Ah, the joys of typesetting! I’m having more fun with this than expected.

I played with Reedsy Studio since it was free. It had some helpful features like showing how many words I add (or remove) in a day. It also shows word and phrase repetition – great for revising.

It’s also got a handy little planner tab that provides a story-board style tool. I love that. I’m not a stream-of-consciousness kind of writer. Blank pages evoke terror. Lack of planning prompts hours of staring into the abyss.

It’s limited on the actual typesetting, though. Don’t get me wrong – super cool for a free tool. If I wasn’t an exceptionally picky guy it’d be invaluable for creating simple but professional looking books. Sure, it does add a little note on the copyright page about the typeset files being created in Reedsy… but small price to pay for a really good word processor that is able to transform your work into print-ready pdf or epubs.

Alas, I am cursed with being picky. My book isn’t structured into traditional chapters. I want to use fonts specific to my genre. I want to add those dumb little icons you see at the beginning of chapters. The book has footnotes, and I want control of their format.

So far, Atticus has been really hitting the right notes. It’s a paid tool, but it’s not a subscription. Refreshing! It has fewer features for planning and revising, which I miss from Reedsy. But, the ability to customize the structure of the book to a high degree, the plethora of font and format options, and the ability to create and save format templates to swap between when narrowing down the book’s aesthetics is rad.

It’s starting to look like a real book!

It’s starting to look good.