Sarah Juckes of Completely Novel, an ALLi Partner Member
Sarah Juckes of ALLi partner member CompletelyNovel offers some answers for those in search of the best software to design their own print book, including CompletelyNovel's own ratings on various criteria. As well as the price (UK rate, as she's UK based), she's given a rating for how easy each tool is to master, plus a rating for how much control you can have over what your book looks like. A key aspect of print book design is being able to produce a high quality PDF file, so she's rated this aspect, too, and has also provided useful further reading resources to help you gain mastery of whichever tool you choose. In the interests of fairness, we should note that other software is also available!
1) Microsoft Word – for interior/manuscript files
- Price – £5.99 per month
- Easy to master? – 4/5
- Degree of control – 3/5
- Export to PDF – 3/5
Killer feature:
Paragraph styles – The key to keeping your formatting consistent. Master these, and your book will look much more professional
CompletelyNovel's verdict:
You can achieve professional results from Word, but it does get tricky if you try and do complex formatting, such as images and tables.
Resources and alternatives
How to typeset your book in Microsoft Word – a free guide
Open Office – a free (basic) Word alternative
2) InDesign – for interior/manuscript files
- Price – £17.15 per month
- Easy to master? – 2/5
- Degree of control – 5/5
- Export to PDF – 5/5
Killer feature:
Master pages – These enable you apply a template to your pages, so you can make changes to a group of pages at a time. Great for keeping your manuscript consistent if you decide to shift things around a bit later.
CompletelyNovel's verdict:
If you have a complex book, with lots of images or tables, then you’ll find InDesign much better than Word. For text-only books however, InDesign has more in it than most people will ever need.
Resources:
Free Indesign tutorials – Good for getting started
An Introduction to typesetting a book using Adobe InDesign
10 of the alternatives to Adobe Indesign
3) Scrivener – for interior files
- Price – $45
- Easy to master? – 3/5
- Degree of control – 3/5
- Export to PDF – 3/5
Killer feature:
The Inspector pane – Scrivener lets you add notes to each part of your manuscript so you can keep everything organised when writing.
Our verdict:
A seriously great tool for writing, but overly-complex for formatting a print book. This being said, if you’ve written your book using Scrivener and you know your way around the program, then it’s possible to get the same kind of results from Scrivener that you could get from Word.
Resources:
How to format a book for printing using Scrivener
Free Scrivener tutorials for beginners
4) Photoshop – for cover files
- Price – £9.00 per month
- Easy to master? – 2/5
- Degree of control – 5/5
- Export to PDF – 5/5
Killer feature:
Content aware fill – perfect if you need to expand/doctor an image.
Our verdict:
Wonderful for experts, but often frustrating for beginners, as there are things that don’t seem to do anything when you click on them. Unless you have a lot of time to dedicate to learning Photoshop, you’ll probably find that you’re better off using simpler software.
Resources:
Photoshop tutorials from Lynda.com
Free, downloadable book cover templates
5) Canva – for cover files
- Price – free!
- Easy to master? – 5/5
- Degree of control – 3/5
- Export to PDF – 2/5
Killer feature:
Pre-loaded templates enable you to create an awesome-looking front cover very simply.
Our verdict:
A great tool for eBooks, but not so good for full-cover print books. As a high-quality, low-budget option, try creating your front cover in Canva and transferring it to your publishing provider’s Cover Creator (more about CompletelyNovel’s cover creator here.) You can then create a more basic back cover and spine using this tool.
Resources:
The basics of good design, via Canva Design School
OVER TO YOU
Which book creation software have you found the best in these criteria? Please do share below so others can benefit.
Regarding formatting software, I have no idea why anyone recommends Scrivener. way too complicated and messy. They don’t make barge poles long enough for that.
No mention of vellum. It is highly recommended by a lot of authors and designers.
Can anyone suggest how to resize pics for web and print on a mac?
Thanks to all, especially Sarah Juckes, who promptly replied to my emailed-request for print-book software. My goal is to write a memoir for my grandchildren to explain their free-spirited, goofy behavior was inherited. Sarah’s guidance and the responses that followed have encouraged me to continue my next adventure as an author. . ..but first, I need to join the ranks of ALLi! Looking forward it. Grannie Annie
I use BookCreative (bookcreative.com) to design my print and ebooks. It was originally called BookCoverPro, but they added a page formatting feature last year and changed the name. Personally, I just use it for creating covers with barcoding and love it as I’ve never had any issues with submission. I use the standard version which is $97 and they have a deluxe version for $197 that includes templates.
I am just beginning my search for the tools to help a friend publish a book. Like the publishing industry in general, there are an (currently) overwhelming number of different alternatives each supported by creative individuals with credible and productive experience. WOW. Thanks for the information found on this site.
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You can’t achieve professional results with Word. You can make a book with it, but you have to lower your standard a lot to call it «professional». It lacks many basics typographic features. Template or not.
I will rant for a moment about producing non-fiction books. MS Word belongs in the dustbin of history. So many things do not work properly. Nor can it control every aspect of the page layout. Worst of all: Word’s inability with footnotes and endnotes is pathetic.
The other packages mentioned have just a few of the features to be found in WordPerfect, which elderly persons may remember.
I used WordPerfect 4.2 from around the late 1980s, with only a couple of updates. My files are often more than a million words long, with more than 2,000 subheadings in a five-level contents list, as well as generated indexes. I used WordPerfect 10 from 2002 until early this year, when I updated to WPX7. I would recommend anybody to start with WP10 however (look around online for a good price).
WP has had troubled financial times recently. What went wrong for WP was that people used it happily for many years so there were no new sales, and of course Microsoft was doing its best to sabotage WP as it was a serious competitor.
Try to talk to people who have used both . . .
Or you could do it all with FREE open source tools:
LibreOffice (http://www.libreoffice.com) – for interior/manuscript files
* Easy to master? – 4/5
* Degree of control – 4/5
* Export to PDF – 5/5
Gimp (http://www.gimp.org) – for cover files
* Easy to master? – 2/5
* Degree of control – 5/5
* Export to PDF – 5/5
Sigil (http://sigil-ebook.com) – produce full ePub formatted books
* Easy to master? – 4/5 (Come with a great Help tutorial)
* Degree of control – 5/5
Just those three applications will save you around £33 per month (by your figures). But the really great thing about FOSS (Free Open Source Software) is that you can have as many copies on as many machines as you like — desktop, laptop, notebook. Plus the three applications mentioned work on Windows, Macs and Linux machines.
I use WriteWay for all my book needs. It is a Windows based program, which Scrivener wasn’t for a long time. It’s the biggest reason I got it. It works like Scrivener in many ways. Was not difficult to learn to use and they have free videos to help you learn. Can easily import and format documents, or your entire book, to pdf, epub, etc. in just a couple clicks. It keeps track of your words per day, and deadlines. It has cover formatting ready to use, and allows for the prep and formatting of all those pages at the front. The program was written and designed by the husband of a best selling author for her and her author friends to use because programs like Scrivener were not available to Windows users at the time. I love WriteWay and all of it’s abilities. It is everything you need for research, word processing, formatting, and development of your writing works, all in one program. And, it is only $35 for the professional edition. They also have a FREE 30-day trial, if you’d like to try it before you buy it.
I’ll add #6 – GIMP free photo/image editing software for cover design and images.
* Price: free open-source software
* Easy to Master: 2/5
* Degree of Control: 5/5
* Export to .pdf: 4/5
* Export to .jpg / .png: 5/5
Killer features: Does everything Photoshop does without the killer price tag.
The verdict: A steep learning curve, but it does everything Photoshop does and is free. There’s a good basic ‘how to’ book out there to master GIMP 2.8 basics … use the money you just saved on Photoshop to buy it or you’ll end up ripping out your hair. If you come over from using Photoshop some of the features seem counter-intuitive until you learn the works. Graphics (text) effects can be clunky to master manually, so if you own a text editing software such as InDesign it might be easier to just import it in. Tons of free online videos on YouTube to learn fancy features, plus a G+ users group.
Download GIMP for free at: http://www.gimp.org/
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I just tried to download Canva and it doesn’t support Internet Explorer, which is a bit weird! You have to download Chrome.
Internet Explorer is a problematic browser for lots of applications, Christine. So good move to download Chrome
Internet Explorer is being phased out now anyway, Christine, so much better to go with Chrome before it disappears anyway! Even some government applications don’t work with Internet Explorer, I discovered recently!
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For layout I use Serif PagePlus. I’ve used it for all 50+ of my own books, and many for other people too. It’s easy to learn, has all the features you’ll ever need, and is a fraction of the price of InDesign.
I’m with Dave – Serif’s Page Plus is a great product to use and doesn’t cost the earth.
I’ve used it for the CA text book, other books, brochures, flyers etc. Produces print-ready files which we upload to Lightning Source … who print the books on demand.
In Design is too expensive and unnecessarily complex for the occasional user.
I purchased PagePlus after reading this comment and the one below it. Their quickstart video gave me high hopes about the program. There’s one problem: their software delivery system is a bit antiquated to say the least. After purchasing an instant download, I got a message that it wouldn’t be ready for another week. In other words, there’s no way for me to download the software that I just purchased. I submitted a trouble ticket but customer service is not available on the weekends. Also their website email queue is slow. It took a few hours to get a confirmation email on my order. After closing the browser I couldn’t get into my account (they did not send a password after purchase). So I did a password recovery request and got a link 4 hours later that said it would expire in 6 hours. I tried the link and guess what… it was already expired. I just submitted another password recovery request. I am still optimistic about this software. At $25 it’s a great deal, but if you’re in a rush to get started you’ll be sadly disappointed as I am right now. I just hope that the program works as described in their video, and not like the experience I’ve had with their website.
These rarely look professional. Best to save up and go to Matador who will also put your work into bookshops and get you international outlets.
InDesign, like Quark, is for the whole book. Especially the cover. There seems to be confusion between word processing software, such as Word and Scrivener, and Desktop Publishing software like InDesign, Quark, or Publisher. Word processors are great for creating manuscripts, but they are really bad as DTP software, which is why Traditional publisher don’t make book with these programs. Likewise, I would not use InDesign as a word processor to create a MS, even though it has some pretty powerful editing tools. Photoshop is a raster program (images with pixels) and Illustrator a vector art program. Yes, you can design covers and such with them, but they are not ideal and rather clunky for that.
There is one important section missing here. How are you color managing your workflow?
If you don’t want to go to through the hassle of formatting your own Word or InDesign Templates, ALLi advisor, Joel Friedlander—The Book Designer, has a myriad of pre-formatted templates for Microsoft Word and Adobe InDesign for print books.
http://www.bookdesigntemplates.com
I use Word for creating ebooks first and then later creating the print book (for Createspace). I have my own templates in Word I created using the Styles feature that makes it so much easier. I have a template for the specific genre I’m publishing. Romance and young adult has its own template, art books and children’s picture books have their template for ebook and also print books, and coloring books have their own for print. I use Corel Paintshop Pro for graphics. Learning some Photoshop now.
Creating your own template in Word is a really great idea, Grace. Thanks for sharing!
I use Scrivener for creating ebooks, InDesign, Photoshop, and MS Word 😀