Reedsy simple book formatting & free!
I received this email today from the Skilled Workman contact form: From Martin at Reedsy simple book formatting:
“I’m part of the team behind the Reedsy Book Editor, an online tool that helps independent authors write, collaborate on, and format their projects. It exports in EPUB3 and print-ready PDF and we’ve been getting really great feedback from our Authors. We’ve just published a post on how to format books and thought perhaps you and your readers might find it of interest: https://blog.reedsy.com/how-to-format-a-book ”
Reedsy simple book formatting looks good
It’s very simple, but it should work well for novels not needing much. Things will be very basic. However, we all know that a huge portion of the self-published novels are simple single story content [one continuous text frame] with no graphics except for the cover. This tool might take care of some of the angst faced by many new authors.
Will it take care of intensely formatted non-fiction?
No. Nor will it help much with books using many graphics. However, for those who are fiscally challenged and/or have little or no design experience, this may well be a solution to get you started. Will it look like a professionally designed book? No. But then, most of the new authors do not require that.
I’ve written extensively on the problems with word processing. In The sadness of Word: How it’s damaging self-publishing for example, I cover many of the issues. Reedsy has the same problems, as far as I can see.
- Word can’t handle professional graphics: PSDs and PDFs. It can’t handle vector image data at all.
- Word processors justify line by line not a paragraph at a time: As a result, word spacing varies wildly from line to line. Additionally, Reedsy just offers left, centered, and right alignments.
- No link management: You must link graphics so you can swap out the high resolution gray images for the high resolution color images of downloadable PDFs and the low resolution color images of ePUBs and Kindle books when going from print to ebook.
- No CMYK color: This is the standard for printing and word processors cannot even import it. Reedsy is a browser tool, and can only use Web graphics [as far as I can tell]
The list goes on and on.
That being said: Reedsy looks like a useful tool for its niche.