Atticus Review: Is it worth it?

today we're taking a look at Atticus the writing app that is aiming to be a One-Stop shop for writing formatting and soon everything in between I'm Michael LaRon with author level up and I make tons of writing app tutorial videos and if you're new here I would love to have you subscribe now we've got a problem in the writing community and that is that authors need to develop beautiful ebook and print versions of their books before Atticus there really was only one game in town well technically two and that was Vellum and Vellum is a great app I've done reviews on Vellum on my channel but Vellum is Mac only and a lot of people don't want to go off and buy a Mac just for one program some people don't like Max right and there's Microsoft Word but that is a colossal pain in the you know what to develop formatting for ebook and paperback so enter Atticus which is a web-based writing app that you can use on any device as long as you have an internet connection so Windows Mac iOS Android Linux you can use it on any device and you can even use it offline another thing I'm going to share up front is that Atticus is a flat fee writing app so at the time of this video it costs 147 dollars and you buy it once and you own it forever and I know you guys are going to be a big fan of that so without further Ado let's jump over into my computer and give it a demo all right I'm here inside Atticus and we're just going to go from 0 to 60. so let's say you watch this video and you're like oh my gosh I love this app I want to upload my existing manuscript into Atticus well they make that very easy all you have to do is just make sure you set up your word doc properly and I will link to a video that Atticus has done with their specifications it's really simple just make sure that your chapter names are in header one or size 20 or bigger and if you have a section break just use three asterisks and you'll be just fine and you'll find that the upload process is super easy so I'm going to click this upload button here and I'm going to pick my file then I'm going to enter in my metadata like so and click this go get em Atticus button now as you can see it brought in my manuscript Simple and Clean all right this is just a sample I didn't do my whole novel but because I set my word doc up correctly it brought everything in nice and clean all right and as you can see I've got some metadata for my book I've got a front matter section which I can collapse and bring in I've got the body and then I've also got some back matter which I don't have because I said this is a sample so you'll notice here that Atticus generates a copyright page automatically for you which is great but I don't need it so I'm going to select this x button here and I'm going to delete the chapter and then I'm just going to Simply click and drag my copyright page into the front matter and it will delete the numbering and if I click on it now I've got the copyright page as I intended it now let's just go from top to bottom here if I click this little pencil I can go into a section where I can add more metadata for my book so I'm just going to Auto populate that right now just show you how easy it is in just a few seconds I populated some of the basic metadata from my book including ISBN language title all that stuff and then I can also put in my publisher name and logo and I can also generate versions of the book export versions of the book If I want to back those up now there is a Download snapshot feature this is a snapshot feature that allows the IT team and Atticus to diagnose your issues so if you're running into any problems you can download a snapshot and they can use that to restore your book if you ever need to to do that now moving along the page here we've got front matter and this is just a title page here that will be based on what you put in earlier and then we also have an auto-generated table of contents now this probably won't be that useful to you if you're if your chapters are just chapter numbers but if you've got titles you can take a look at the titles to make sure that they they line up now when we move into our body here this is where the the magic happens with Atticus so this is a writing app in your browser so it works like any other writing app except you could just type your words into Atticus just like this and you can format it with the usual suspects here and there's all sorts of things you can do you can add ornamental breaks you can add images you can set your alignments you can even split your chapters with this button if you need to do that there's an ability to merge your chapters as well I'll include a link to the Atticus video that shows you how to do that and then we've also got a simple undo and redo you can apply smart quotes and then you can even look at inconsistencies with your smart quotes and for those who are productivity Junkies you can also set a timer to monitor your productivity that way if we move over to the right hand side of the app here we've also got some additional features so you can set a book goal so a word count goal for the project all right so if you want 50 words and you can set your due date and you can set which days you intend to be writing all of that's great I always love when writing apps feature stuff like that because it just helps you stay motivated and you can also put in your writing habit per day and eventually I believe they're going to build out some statistical reporting that will let you see kind of how you've been doing now another thing I want to give Atticus brownie points on is be hover over this it'll say this will help you build a daily writing habit and this will be applied to all of your projects so this is going to monitor your writing over all of your projects which not all writing apps do now we've also got a find and replace feature if I click this magnifying glass here and I can find and replace terms and phrases throughout a chapter or throughout the entire book you know how this works I don't I don't need to tell you anymore it works great now I can also change some font settings which is unbelievably helpful okay so I can just stick with the default which I actually happen to like but if I wanted to change it to garamond which is more of a print type font I could do that if I want to change it to open dyslexic if you happen to be dyslexic that's a great accessibility feature okay change it back to default I can change the font size if I want so I can go up or down so pick your poison there and they can also change the line height okay I think this is great functionality to have in a web-based writing app not something you always see okay now you can also also change your paragraphing to indented or spaced so I'm writing fiction I like it to be indented if you're writing non-fiction or something you know people like that to be spaced you can also choose whether you justify the text as well so moving down into the the meat and potatoes of Atticus you can add subtitles to your chapter you can add images to the tops of your chapter which is always great and it'll you can do some statistical reporting here in terms of number of words that are in your chapter number of words that are in your book or the number of words that are in a selection so the writing experience is is pretty good writing in a browser sometimes can be an exercise in frustration sometimes there's lag sometimes there's just other issues that pop up and in my test with Atticus I didn't really experience that a whole lot and that was great so I found that the the experience is pretty Zippy it's it's pretty fast is pretty responsive and accepting your keystrokes and if you have issues it could be your browser not necessarily Atticus so as I type stuff here you'll notice on the right hand side of the screen on the top that it's Auto saving my work as I go so you don't have to worry about clicking a save button that is one of the great things about Atticus now if I want to add chapters I can simply do that by clicking the add chapter button and you'll notice here it gave me two chapter ones so I'm going to have to move some things around here and that's very easy to do and I can just simply go in here and change it and then I can start writing I can also add about the author all right and I've got my author profile loaded in here and I've got a standard image that I like to use with my author pages so if I want I can go in here and I can add an image and I've got it uploaded into my gallery here it'll save your images too which is really nice and helpful so I'll select my author image here and then I can add a caption which is always recommended and then I can also change the alignment of the image to the center if I want I can make it on its own separate page I can change the sizing and I can even add a link so I'm going to upload the image and then I've got my author profile all set now another great thing that you can do in Atticus is if you hover over any page and you click the three dots you can save that page as a template so let's say you're writing book two in your series or you're writing your next series you don't want to have to go in here and copy and paste your about pages so you can just save this as a template and then you can import it into your next book just like that without having to copy and paste or upload an image again which again is a great feature all right now we have seen the writing app now the great thing about Atticus is that with just a click of a button it becomes a formatting app similar to the formatting apps you're used to using so if I click on this formatting button on the top here things are going to change all right so now I've got some different themes that I can pick and then I've got a previewer on the right hand side so first things first if I look at this previewer I can preview what my book is going to look like on different devices or a print book all right so if I click this page button here you can see this is what it's going to look like ah but do you see I I made a mistake okay I've got chapter one but then it says chapter one here oops what did I do wrong am I going to have to go back to every single chapter and fix this well no I'm not actually so what I can do is I can just simply go over here to body and click these three dots and then just uncheck this numbered button and look at that I can play around with this and I can adjust it now I can also change the theme so if I change the theme here there I it looks a lot better okay and then I I can do all sorts of things with it there there's another theme and I can change the the device so I can go to a Galaxy Tab and I can see what that would look like and I can scroll down on devices and I can change the the fonts and the font size to get a sense of what it's going to look like and then if I scroll down so I can change my chapter heading settings I'm not going to go into that here and then I can also adjust my paragraph settings so it starts with a drop cap but if I don't like Drop caps I can take them off and you can see it changes in real time there on the device and then I can also click lead in small caps and you'll see there on the Galaxy Tab that now the the first few words in the sentence are in small caps which some people happen to like that a lot and you can choose whether your drop caps and small caps happen at the beginning of a chapter or after every paragraph following a break now we've also got some section breaks or ornamental breaks okay now these are a couple of different options okay some of these may not be your cup of tea so you can upload your own custom images all right so say you've got an image you want to use for your series you can upload that and use that now Atticus also integrates with book brush so that you can create your own ornamental breaks if you want now I've done reviews of book brush on my channel I like book brush a lot I'm not going to cover it in this video but the the tldr is that you can go to book brush you can select Atticus as you know your sizing requirements and it'll automatically create a canvas for you where you can you know create this sort of image and they've got lots of different um choices for you pre-designed materials you can design your own and then when you're done you can just save them and upload them into Atticus so that's a great integration now there's also some PDF options as well as some ebook page settings so you know where do you want ebook readers to start and then we've got some of our print settings okay so we can adjust our print font and you can specify whether the book is a large print book or not which is really important and Atticus does a great job at that all right so I've got some different header and footer options I won't go into that but you know what that looks like so you know what you want in your headers and your Footers and you've got some different options here for page numbers and things like that and then we've also got the ability to change trim sizes so using this little dot system here you can tell what is supported by KDP print and what's supported by ingramspark so that'll just make sure that you don't um you know you don't accidentally generate one format in the wrong trim size for one versus the other and if I go down to advanced settings here I can even do some things with my alignment and my margins and and all that good stuff if you want and you can even change the font size of the book as well so there's lots of stuff you can do and I'm going to change my settings to something that I like a little bit more and then I'm going to export this to EPUB and we're going to see what it looks like all right I'm in Adobe Digital Editions which is just a free epub viewer that you can download for free to test your test your ebooks and I've got a table of contents over here that matches what we had in Atticus so I click on this first chapter here it gives me what it looks like all right I actually think this looks pretty good for uh just a demo right now I could play around with this some settings like the drop caps that doesn't quite look good to my eye um and I can play around with uh the the line spacing and things like that but this is a pretty good looking ebook all right so if you upload this to your your retailers of choice it's gonna it's gonna look on par with with anything else that you would generate all my chapters are here including my about the author page but I think my image was too big so I just need to go back and fix that all right but these are these are no issues with Atticus these are just issues with formatting and you can easily regenerate new changes I I played around with this a few times uh before I recorded this particular section of the video and it took about 20 seconds to fix what I needed to fix so great overall ePub generation I did test all of atticus's epub's past ePub validation so you shouldn't have to worry about any issues on different retailers all right now let's take a look at the PDF all right so we've got our PDF here and if I go to chapter one that looks pretty good and then I'll just kind of page through and I change my headers and Footers I just put page numbers at the bottom because I think that that looks a little bit better but overall this is looking really good I mean I don't know anybody that could do this in Microsoft Word and this quickly right so this is this is a really competitive really good looking output that is gonna be good for readers the readers aren't going to bat an eyelash when they look at files like this right and you can create your own custom themes and Atticus as well so what you see here you can you can use that or you can create your own theme there's all sorts of flexibility built into it now another thing I want to mention about Atticus is that I'm using it in Chrome in the browser but you can also download an app and if I click on this little button to install app this will basically allow Atticus to run locally on my machine without having to be on a browser you get the same functionality but some people may like that a little bit better another thing I'll mention is that I I did test Atticus on my iOS device it really didn't work that well I was able to access it but the typing experience didn't work that well and I know that's something that they're eventually going to work on but you can access it at least but you're not going to get the same experience as you would get here so for those who are wanting to write on their phones or write on the go it's not really going to give you that solution so if that's an important thing for you I just want to call that out but remember you can use this on just about everything else right so you can use it on Windows machines MAC machines so long as you've got a machine that's got screen real estate that's big enough to be able to run it you should be just fine all right I would be remiss if I did not mention the support button here so I can click on this support button and Atticus has some pretty good tutorials that you can have access to if you want to know more about things like page breaks and how to export doc files and how to make sure you're always using the most up-to-date version there's lots of tutorials here I also recommend checking out the Atticus YouTube page because they've got lots of videos on how to use the the app so for example there's some there's a pro writing Aid integration that I didn't didn't show you but you could check that out if you're interested in it some tools on tips on how to use grammarly with Atticus other tips on things like setting your Microsoft Word docup properly using smart quotes I just just if you want to invest in this app I just highly recommend taking some time and reviewing the YouTube channel because it is quite helpful and if you're a geek like me you can check out some of the roadmap features that they intend to add in the future and I'll include a link to this page on the the video description but if I scroll down here and I can see what they've completed what's in progress right so here are some of the things they're working on as of April 2nd 2023 so looks like there's a non-fiction update coming this is just really cool it's cool to know what developers are working on and what's in the pipeline and to see that they're they're committed to continuing to improve and update the app I would love to know what you guys think about Atticus let me know in the comments below I think that they are a fairly new writing app and they've they've accomplished a lot in the short time that the app has been around and I'm very curious to see where they go from here I've spoken with Dave chesson who is the founder of Atticus and he shared some really cool ideas with me that I know he shared publicly such as being able to collaborate with another writer within Atticus or being able to Grant access to Atticus to your editor so your editor can do all of their editing within Atticus so that you're you don't have to generate a Microsoft Word doc or a Google doc and send it to your editor and then import it back into Atticus and I think those are really bold innovative ideas that solve problems that we've had for a long time in the communities and add on to the top that this is a flat fee writing app meaning that you buy it and you own it and that's great and I think it's something that a lot of you should take a look at because I think you'll be pleasantly surprised so if you're interested in grabbing a copy of Atticus check it out at authorlevelup.com Atticus and you can grab your copy today thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video foreign [Music]

Channel: Michael La Ronn

Views: 12,294

Keywords: author level up, atticus, atticus writing app, atticus writing app review, is atticus worth it, atticus vs vellum

Id: yAnHThB2wUQ

Length: 19min 43sec (1183 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 07 2023