Sarah Juckes of Completely Novel, an ALLi Partner Member Sarah Juckes of ALLi partner member 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 – • Easy to master? – 4/5 • Degree of control – 3/5 • Export to PDF – 3/5 Killer feature: – 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 – a free guide a free (basic) Word alternative 2) InDesign – for interior/manuscript files • Price – • Easy to master? – 2/5 • Degree of control – 5/5 • Export to PDF – 5/5 Killer feature: – 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: – Good for getting started 3) Scrivener – for interior files • Price – • Easy to master? – 3/5 • Degree of control – 3/5 • Export to PDF – 3/5 Killer feature: – 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.
![For For](https://www.perrla.com/_images/screenshots/apa-perrlamenu.jpg)
Blurb makes it easy for you to create any kind of book or magazine—in both print and digital formats—for yourself, to share, or to sell. Blurb for iPhone & iPad Make a.
![Software Software](https://www.invoicingtemplate.com/screenshots/bill-format-computer-repair-service-uis.png)
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: 4) Photoshop – for cover files • Price – • Easy to master? – 2/5 • Degree of control – 5/5 • Export to PDF – 5/5 Killer feature: – 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: 5) Canva – for cover files • Price – • 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.) You can then create a more basic back cover and spine using this tool. Resources: OVER TO YOU Which book creation software have you found the best in these criteria? Please do share below so others can benefit. 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. Shaiya new servers 2017. 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 () – for interior/manuscript files * Easy to master? – 4/5 * Degree of control – 4/5 * Export to PDF – 5/5 Gimp () – for cover files * Easy to master? – 2/5 * Degree of control – 5/5 * Export to PDF – 5/5 Sigil () – 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).