Can You Use Scribus To Format Your Self-Published Book?

Hello Friends. Today I am coming to you with another tool recommendation to help you as you write and publish your books.

For KDP Paperback Formatting I have mentioned previously that I would use their Word Doc templates and fill in the text. If you are planning to publish your paperback through KDP, I still think that this is the easiest route. Amazon is telling you, hey we built this template, just use this.

But, when I was publishing The Infinite-Infinite, I did that through IngramSpark and they made it clear that you couldn’t use a PDF that was “saved-as” from MS Word. I’m not tech-savvy enough to know why that is, but I knew I couldn’t use those templates from one platform to publish on another.

I had used Scribus as a free alternative when I was working with David on the Fiology Workbook. So I had already worked with the program, but I didn’t love it. Mainly because I hadn’t really taken the time to learn it.

But, I needed a formatting tool, and I wasn’t about to buy a Mac just to get Vellum or drop a lot of money on another tool, I decided to try Scribus again. But this time I actually watched some tutorials on it. And go figure, it went smoother.

I was able to format my entire novel and it looks great. I was able to do drop-caps and set it up just the way I wanted it to look.

The tutorial videos I watched came from Michael Henderson, I’ll have links below for those.

For any author looking to format their book, I would definitely recommend Scribus. It would mean learning a new system, but it wasn’t as wonky as MS Word and I was able to set up the master pages to keep the formatting consistent, which I really liked.

Videos from Michael Henderson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0N2TfW4HYA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1JV1c5ADcI

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Now you can get back to writing your book.