A self-published writer’s workflow, 2025

Warren Ellis laid out his current workflow in his newsletter; no one asked me, but here’s mine.

A It might be of interest because it’s very simple: Raw words into a reMarkable 2, paste into Atticus, do the rest there.

The reMarkable is more or less an e-ink notebook that will OCR your handwriting. You can pay $3/month to host your documents on their cloud and access it from most devices, or you can just email stuff to yourself for free. The OCR needs a lot of editing, but for me the device gives the low-distraction writing I want from a notebook while eliminating most of the cost of transcription.

So that covers getting the words In The Computer. “The rest,” done in Atticus, covers:

Edit from developmental through line stages (including killing all the typos inserted by the reMarkable)Produce formatted ebooks and printer-ready PDFs, including the cover if necessary.

I’ve used Scrivener for ebook and manuscript production in the past, and as Warren says in his newsletter, it’s a little too powerful; you can do everything you need to do and a whole lot of things you don’t, and the interface doesn’t distinguish between them very well. In particular, you’d better memorize all the parameters you used for Book 1 if you want a consistent look for Book 2… and there are a lot of parameters. Atticus has customizable styles that you can save. There are also things I don’t love about Atticus, in particular their inexplicable handling of smart quotes, and I’ve experienced performance problems when trying to do basic things with a large amount of text; but it’s what all the Streets of Flame books have been done in, and I’ve liked it enough not to shell out for Vellum.

Currently reading: THE WAKE, by Paul Kingsnorth.