Cailin Riley Books

Formatting your book can be one of the most stressful parts of self-publishing.

While Amazon’s Kindle Create can be a very helpful and simple tool for creating ebooks and print, there are other options to format your book.

Ingram Spark’s design suite

If you sign up to distribute your book through Ingram Spark, there is an option to use their book formatting software. It isn’t as user-friendly as Kindle Create, but it does provide a good amount of options and is free to use if you already have an Ingram account.

Atticus

Atticus is a web-based software that you can buy for about $150. That price gets you lifetime access to the software, meaning that you can use it to format as many ebooks and print books as you like. Many authors say that they really like using Atticus and that customer service is very responsive. It apparently does have a bit of a learning curve and can be a bit buggy at times, but it could be a good option for those who want more control over the design process.

Canva

Canva offers free and paid (through Canva Pro) templates to help you design book covers and pages. Many of them are very professional looking and if you use the free version, you can potentially save A LOT of money on your book. That said, Canva cannot export epubs, so if you want to upload your book file to Amazon or elsewhere, you’ll need to adjust. For example, I used Canva for the print version of my gardening book to create a static pdf version, since I wanted to keep all my images and design elements. But for the ebook, I only used Canva for the cover and used Kindle Create for the internal content (epub).

Overall, my opinion is that, if you have a text-heavy book, it’s better to go with IngramSpark, Atticus or Kindle Create. Canva is best for image heavy books such as cookbooks,photography and other types of non-fiction.