Beta Reader Group discussion
Writing Advice & Discussion
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Software - Editing, formatting + publishing
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Marta wrote: "Thank you!"Hi Marta,
You're very welcome :-)
Nick
Kindle Create is good if you're planning to publish an ebook to Amazon. If you need to convert (because nothing seems to natively read the file type of kpf) then Calibre is free and works well.
Dienekes wrote: "Kindle Create is good if you're planning to publish an ebook to Amazon. If you need to convert (because nothing seems to natively read the file type of kpf) then Calibre is free and works well."Thanks for that information, Dienekes.
I had my first go with Kindle Create yesterday. I wish I'd known about it earlier. I'm struggling to get up to speed with e-publishing as it is now, but I am making progress. :-)
Grammarly is great. I've been using it for a while now and it has proven the ads I've been seeing right. Canva's awesome and simple! I don't know about the rest.
Actually, Grammarly makes many, many mistakes. I purchased the premium version a couple of years ago and noticed that it constantly made bad recommendations. I researched and others had similar issues. My high-priced editor advised me to dump Grammarly and use Pro Writing Aid instead. They are made by the same company but Pro Writing Aid is vastly superior in my experience. As an example, I just received extensive comments from a beta reader on one of the novels I'm writing. The beta reader was very detailed and it's a 96,000 word manuscript. She said in part, "Based on what I've read, you do NOT need copy/line edits. The book is already very clean; all that's required is a few punctuation fixes here and there." That is largely due to Pro Writing Aid. Hope that helps.
I guess I'll check out Pro Writing Aid too. Though I don't have any issues with Grammarly.
I've tried both Grammarly and ProWritingAid. They both flagged things that shouldn't have been flagged, and they both missed things a human editor caught. However, that said, they do really help find problems, so long as you review what's being flagged carefully. If you decide to pay for the more advanced features, IMO, PWA is the better value. But Grammarly seems like it offers more for free than PWA does. I would try them both out and see which works best with the type of writing you're doing and your specific writing style.
I prefer Grammarly and then pass it to a person who is an avid reader and not afraid to tell it like it is.,
For anyone using Firefox as their Internet Browser, I came across two extensions which go well together and mean I can have my computer read my manuscript to me. I'm hoping this will help me catch more errors and check the flow of my writing.They are :-
EPUBReader and Read Aloud both free installs
I would think there are similar add-ons for other browsers.
I also put my first book through the D2D e-book creator today, starting from a plain as I could make it Docx file. Worked no problem, very straightforward. I opted to create both mobi and pdf files from the site, which both work fine. These are just drafts of course - I'm a while away from being ready to publish, but I am making progress.
All the best - Nick
BTW I should have said before about EPUBReader and Read Aloud that I took me quite a few clicks to find a set-up that works.What I did roughly speaking was load a pdf version of my manuscript into a Firefox browser window via EPUBReader . Once that was showing up properly, then clicking on the read aloud icon on the Firefox taskbar worked fine.
If it doesn't like how you have things set, the EPUBReader errors out. You have to be prepared to mess around a bit to get it working.
Once it is reading, then I switch back to my editing window in LibreOffice and the voice burbles away in my earphones. You can choose a different reading voice if you don't like the default one.
I recently started using the ProWriting Aid word extension and it has its ups and downs. It was super helpful for grammar/spelling (which is my achilles heel) but there were some times it crashed/gave me recommendations that it recommended removing (e.g., add a comma, but then updated to say commas should never be used there). For formatting, I recommend Vellum.
I've been trying out Atticus for my current WIP. It's super easy to export a formatted PDF or EPUB. Basically, point-and-click, and you vary the settings and play "what if" games with font choices, etc. I don't think I'd go back to formatting any other way at this moment. Atticus just makes it uber-easy. Looking forward to see how it evolves from its current state.I've messed around with Canva, but can't seem to be able to do what I want to do.
I also found this really cool site for making maps if anybody is interested... called Inkarnate. I only made some test maps with the free version, but looks really easy to make fuller maps as needed if you need a fantasy map.
Others that I use:
Gimp 2.10 - Great all around image processing app.
Inkscape - Great for making illustrations and vector images.
Scribus - Great for creating pro-quality PDFs. Note that for large manuscripts, you will have to split the work into multiple files because it's not as efficient in memory usage as a paid tool like InDesign. But, you can use the free PDFToolkit to stitch the various PDFs together. Easy peasy!
Notepad++ (yes, indeed! But I should no longer have to muck with HTML encoding since I started using Atticus!)
ProWritingAid - My go-to shenanigan-catcher. Like was said above, be judicious regarding its findings.
There is also this website with an AI tool called Marlowe. I haven't tried it yet, but if anybody has, I'd like to know if they found it's output useful. From what I see in the sample reports, a lot of it resembles what ProWritingAid provides.
For formatting print, I use Scribus. It's good for everything kind of print, from flyer to coffee table book, and once you get it figured out, you'll blast right through formats.
PWA is the least error-prone. Grammarly is wrong often than not, so I wrote my own tool in Java for commas, character name consistency, said-bookisms, spelling, contractions, repeated words and phrases, profanity, reading level, etc. Anyone who wants to try it (and has Java installed) is welcome to try it. send me a message or mail at ScottRhineBooks at gmail
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Text ones are :-
Editor = LibreOffice
Checking = Grammarly online version only, WordCounter
This morning I came across NaturalReader Online which does text-to-speech. I think it's brilliant, especially for dialogue. I wished I'd tried it sooner.
For images :-
GIMP 2.1
Canva - web version
I'm impressed with all of the above, especially Canva for designing book covers
(I've installed Kindle Previewer 3 but not tried it yet as I'm still editing my manuscript.)
Anyone else care to share their experiences ?
Cheers - Nick
Previous thread from 2014 :-
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...