted to the point where I can go to publish.
Monique:
So with Atticus, it's not so much about how long the book is versus how much specialty you wanna put into it. So the vast majority of books across, I would say across fiction genres, the vast majority you can bring into Atticus and have formatted within 20 minutes. Now, the more familiar you are with the program, the quicker it gets.
Like we have some authors that are so well-versed in it and they have their settings pre-programmed and they can upload their manuscript, press a couple of buttons and they're good to go in five minutes.
Now if you have more specialized features and you need to work through your book and format a text message in every single chapter because you've done something a little bit more experimental with your book, that's going to take a little bit more time, but it is incredibly easy to do. So it really depends on how specialized your formatting needs to be, but in the vast majority of books, you can be in and out very quickly.
Rhonda:
Okay, so if I just have a basic novel with say, you know, chapter headings, then I'm in and I'm done in under an hour, even if I'm new to it.
Monique:
Yeah, absolutely.
Rhonda:
What kind of resources are there in terms of, you know, so I'm the kind of person who learns just enough tech. to be frustrated when the thing doesn't do what I want it to do, and then I have to go and learn the next step and the next step. What kind of resources are there to learn basically everything you need to know in order to be able to format your book without chaos?
Monique
Yeah, you're not alone. There's a lot, especially authors. I mean, we're here to write. That's what we want to do. So formatting is something that we'll do out of necessity. Some people are a little bit more creative and they like to get in there, but we... I'm the educational content curator for Atticus so I do all of the training materials and we really listen to our authors to try to provide what they need.
So there are all sorts of different learning styles and we have material for everyone along the way. We have all of the basics to get your book in and out of Atticus as quickly as possible in written tutorials, we have video tutorials. We do have a chat bot on our website. That's the only AI you'll find on our website and we've specifically programmed it for Atticus. So you can go in and if you just have a quick question, you can ask the chat bot or you can email our support team, which I have to brag about because there is basically no better support team.
Everybody on the support team behind Atticus are authors. So we all know exactly what you're going through and we know the stress, and we know how important things are. and we know what it feels like to be on a deadline and be like, I need this book out now. And we also understand, like you said, most authors are gonna learn how to use the program enough to get what they need done. And if it doesn't work, it's kind of a panic mode. And so everyone on our team absolutely understands that.
And honestly, the greatest reviews for Atticus are all about our customer support. So whatever your learning style is for using the tech, we have you covered pretty much.
Rhonda:
Okay, great. I love that. I would definitely need the videos. I'm the video person. So what are the things I would need to bring into Atticus in order to come, you know, to come out of it with a book that I could then load up to Amazon or IngramSpark or whatever?
Monique:
So the bare minimum is your manuscript. The majority of authors work in Microsoft Word or Pages or Google Docs and all of those formats will export to DocX and that's what you import into Atticus.
So we do have some tutorials to help you prepare your manuscript but the more simple that you can keep your original manuscript the better it's going to import and the easier it's going to make things for you.
Inside your original document you'll want to format your chapter titles as the default heading one and have your body paragraph just normal font. You don't need anything special there. If you use scenes you can use like three asterisks which is fairly industry standard and Atticus will import that as a scene break. Once you have your manuscript just as basic as can be you can import it and then Atticus can take it from there.
For your chapter titles you can access the Google fonts library so you can really choose from nearly any style of font that you need. The body fonts are more limited because we want to help you set your book up for success and authors are creative and sometimes that can get away from you. So we've limited.
Rhonda:
No Comic Sans books. Okay.
Monique:
Yeah, exactly. So we've limited it to the most easy to read and industry standard fonts for the body, but you can get really creative and you know, add beautiful work with your headings. You can also do subtitles and subheadings in your book as well.
We also have a lot of authors who will do, say, a handwritten letter in their content. And while you can't use a body font to do that, you can use one of the subheading fonts and choose a font to use for that and get the same effect. So there are things that you can use just the basic fonts for.
Atticus has a variety of themes that are pre-built. Some of them have image elements already that you can use. We also have ornamental seam breaks that are pre-prepared that you can use. So... As long as you have your manuscript, you can take it and run, or you can bring in these elements of your own.
You can upload your own header image graphics, your own scene break graphics, you can upload full page images, you can add character art. You can get as creative as you want to be, but the bare minimum, we need your manuscript.
Rhonda:
And what about cover, front cover, back cover? Do I have that done separately and uploaded into Atticus or do I take the Atticus output and my cover and then somehow put them together. I'm totally clueless here. You have to walk me through it, Monique.
Monique:
Sure, it's a little bit of both. And it depends on the version of the book you're creating. So your cover art, you will do separately. Most authors will have your cover – design is a very specialized skill. Some authors do it themselves, but you'll want to have your cover art created separately.
For the ebook version, you'll have a JPEG. or a PNG file, typically that is your front cover of the book. You will import that into Atticus, and it will export with the EPUB file that you upload to any of your publishers. When you're uploading to, say, KDP or IngramSpark, you will also need to upload the cover art separately. That's what they use for marketing and their websites.
But the version that comes with the EPUB that you export from Atticus, that's what is used for the cover art, the user bookshelf or library. So when they download your book, that's what shows up there. So you do want those to match. You can get in trouble if they don't match. If you want a separate page in your book, so if you want a title page that matches the cover, you would have to insert that as a full page image in the content itself.
Now with the print version of your book, those are gonna be completely separate. Every single publisher out there is gonna require you to have your manuscript in a PDF format, and your book cover in a separate PDF. And that book cover is going to need to be, you know, high resolution print quality, including the front, back and spine all as one file. It's always gonna be separate so you don't ever have to bring it into Atticus.
Rhonda:
Okay, that's really good to know. Yeah, cause I was having a little panic here about how to make all the things go together, but that sounds pretty simple then. So, Monique, you said you would walk us through a little presentation, just share your screen and basically show us a little behind the scenes. Can I get you to do that and just kind of narrate through for us?
Monique:
This is the Atticus dashboard. Now, I clearly have some books already started, but when you are first opening it, this kind of center area will just be blank. You can upload your manuscript. You can start a new book and just write inside Atticus and just do the whole thing in the program.
Or you can create a box set. So if you already have multiple books written and you want to combine them into one, to sell as an EPUB box set, you can do that in Atticus as well.
So this is my standard example book. And I've got it set up so I can show a lot of different features off. One of the things I've started warning authors about is because I'm the educational content curator, I do videos and I get really excited about all of the new features available to Atticus. And I'm the kind of person that as soon as I see a new feature, I want to find some way to work that into my book. And I want to caution you all against doing that.
You want your formatting to match the content that you have created, not create content to match the formatting. So even though there are tons of features available, only use what your book needs is kind of my basic rule of thumb.
Rhonda:
So I can see over on the left-hand side here, it says title page, copyright, copyright public domain, left map, right map, table of contents and preface. and then the body and it's broken down by chapters. So do you automatically populate those first seven items, title page through preface?
Monique:
Not all of them. So when you upload a brand new book or when you start a new book in Atticus, you'll want to give it your title and your author name and you can put it in a project if you want, that's optional. And every new book, whether you've started one from scratch or imported one, it's going to give you a title page. And this is going to be based on the information that you put into it.
So the title of your book and your author name, it will give you a copyright template, which you can adjust this. And, or you can delete it and add your own, and it will automatically create the table of contents. The table of contents is the one page you really can't change. It's the one page that is kind of the most difficult to format when you're doing your own formatting. So if you're if you've ever tried to do this in Word, it's very difficult.
Rhonda:
You have to get all of the links working. Yes. Hate the whole table of contents. Yeah, it's a bit of a nightmare.
Monique:
So the programming has to be very specific because Atticus does it all for you. It will have all your chapters in there. If you move things around, it will automatically renumber all of your pages for the print book. It links everything. It makes it really easy, but that is the one page that you have the least control over. And then the rest of the pages here are optional. So it depends on what your book needs.
So you can also change your title page from the default text one. So I'll just add a new one so you can see what that looks like. You can preview your book while you're working on it. You can open the preview here. and you can either look at a digital version or you can actually look at what it will look like when it is in print. Print preview is true to print. What you see is what you get.
With the digital versions, you can look at a variety of different styles just to get an idea of how it's going to look. I like to stick to the iPad because it's the most consistent, but every device is going to load differently. So this isn't ever going to be exact. So this would be a title page that is automatically populated by Atticus, or you can change it to a full page image and upload your own title page. The copyrights page, you can, like I said, fill in your information for the template, or there are additional templates.
So if you're using a different kind of book, if you're creating a public domain book, we have different templates here, also for general fiction in general. Nonfiction, the general fiction, for example, gives you prompts to add your artist, if you have any illustrations. You can adjust these as needed. It's not legal advice by any means, but it just gives you something to start with.
Rhonda:
And it looks like the text part that's in there. So I'm looking at the first of chapter one here now, that was up on the screen there. And it just, it looks to me basically like Word once it's in there.
Monique:
Yeah, so we've done everything possible to make it as easy for authors to learn the program, as intuitive as it can be made. Now, there are definitely some features that you can't do in Word, like you can create call out boxes, you can create formatted text messages, but it's fairly obvious what, you know, where to find the options. So we have the main toolbar up at the top.
And anywhere you see three dots, which is fairly industry standard with apps anyways, anywhere you see three dots, you can find more options. And then you can, whenever you see a gear icon, you can find more options. So we've tried to make it fairly intuitive so you can click on things and find your way around as needed, but it is very simple and kind of clean.
We don't put anything in Atticus that isn't needed. formatting a book so you don't get all the bells and whistles that you might find in Scrivener, for example. Amazing program, super powerful, mind-boggling in the options, and just too much for what you need to format, for example.
Rhonda:
Okay, and I saw you scrolling over some things. It looks like there's a spelling and grammar check in here.
Monique:
So this one here is not integrated into, it's not a feature of Atticus. Atticus itself doesn't have spelling and grammar because there are already tools that do that so effectively and that is their main job. So you can integrate with either Grammarly or ProWritingAid, which are the two industry standards. Yeah. So this is ProWritingAid here that's kind of giving me suggestions. I'm not logged in, so it's not showing me my premium ones, but if you have a premium account, it will give you all of the features of ProWritingAid and you can work with that in your document while you're self-editing.
Rhonda:
Wow, okay. So can I ask Monique, what are the usual errors or mistakes that first-time authors doing this trip over? Like what do you see where your support team is like: they're always asking this. You know?
Monique:
The main questions that come in to support are the document didn't import properly. So if you, at the very beginning, I had said there are a few steps you wanna do in Word to import your document. One of those steps is to make sure your chapter titles are set as Word default Heading 1.
This is an example of Heading 1.
If you don't do that, if everything is just in a normal body paragraph, or if you use unique styles that you've created for Word, Atticus and Word use a different language. So anything that's in Word to come into Atticus, it has to be programmed. So if you've created something super unique in Word, that's not going to translate into Atticus. The goal of Atticus is to do it on this platform. That's what it's made for.
So if you haven't put all your chapter titles in Heading 1, and it's all just body paragraphs, for example, it will import as one giant chapter. And that can be daunting. You can... fix it, you can split chapters. I can put my cursor in here and use the split chapter icon here and it will split and you just have to work through your books that way. But it's just a lot easier to have it set up in Word so that it imports and it's nicely all of your chapters are here.
Rhonda:
So the way to go about this, it seems to me to make it easy for myself would be even if I'm working in Scrivener or whatever. take my file, I download it, I get it into Word or Google, that will allow me to get a docx file, and I make sure I'm all edited. The thing is beautiful. And I make my chapter headings, heading number one. If I have a chapter subtitle, like here we're looking at a subtitle, is that heading number two or is it all heading number one?
Monique:
So your titles are always going to be Heading 1. there isn't an import option for subtitles. So if you have a subtitle, it would just import into the chapter. So your subtitle would kind of come in like this and I've misspelled it. So then I have to cut and paste. Yeah, you would just cut it from there and put it into the subtitle location and it would pop up for you.
You can use headings two through six as a subheading. So rather than these, you can also format the fonts for, so you can change the font to something a little bit more specialized and you have five different options. You can do different levels. You can do different font types and that thing. That was mainly designed for the non-fiction market because they use a lot of subheadings.
But as I mentioned, a lot of fiction authors have used these creatively so that you can, for example, have different headings in different areas. You can have letters. This is all here done in a subheading and you can change what it looks like. So if you wanna note, you can pick handwritten formatting and you just set these all up in your theme settings. Okay. So I can pop into there and show you what that looks like as well.
Rhonda:
So these are the themes that you're showing us now. Wow. Yeah.
Monique:
So some of these I have created, but Atticus comes with 17 preset themes. So for your ebook, honestly, if all you were doing is an ebook, you could come in here and just click on one, export, and you're good to go. With your print book, you at the very least need to choose your trim size because you wanna make sure that matches up what you're printing.
We of course do recommend you go through all of the options and make it a little bit more customized to what you need. And it is really easy. I tend to explain it as like a multiple choice quiz where every answer is right. It just depends on what you like.
So you can, these are your sections, and you basically just work through them. You can choose your chapter heading. And if you want a chapter number, you can add that as well. And that will give you an automated chapter number. It can give you a chapter number if you want a chapter number and a chapter title, or you can just hide that.
And you can do this for all of the options. You can either have them or not have them. You can change the fonts. We've got the Google Fonts Library in there. You can include subtitles or not. You can have a chapter image or not.
Rhonda:
What I love about this is how over on the side, you've got to toggle to the iPad, and every change you make, it's showing you exactly what it's going to look like.
Monique:
Yes. And when you're going through this process, especially the first time, we recommend keeping it on the iPad. If I change to print, it will give me a print preview, but every single change you make to your book, Atticus has to re-render the entire file because it is exactly to print. So when you change a font size, it's going to take a few minutes.
Well, usually a few seconds when I'm streaming, it takes a bit longer because it has to work through the entire book. Any minimal change makes a difference to page numbers, to where the last sentence on the page falls, all of that kind of stuff. So it can take a little bit.
And if you're going through this for the first time, getting it set up as much as possible in the iPad preview where everything is instantaneous is recommended. And then you can go back through and proof the print version once things are mostly the way you want them, because that can take a little bit of extra time.
Rhonda:
And if I have a book that has, let's say illustrations or graphs or, I mean, you mentioned text messages as a special thing that you format for, but is there anything I need to do around that? Like, how would I handle, let's say I've got a mystery, cozy mystery, and I'm gonna put a map of the town at the front of the book. How would I do that?
Monique:
So in most cases, you would do a full page image. So you're going to need to have your art created outside the program. And we recommend matching the size to fit the trim size of your book. So if you are printing a six by nine book, if you want a full bleed image, which means it extends to the very edges of the page, you need to make sure your artwork is the trim size plus the bleed and then it will import properly.
Atticus will automatically export it with bleed so that when you send it to the printers, they have their trim to cut off and it's all set up that way, but you need to have the right size first. We do have a calculator on our website to help you with this. So if you don't know how to do that math, don't worry, we can help you with that.
And you can get either the inches or the pixel dimensions to send off to your Illustrator, Graphic Designer, or use it yourself. You can do it right now – I have it as you can see I have a left map and a right map. This is designed so that when you open the book, it will be a two page spread. This is like a two page image. So you do have to cut it into two separate images. But as long as they're properly sized, you just lay them up side by side and they open into this beautiful two page spread.
Rhonda:
It's great. It's really good to know. Sally is asking, is this a subscription? Is it a fee based on how big your file is, your page numbers? And then related to that, I had a question about, is it like password protected where I go and log in or do I have to download the software to my computer?
Monique:
Okay, I'll start with that one. So it is what's called a progressive web application. So you can use Atticus on any device that is convenient to you, as long as it has a browser. We do recommend always logging out especially if you're not on a personal computer like on my personal computer in my bedroom that never leaves my bedroom I'm logged in most of the time. If I bring my laptop out with me I will always log out and log back in whenever I'm using it.
If I'm switching between devices, if I have it on my laptop at home I will log out before I log in on my cell phone to bring with me and write as I go. So as long as you are logging out, nobody else has access because it is password protected, like you said. You can't install an app version if you are easily distracted and you just kind of want it outside of your browser, but it is always connected to the browser.
So there are certain things that you can only do when you're connected to the internet, like importing and exporting. Those, you need to be connected to the internet. If you're logged in and you're just writing in Atticus, you can be in a remote location with no internet access and you can write. And what Atticus does is it saves to your local server until you reconnect to the internet and then it backs it up in the cloud. Highly secure, never had any issues on the most secure servers that you can get. You're the only person who has access to your content or anybody you give your password to, of course.
Rhonda:
And then cost wise, what are we talking about in terms of fee and what's the fee based on? Like is it just like a year's access or lifetime access or number of projects?
Monique:
So this is the part where I get the most shock. This is the part of the presentation where people are most surprised. If you are going to hire a book formatter, you're typically paying somewhere around $500 for a single book. With Atticus, it is a one-time cost. You can format any book you ever write for the rest of your life. It includes all of our future updates and we have so much cool stuff coming including collaboration. So it includes everything for the one-time cost and it's $147.
So it comes in at significantly less than the cost of hiring a professional formatter for even a single book. Actually, I'm going to offer, I have a special offer for all of your listeners and viewers and everyone here today. We don't ever do discounts on Atticus. That's not something we do because it is very competitively priced.
But if you register in the month of June using your special link Atticus.io/resilient, hopefully that's easy for everyone to remember, you'll get a bonus course. And this course that I've created. is what to do after your book is formatted. So your podcast is amazing, very detailed on how to finish the book, and I know that's where authors spend the majority of their mindset, is getting that book written and finished and then they're done and they're like, oh my goodness, now what?
And then they come to Atticus and they get to format their book and then they're like, oh my goodness, now what? So the course answers that. It helps you upload to different platforms as self-publishing authors. I have guest speakers to help with marketing and research for your keywords and all sorts of stuff. So you'll get that free if you order through the link within the month of June.
Rhonda:
Fabulous. That's so exciting. Thank you. So another question I had was, this is for either a Windows computer or a Mac, right?
Monique:
Yes. You can use it on either.
Rhonda:
Okay. All right. And I don't necessarily have to download anything. I can just go in and log in and everything's on the internet. And as long as I've got internet access, you know, I don't have to download things. That's correct, right?
Monique:
That is correct. Aside from your files, of course, you have to download your files when you're done with them. But that is what makes it accessible to all different devices. So it's not just a Windows or PC. You can use it on your Chromebooks. You can use it on Linux. My mom wrote an entire book on her phone, I don't know how, but she did. So if that's your style, you can do that too.
Rhonda:
Okay, cool. That's awesome. Mary Lynn is like, how is that possible? How can you do business? But I'm guessing it's volume.
Monique:
It is – a lot of people are using Atticus. And so many more every single day. The self-publishing industry is a really exciting place to be. The opportunities for new authors are unlimited. And we just absolutely love working with authors and welcoming new people on board and making it easier to get more books out there. As authors, we're also all readers. So the more you publish, the more we read.
Rhonda:
Okay. I guess I want to go back to the question I asked earlier about I'm interested in all the ways a novice, complete newbie like me, could mess this up. So other than formatting, is there anything?
Monique:
It's really hard to mess up in Atticus. It's hard to do things very wrong. If you're getting really creative, it can be more difficult to get things exactly how you want them to look. but it's hard to do a basic book wrong. We also have tools so that once you have set it up, you can keep it that way.
So for example, as a newbie author, this may be the first book you're publishing, but as you get one or two down the road, the also by page is one of the most important pages in your book because it sends readers to the other book so that you can get them reading your backlist. It is one of the least, is one of the most underutilized pages, because once you write a book and you publish it, and then you write a second book and you publish it, you can also buy the book in that second book.
But in order to get the first book updated, you have to update your formatting, which previously before Atticus meant sending it back to the book formatter, getting them to redo the page and then you have to reformat. With Atticus, you can now update all of your previous books really easily yourself, but we've made it even easier. So with this also by page, if this was my most recent book, and I'm adding this to the book that I'm working on, I'm ready to publish. I've set this up as a master page, which all you have to do is click the three dots beside any page.
This one is already a master page. So let's see if I can find one that... So if you have not, this is just a chapter. I wouldn't say this as a master page, but as an example, you would click the three dots and it says save as master page. And then this becomes a master page. Now, any change I make to this book, if I add a new title and I link it, I can then apply changes. So I can leave it and it will only affect this book. But if I apply changes, I can choose to apply this to all of the books that have used this master page. So if I have all of these other five books, when I save that and apply changes, it's gonna go and change that in all of the other five books that are using this page. I'm gonna update my entire series all at once.
Rhonda:
Yes. Wow.
Monique:
And then the only thing you need to do is re-export the files and re-upload them to your publisher.
Rhonda:
So it changes it all for you. And that was a question Mary Lynn said. She said, is Atticus also a printer or do you take your completed files and then move them into IngramSpark or another place? So you do have to load them up into IngramSpark after, right?
Monique:
Yes, yeah. And you can export to EPUB for your ebook files. That will work universally for any book publisher. They'll take the EPUB. It's the highest standards, the expectations. You will want to export the PDF for print books everywhere. and you can also export to docx.
So if you decide to write in Atticus, you can write your book in the program and then if you need to send it out to an editor, you can export to docx and they will have the content. Word can't display all of the formatting that Atticus does, so it will just export a basic content version of your book, but you can send that to your editor that way, or you can just keep a backup copy for yourself somewhere as a docx file.
I dropped a teaser a few minutes ago when I was talking about the price and how I said it gets all the future updates as well. Our programming team is working on collaboration right now. We're very excited about this. It is the next big thing to come to Atticus. And when that launches, you'll be able to invite your editor into the program to do their editing. You'll be able to work with co-authors if you give them permission. you'll be able to invite beta readers and your ARC team to actually come in and leave their comments in your book. And you have total control over how much they can access, how long they can access it, what they can or cannot do. You get control over that. You can kick them out when you're done with them. And so that's the next really exciting thing coming to Atticus.
Rhonda:
Yeah, that's fun. Katy's wondering, when you make a master page, Can you put links there? I saw a QR code at one point, but like, let's say you want people to sign up to your newsletter to hear more about when the next book is coming. Can you do that as well?
Monique:
Yes, absolutely. So you can do either both on the same page and export the file, or you could do, so these ones here are links. So if it has the little kind of pencil icon, these are links in the EPUB version, this will be clickable. So. somebody can tap and it will go directly to that link. In the print version, clearly they can't tap, so you can add as suggested a QR code.
So on this page I have, this is a clickable link and I've also made the image tappable. So no matter where they tap, they can get where I want them to go. But the print version, when they buy the print book, they can scan this with their mobile phone and it goes where I want them to go. When I'm streaming, the print version is very slow to load. I apologize, I can't show that, but you can absolutely do that.
What you could also do is create separate versions. With the also by page, if you didn't want to have a QR code for every single book on the digital version, you can actually choose to include it in e-book only. This icon here will show you that this page now is only in the e-book version. And then I can create a second also by page, which does have the QR codes. And I would say include that one in the print book only. And it will give you a little print icon.
Now, when you export the EPUB, you can see that this content is not included in the EPUB. It just doesn't export and vice versa for the print book.
Rhonda:
Okay, great. Katy's wondering, she's saying, is there a way to left align everything where your manuscript has an indent at the start of each chapter? Or should I fix that in Word first? Like how should you bring in your body text? Should you have indents and so on in it?
Monique:
Atticus will more or less ignore anything that you do in Word there. You will set it up in Atticus. So I'm just editing my theme here. I'm in the paragraph settings and you can choose whether you want it to be indented with each new paragraph like it is here or spaced. And then you add a space between each new paragraph. It has to be one or the other because that's industry requirements. So you have to have one or the other.
Atticus is designed to give you enough options to follow industry standards, but not so many options that you can do something like you were worried about being able to mess up the formatting. If the industry won't let you publish something, we won't let you do it in Atticus for the most part.
Rhonda:
Okay. So I have to make a choice. I either use indents or I use spacing. It looks to me like spacing is easy to read. Can you show me indents again? I'm just wondering.
Monique:
Yeah. Okay. So it's sort of fun. This, I would say, is the most common that you will find. That is the most common in almost all books. If you wanted both, you could set it up to indent and then double space yourself. Now Atticus won't import blank spaces because that is not industry standard.
For the most part, KDP specifically doesn't like blank lines because there was a time when authors were abusing that to get more page reads. It is not, it doesn't help get more page reads anymore. They are basing it on word counts. So extra spacing does not help you, but they still don't like it. They don't really love it when you have a lot of extra blank lines. So we don't recommend doing that, but it is possible if there is a reason for it.
So if you have a section in your book where you need to have extra spacing, you can do that. You can also insert scene breaks, of course. So you can do that with an image or you can, if you don't want an image, you can choose a scene break without an image and it just leaves an extra gap there or you can even do no visible scene break. This is generally used by authors who are writing inside Atticus, and they don't necessarily want their scenes to be broken up in the finished formatting, but when you add a scene, it gives you scenes here, which you can work just in that individual scene, and you can even drag and drop those around, and it will impact the full chapter, but... you can work on it, kind of pull it out.
So when I'm writing, I can go over to this left-hand menu and just drag chapter eight and make it chapter six. Absolutely.
Rhonda:
I love that. Okay, great.
Monique:
And you can do that in the front matter as well. So if you decide you want your first chapter in the front matter, it goes in there. Now the chapter one, if you have used automated chapter numbering, it's always going to start in the body section. So if you want... chapter one to be in the front matter for some reason, you would have to put that into your title. You can see my numbering changes when I do that.
Rhonda:
Right. I love that. And I just can click back and forth between writing the book and formatting the book. That sounds like a way to really get distracted very easily. It's like, let me try this, let me try this, let me try this while you're writing instead of actually finishing the darn book.
Monique:
That's why you can turn the previewer off as well. So if you want less distraction, you can close out that previewer so you're not watching it. We also have settings that are only specific to the writing. So if, for example, you are dyslexic, we have a font that is designed to help... make it easier for dyslexic people to read.
Rhonda:
Love that so much! That's so great.
Monique:
And you can also increase the font size here and make it easier for you to read. And none of this changes. And if you like how it looks, if you find it easier to see it when it's spaced or when it's justified or when it's left aligned, you can make all these changes for your writing comfort. And if I open up the preview again, you can see it has not changed the formatting. So it doesn't print that way, it just helps you write it more easily.
Rhonda:
Exactly, yeah. Okay, fun. Mary Lynne wanted to know what you would do for a book of poetry, which is formatted differently, right? Would you just, do you think it's best just to kind of either write the poems directly in Atticus or cut and paste them in? Like, what would you do for, people must use it for books of poetry. What typically would you do?
Monique:
Yeah, poetry is a lot more difficult. It depends on how creative you need your formatting to be. So Atticus, I will be absolutely honest that it is designed for narrative fiction, not necessarily poetry. So if you have a poem that is fairly standard in its layout, you can absolutely do that in Atticus. And there are some options. So let's just take this and pretend it's a poem.
Rhonda:
It's a prose poem. That's what it is.
Monique:
Yeah. And I'll just add some. So we have some options. You can either do a block quote or verse formatting, or you can just leave it in the regular. So we'll show you the verse formatting. It centers it on the page. And so you have bigger indents on either side, and it increases the space between what it considers to be verses. So it's treating this as a verse and this as a verse.
Every time you press enter, it becomes a new verse. So if I want to have a new line within the same verse, instead of pressing enter or return, I press shift enter and that starts a new line, but it's within the same verse. And the block quote is essentially the same, except it's not indented quite as far. So you can do those formats, you can also just kind of break up your lines where you want them broken up. You can do a certain amount with verse, but like if you were doing anything like visual poetry or a different layout on the page or concrete poetry, this isn't really the... Exactly. If you need staggered indents, you can only go a single indent.
You can do a hanging indent, which is more popular in poetry, and the hanging indent everything except the first line. So the first line, I don't know how well you can see my little preview. Hopefully you can see that though, but the first line in the verse is not indented and then the rest it is. So you have some options for playing with the layout here, but I will be honest, it's not designed for the more creative layouts.
Rhonda:
Okay, gotcha. But non-fiction, would this is – you're showing us fiction but nonfiction you know it's got the subtitles it's got sometimes the chapters look differently I find in non-fiction so either fiction or non- fiction you can do in here.
Monique:
Absolutely and there's quite a few features that um here let me see in this book this is kind of the non-fiction usage of things um so You might have a subtitle, a paragraph, and then a block quote. You can have your attribution there. You can do subheadings there. We've got custom subheadings where you can do more handwritten style. It really depends on what you're putting in your theme settings.
But something like the key learnings from the chapter, then a nice list. I don't know. that I have callouts already shown. So you can do a callout box as well. That's where you take like a line and then pop it out in the text. Yes. So you would do that. And you can adjust the settings as well. So you can change the border style, if you like that better, you can change the color of your border, you can even do a background fill color.
Just keep in mind your readership. Again, like I said, you can do a lot of things. That doesn't always mean that you should. But if you're writing nonfiction and say you have this preset and you know you're going to use it in every single chapter, you can save it. And you can save it as a preset, and give it your own name. You can... then every time you create a callout box, it will just look like. You'll make the same consistent box all the way through.
Rhonda:
Yeah, exactly. Oh, I love it. Okay, great.
Monique:
And I think I'll show you guys a quick, I've got the text message formatting here. So that's what the text messages look like. And this is how it's formatted in Atticus. So you can change who's speaking just by clicking the button. If it's their name, you want to just show that it's a person and it goes along with the next text message. Or if it is a message, you just click that button.
So it's really easy to do. And if you kind of do it wrong, it's pretty easy to see. So you'll see, Mark, well, that was supposed to be a name. So then it's pretty easy to fix that and adjust it there.
Rhonda:
And Katy's wondering if you're doing text messages, can you put in emojis? Or is it just text? Emojis are really hard for EPUBs. They, it really depends on the device and some of the older devices aren't going to have them programmed in. So to protect your readership and to make sure that it displays EPUB like the same across all devices, no matter who's reading, we don't recommend using emojis.
However, generally, on Windows, you press the Windows button and the period and it gives you this kind of emoji window. Generally, if you use the really basic emojis, they will often come up in most e-readers, not in print.
Rhonda:
So if it's like, you know, a colon dash bracket and that gives you a smiley face, it's using those like the characters, is that it?
Monique:
So I'm wondering, you may not be able to see my little pop-up. So now I have this emoji that I kind of put in there. That will show up on most e-reader devices, most of them, but it may not show up in print versions. And it may not show up on older e-readers. Yes, exactly. So for consistency, it can be a little bit dangerous, but if you do things like the text kind of smiley face, that will show up because those are punctuation marks. So you can find menus of all sorts of different kinds of text-based emojis that you can use that just kind of get really fun as well.
Rhonda:
Okay, great. I think that Katy could learn this inside of an hour Katy. Like I think you could be an expert in this. Katy's our resident tech savvy person. So she would know it inside of 10 minutes and it would take me probably five years to feel comfortable with it. There was a question from Mary Lynne about schools. Like if she wanted to introduce it to a class to use, is there something like a group purchase or how does that work? Do they all need their own software or?
Monique:
Right now they would need their own software. With the collaboration features that we're working on, we are also developing a kind of a publisher version. So this was something that has been very much asked for from high level university courses where the students are writing books in the courses and then the professors are publishing them or helping them get published. So that has been a request and it is something we're working on. For now, every student would have to have their own version of Atticus or the school would have to have logins for all of the students, could be a little bit problematic, but.
But when you get to the collaboration phase that would when you launch that feature that would make it easier for classes to use it. Absolutely. Of any kind really to use it.
Rhonda:
Well, this has been amazing. This looks super easy to me and I'm definitely going to hop in on that June special that you offered us to get that course at Atticus.io/resilient. So thank you for that. That's exciting.
Monique:
I'll mention one last thing for you, Rhonda. Once you set it up once, you can just click on your saved theme. So I can now use this theme that I've created in any book in the future. So once you set it up once, you're pretty good to go for all of your future books, as long as they're within the same series or whatnot.
It might take me like an hour to go through all the options and set it up exactly the way I want it. But then when I'm publishing book two, book three, book four, book five of my series, quick and easy because it's all really preset. You have your theme preset, any master pages you created, they'll already be ready. So even your About Author page, you can create that once turn it into a master page and then just insert it into every book afterwards.
Rhonda:
Love it. Wow. I love how easy it is! This is great. Thank you so much, Monique. I really appreciate you being here to show us this today.
Monique:
My absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for having me with you. It's been so wonderful hanging out with everyone.
Outro:
Thanks so much for hanging out with me today and for listening all the way to the end. I hope you enjoyed today's episode of the Resilient Writers Radio Show. While you're here, I would really appreciate it if you'd consider leaving a rating and review of the show. You can do that in whatever app you're using to listen to the show right now, and it just takes a few minutes.
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