Atticus Software Review for Book Writing and Book Formatting

My latest book, coming out in 2023 was written on the new writing and formatting software Atticus. If you're thinking of making a purchase but wondering if you should, well, this video is for you. Hey there, I'm Julie the Book Broad. I'm a three time soon to be four time author and the founder of the fabulous self publishing services firm called book launchers at 20 books to 50k. In 2021, Dave Chesson of Kindlepreneur or publisher Rocket unveiled his new software Atticus. In my mind it was like Scrivener, Word and Vellum all got mashed up into one software and I was smitten. I bought my copy that night and declared to my team the following week that we were going to get an enterprise license and give versions to all our clients and use it as our standard as soon as they rolled out the collaboration feature. You see, this software will, when they finally finish programming all of it will potentially be the perfect solution to a lot of the woes we experience as authors and a self publishing services platform that we work with a lot of different people on a project. So first let me share the things that I loved and still love about Atticus. Besides the super cute dog for an icon, it gives me some of the functionality of Scrivener that I liked without giving me the complications that made my head spin. Here, let me show you quickly what I mean. See these things on the left? They are chapters so we can move them around, add a chapter, manipulate them. It gives you a visual look at your book the whole time. I really liked that versus being lost in the middle of a Word document. The that's a lot like Scrivener. Each chapter has a word count too, which I found really useful because I would be able to see, oh boy, this chapter is getting too big. Or ooh, this chapter is a little too small. It also looks and functions a lot like Word where I am very comfortable. Instead of the built in Microsoft spell check, it's got ProWritingAid integrated for spellcheck and other writing tools, which is a huge upgrade over Word. I think you also have this front matter section so you can start planning some of those pieces that a lot of authors forget about until they go to layout and then go ooh, I need to have a title page and a copyright page. It also creates a table of contents right here for you. And finally, my other favorite feature was this book goal and word count. You can see how many days in a row you've been writing and kind of gamify your writing journey. And there's also a built in timer. So whether you're doing writing sprints or you're just trying to make yourself focus for a set amount of time, the timer can be a really useful way to do that. As you can see, the marketing book is a bit of a beast, but don't worry, we've been cutting it down since this draft. I had some glitches with writing the book when I had big paragraphs that I imported from video scripts, but largely that was fixed by turning Grammarly off of my computer and hitting return a few times to split the paragraph up. I did send that issue to support though, and likely they've even resolved it since I've been writing the book. Overall, I enjoyed my experience writing the book in this software. Unfortunately they don't have the collaboration feature built in yet, so an editor can't hop in and track changes, which we were really excited about for many reasons, but one of them was because you can have version control and lock the document because it's an app, it lives in the cloud, and it's not a piece of software sitting on your computer with the file only being on your computer or in your own personal cloud. It has some exciting features that would give us an option over people using Google, which is a problematic piece for editing and entering layout as we've talked about before. So having it live in the cloud does allow to have some features that authors like with Google Docs and once it has collaboration would give us as an organization more control over the manuscript. You'd be able to lock access and also make sure the document doesn't get lost in a computer crash on anyone's side. So I'm really excited for those things. But without this ready to go, I was forced to export my file to Word. Easy enough to do. Watch how quick and easy it is. Oh, and you can see a lot of the other features here which are important to set up if you are using Atticus to lay out your book and you can then export to a PDF and an ePub all wonderful attributes and tools that continue to make me so excited for this software as a way to simplify our process and give our authors more tools to edit their own books in the future. But again, without a way to have an editor work on this file, you have to export it. And here's what it looked like when I exported it. The table of contents didn't come over and the book has no spacing so it looks horrible. I lost my paragraphs and the Entire book was like this. It was such a pain for me to read through. And then when I handed it to our book marketing manager for her to read through, she commented on how hard that made it. To get through it, she had to read the book a second time, which at 100,000 words, well, that's not a small job, so that wasn't cool. And it would stop me from writing in the software again until I could collaborate with others within the software. And of course, if you plan to use Atticus for the layout of your book, you would export it to edit it and then import it back in. The good news is that was pretty easy to do. Check it out. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Oh, and this is after I edited it. So look how much we've already cut it down. Now we're down to 80,000 words. It's still a big book. It's better than it was. Okay. An Anicus is a great little system for someone who is not a designer to lay out a book. It's not going to be as quick as you would like and it still requires you to be patient and review line by line what's happening in your book. But it's much easier to do because than in a program like Adobe InDesign. See, check this out. Head in here and they have some built in templates or you can make custom templates. The preview window on the right is gold. As someone me who has no interest in ever doing my own book layout because I know how nitpicky it is to get right, this sure makes it look easy. What it really does is simplify the process so an expensive designer isn't required. You'll need to make some choices on this page, but that allows you to get it closer to the look you want. It still doesn't quite customize the level most of our books get customized to, but again that's the difference between a template or a customized template versus software that is used by a professional designer. You can add images and do a lot of that work here and the output of this is really strong. Once you have all the elements and the design pieces set up, it's really as simple as clicking ePub or PDF. Just for kicks. I'll hit export PDF so you can see what it looks like. We don't use this for design yet, but we are excited about incorporating it for the simpler books in the future when we have an enterprise license because then our authors will be empowered to make their own tweaks post launch or post book launcher's. Life versus needing to get a designer to go back into their indesign files and make a small change. Because when you do that with InDesign, you then have to scour the manuscript to see if it introduced anything else. Weird, because it often does. So I think this has the power to reduce our costs and our time, which in turn can reduce what we have to charge in our process. And as an author, if you're doing a do it yourself book, this is a really powerful tool. And again, because it's cloud based, you can use it on Mac or PC. Vellum, which is also a good design tool, is only for Mac users. Again, you'll still need to go through to check for orphans and widows and all the proofread checks after you've laid it out, but it's a powerful tool to get you to a good design. I'm anxiously awaiting so many feature additions so we can fully use it and I can fully recommend it. As of the filming of this video, collaboration is no longer in their short term view, so I'm going to keep watching it and keep cheering them on. But it's not something I can really fully get behind just yet because that collaboration feature is so vital and the export function makes your book so hard to work in for editors, but the Software is only $147. I mean, this is a steal of a deal and I couldn't be more excited that it's been created and it's only going to get better and better. Have you used Atticus? Let me know your thoughts below. And if you want my updates on this, make sure you subscribe to the channel and turn notifications on so you find out when my new videos are out. And I have a lot of videos I could send you to after this. But if you saw the epigraph on the left column, maybe you're wondering what the heck that is. So why don't you watch this video right here on epigraphs? Or if you're wondering what I'm talking about with regards to watching out for orphans and widows and all that fun. Well, these videos right here and here are on layout or interior formatting. So go ahead, watch one of those three videos. I'm waiting for you.