Podcast: Play in new window
Surprise guest Dave Chesson (Kindlepreneur, Publisher Rocket) walks through the forthcoming writing/formatting software Atticus with me. We see what’s working now in the closed beta, what’s coming soon, and how Atticus will take on Scrivener and Vellum.
Mentioned links:
Atticus: http://Atticus.io
Free online writers conference: http://writersconduit.com
SableAradia’s Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sablearadia/a-few-good-elves
Video (from Twitch and YouTube):
<p>Writing is only part of a writing career -- no one warned us that we would need business acumen and entrepreneurship to be an author. Whether you're traditionally published or an independent self-publisher, it's good to have a leg up on accounting, marketing, time management, and other key skills.</p><br><p>These recordings of live discussion on craft and development, on business best practices, on explorations of fascinating and inspiring real life cool stuff, and more will help you along your writing journey and career development. Join Laura VanArendonk Baugh as she shares what she's learned and what she's learning. (Or join the weekly live discussion with your own questions!)</p><br /><hr><p style='color:grey; font-size:0.75em;'> See <a style='color:grey;' target='_blank' rel='noopener noreferrer' href='https://acast.com/privacy'>acast.com/privacy</a> for privacy and opt-out information.</p>
Transcript:
Laura
All right, let’s try this again with more audio. Oh, my gosh, I am so sorry. I was so good reshuffling audio shortly before we went live for reasons that you will see in a moment. And I forgot to shuffle it over here. And so let’s try this again. Kate, Bridger, PJZooFit. Grace, all of you. Thank you so much for catching me on this.
Laura
OK, once again. Hi, it’s Tuesday. I’m Laura. You know the drill. Quick pieces of news and links I will throw into the chat: Diane Morrison, who has been a guest here previously, you might remember her as Sable Aradia, and her new Kickstarter launched today. That is A Few Good Elves. It is space opera high fantasy. So really everything you need to know about this is, it is elven space marines. OK, that’s, there’s everything you need to know, and I’ll drop that link into the chat.
Laura
Hello Adam. Yes. Yes. We are going to talk about Atticus tonight. So give us just a minute and we will, we will launch here with that. The only other thing I have to mention in housekeeping is Writers CONduit, which is the upcoming Free Writers Conference here on Twitch. Nothing to register for, nothing to sign up for, nothing to pay for. Just show up and watch it stream. It’s great. I will be presenting there as well and I will be doing Author Websites In An Hour, Your Velociraptors are Broken, which is all about my day job of animal behavior but in fiction, Beta Readers and Critique Partners, and Building your Author Brand. So you can catch all of those. I’ll drop that link in the chat as well.
Laura
And then finally, my only other piece of news is our local Internet has been a wee bit unstable. I was running several speed tests today and they came up varying between five megabits per second, which is really where it should be, and zero point zero eight, which is really where it should not be. So if you are starting to get buffering, I’ve got everything I can locked down to try to make this smooth. If you start getting buffering, just refresh on your end, because sometimes if we break through here, but Twitch is still trying to catch up, just refresh and catch up where we are. That will help.
Laura
If you’re having trouble, go ahead and put your question in the chat. I will still go ahead and get that taken care of. I am recording locally here, so we’ll have a nice, squeaky clean copy to upload when we’re done. So even if you can’t see it streaming live, we’ll still get all the questions addressed and and then a clean copy uploaded. So just be aware that that is a thing. OK. All right. Oh, good, I’m glad it’s going to work, P.J., so I will throw those links in the chat here in just a moment.
Laura
But first, I need to tell you about something really cool that happened today. I’ve been telling you guys that we were going to do this Atticus walk through today. And then this afternoon I just was talking with Monique. Mad props shout out to Monique, who’s one of the support staff over at Atticus and has been really helpful and chatting with me for the last couple of weeks. And she just checked in today. She said, I knew you were doing this stream tonight. And I just off the cuff said, hey, do you want to join me? Because you’ve been giving me so much good help and info. And she said, no, but she brought me instead a Dave Chesson, who is the owner and founder of Kindlepreneur, Atticus, and all of that.
Laura
So all of this was very, very last minute that it’s all just came together this afternoon. So you’re getting 100 percent classic off the cuff, Laura. So everybody give Dave some some support for putting up with me as we just wander through this thing to go. And and Dave, since I kind of borked my own audio earlier, could you just say hello for us and make sure that I can we can all hear you.
Dave
Yeah, sounds good. Hi, guys.
Laura
All right. Yeah, OK, good. Thank you so much. So as I said, Dave and I did no planning for this whatsoever, but I’m just going to ask Dave with no prep, tell us what Atticus is, because I think you’re going to do a better pitch for it than I will. And then we’ll jump into how it works.
Dave
Yeah, well, currently the focus on Atticus is basically presenting something that’s better than Vellum but works on all platforms. So that’s PC, Mac, Linux, you name it. And even more so is to make it cheaper. But that’s actually not our ultimate goal with with what Atticus will be. We’re starting with that point.
Dave
But the truth of the matter is, is that I’ve always wanted as a writer to create one program that we use throughout our entire book writing process, because right now, when I write my book, I actually start with Scrivener and I work on Scrivener. And then when I’m done, most of the time my editor prefers that I send copies in a Word Doc. So then I’ve got to export it out, then I’ve got to send it back and forth with the editor and they do their track changes. Sometimes I’m kind of lucky and I get an editor that actually likes Google Docs. So then there’s only one version. Right? But in the end, I at this point with an editor, I have five or six different copies on my desktop that says final version.
Dave
And when I finally figure out which one it is, which is usually the one that says final final, no this is the final, all caps
Laura
Final dot 2, final final, no really final
Dave
Yes, exactly. I then have to upload it to some formatting software. OK, so we’re now worked with three different softwares just to get it to format. Now you could say, well, you just send it to a formatter. That’s great. But when when you need to say update the back matter, such as the also by section, or maybe you find out that there was an error or heaven forbid you’re one of those people who sent the wrong final final version.
Dave
Speaking for a friend. We would never do that.
Dave
No, no. Yeah, exactly. Then you finally format it and now you have all these files throughout. And as a writer, that’s always been my personal pet peeve, if I will, is that I have to work with all these different components and let’s not even throw in outlining as well. Some authors out there may use four to five pieces of software just to write and publish their book.
So what we want to do is create a software where you can have the power of Scrivener, but have instant collaboration without ever leaving it and be able to format that same file all in one spot. And so I’m generally calling what Atticus will be is what you would get if you got the best of Scrivener plus Google Docs plus Vellum. If they all got together and had a baby, its name would be Atticus.
Laura
And you totally got me with the the streamlined formatting, because I do format all of my own books, I’ve been really happy writing in Scrivener, so I wasn’t actively shopping for a new writing software. But, you know, every everybody is talking about Vellum. But I’m a Windows girl, so that’s not available to me. And then when, you know, I do all my own print and all my own e-book formatting, and I’ve always used Sigil, which is freeware, but I contribute because you pay people who help you make money.
Laura
But Sigil is one of the few pieces of software that has gotten less and less user friendly as it ages and matures. And so I was I was actively shopping for something that, is there a way to make this faster with less effort? Because I do all my own updating and all my own creation and everything. And that’s how I actually I came across the first mention of Atticus and I was like, what? Sign me up! And I did sign up and I got into the private beta, which is fantastic. That’s How we’re here tonight.
Laura
So you’re getting lots of hellos from the chat, by the way. And Kate has a very important question, which is, will Atticus have features to accommodate the “Arrgh, my book is crap” Panic Phase. Does it come with a crate of dark chocolate? Because that’s really what I would need to get through that phase, We’ll talk about that.
Dave
What’s funny is we actually had somebody who voiced this recommendation, that we create a like a button that, you know, when you click it, it would find the nearest coffee shop that will deliver coffee. You know, like, that’s actually awesome. I’d love to do that. We’ll see. But, you know, actually, one of the things that we’re really going to get into is that — so first off, let me kind of break down our process on where we’re at as a software.
Dave
So right now, we’re in, as Laura talked about, the private beta. And this is where we’ve kind of released at a very special price to those who want to work with us because we really want to get real user feedback. Like it was funny, Laura and I were talking about this, but she found something herself where when she opens it up as the application, as the app on her computer and she writes something, but then she goes to the online version, where you can access it from any browser as well, and does something it actually causes our system to not catch.
Dave
And this is awesome because we want to find those things. But on top of that, too, we want to constantly get feedback, you know, because we have writers who write in special ways. They want, you know, even things like after an ornamental break, that they want certain things to happen to the chapter so as to really separate it. And so we’re our team is just constantly pumping out new updates, features, additions, just about on a daily basis.
Dave
So we’re doing that right now. And that gives my team to have real access to real authors to make sure that we really address the things they want while keeping it simple. That being said, that we believe that come mid July is where we will be at a point where we release it publicly. And I’ve you know, I’ve kind of said that moment is where we can clearly say that we’re better than Vellum and much cheaper and works on everything.
Dave
And that’s our mark that we’re gearing for, for mid-July. But so now that you understand that part, my team won’t slow down, though, because we still need to improve the writing area to make it even better than Scrivener and more capable as well as create that collaboration component I talked about. And that collaboration thing is where I want to get to because I think that could be a really cool thing for what you’re talking about. I’ve talked to a lot of writing coaches or coaches, and they’re almost [more] excited about the component of the collaboration, because what happens is that if you choose to give somebody a collaboration capability of writing collaboration with you, they can come in and they can kind of coach you and communicate with you as you go through.
Dave
And they can see things real time. They can even leave comments when you’re not on or something like that. And so a lot of these coaches are actually like, wow, this would be really cool because then I can come in and quickly see where the people, where the writers are. So that might be an interesting take on where we’re going to go and where that may help To answer that question.
Laura
And a question that’s come in from Grace is, will my editors also need to own Atticus to add tracked changes and comments?
Dave
Nope.
Laura
What?!
Dave
We’ve got, so let me explain where the collaboration components kind of really look like. OK, imagine that. So let’s go ahead and open up. You’ve got your screen there. Let’s go ahead and open up one of the books, right?
Laura
Yeah.
Dave
I’m gonna even tell you where all these buttons are going to be placed here. So in this case. Here we go, we’re in your first chapter. Now up at the top where it says, writing and formatting, there’s going to be a little button that will show up there called a collaboration. And it’ll be right in between the two. When you click on that, it’s going to take what we call like a safe copy of your book, OK?
Dave
And when you go into that, you’ll see on the right anybody you want to give a collaboration, acceptance to. Now we’re calling it, for different collaborations. There’s writing collaboration, and that’s where you and another person can write together. OK, then there’s editing collaboration where I’ll explain what those rights are. Then there’s even ARC review copies so you can work with ARC readers as well. But they don’t have as many capabilities as an editor or writer. OK.
And finally is formatting. So say, for example, granted, we make formatting super easy, but maybe you just don’t want to do it and you’re going to find there’s some really cool, special, unique things that you can do to your book for formatting. But you might not be a great designer. And so you want to bring somebody in to make it look cool. You can give them formatting collaboration capability and they can work on it while you’re writing your book.
Dave
But the point, though, is, is that you can come into that collaboration window and you can assign people that collaboration and see who’s there and you can even kill off their access when you’re ready to. So I really like that option to be able to say, great, beta’s done, be gone with you. You know, like you don’t have access to the book anymore.
Laura
Now, I have to say that is that that was not the answer I was expecting, that I could grant from a single license of Atticus. So, yeah, I’m so glad you’re here telling us this, because that is not what I would have guessed. Please keep going.
Dave
So at this point. Let’s go. Now, here’s the thing. So if it’s a writer to writer thing, then they both have to have Atticus. That one is because they have to have all components of Atticus. So that one, if you want to write with another writer, you both have to have it.
With regards to editors, ARC readers, those two, on the other hand, do not have to own Atticus. What happens is that you send them a special link and they will open up their editor or ARC reader version on their browser. They can open that up on their iPad, on their laptop, on their desktop. And what they do is it will look just like Word, because I’ve learned working with editors like, you know, they have their own preference on how they do it.
Laura
We have a comfort space and we’re happy.
Dave
That’s right. OK, that’s right. You know, and so we don’t want to recreate the wheel here. So when they open it up, it will feel like Word. Everything that they would expect would be where it’s supposed to be. It will have the same feeling as tracked changes and everything. Now, what’s neat is when the editor opens it up, they see your, they’re in the editor version, they can start doing those things. But what’s awesome is inside of your Atticus, you can go in and see it as they work on it so you can even sit back and watch as they go through if you’re both online at the same time. Now, what’s awesome about it?
That’s not nerve-wracking at all.
Dave
Yeah, right. So so what’s really awesome about this is that when they’ve done something all right, they can mark when a chapter is complete. So when they’ve gone through a chapter. All right. So now you know, they’ve said this is good for you, then you can go in and as you accept changes, it will then show up in the writing here. It will show up in the formatting. It’ll all move into those other components.
Dave
So until you accept something, it won’t it won’t automatically change. So this isn’t giving an editor access to your book and they could write whatever they want, write their capability is limited. But the point, though, is, is that by the time they’re done, right, your book is exactly how it is you chose what you accepted, you rejected what you wanted and it’s all seamless. You never had to leave the program. And so that’s kind of how we’re working it with the collaboration.
Dave
This is also really cool because with ARC readers, they can’t do editing. They can’t mark. They can leave comments, though. They can highlight. And you can also select say, if other ARC readers can see other ARC readers’ comments or not. So you have that power. And then finally with formatting, the formatters do have to own Atticus. There’s no way to format it without it. So but that’s one of those things where we really think that a lot of formatters are going to jump on this and we’re probably going to work to provide a list of formatters who work with Atticus and know all the dimensions for image creation, special chapter theme development and all that. We’ll certify them. So that way there’s a little, you know, paw of approval from the Atticus dog, you know, just letting you know that that formatter understands our requirements and can make sure that they can create unique designs that fit the chapter thing. So, yeah, that’s collaboration in a nutshell.
Laura
So I have a quick question about the Atticus dog, and then we’re going to get to questions from the chat which are coming in. So you can see we have this delightful animated dog here. And I’m honestly not sure if he is a Boston Terrier or a French bulldog, but I want to say Frenchie, because then in my mind, he’s Atticus French. So does he have a name and what is he?
Dave
So that’s hilarious. I really wish I thought about that because we were going back and forth about whether it would be a Frenchie or a Boston terrier. And I went with a Boston terrier. And the truth of the matter is, is that I’m a very big Red Sox fan and I’m trying to convince my wife to let me get a Boston terrier. And so I figured, well, honey, you know, the dog would be the mascot. I could take pictures.
Laura
He’s a business expense, you know?
Dave
That’s right. Yeah, exactly. He’s a business expense. My my twenty one year old daughter is all about she’s like, I’ll put him on Instagram. I’m like, see, we should get a dog. I’m working that angle. But actually, you know, but I love that comment. I never thought about that. The Atticus French.
Dave
There’s actually a lot of reasons why we went with the name Atticus. But one of the biggest reasons I mean, first off, I love Atticus Finch. And so that was one. But we also had to be careful with, you know, legal aspects of that as well. However, though, what really turned me to the name was that there is a famous publisher named Titus Atticus, and he was one of the ones who saved a lot of the famous writings and actually republished them. He formatted them and mass produced. He’s very famous for working with the letters of Cicero. He saved a lot of Aristotle’s work. And so and that was like, wow, that’s amazing. Like this guy literally took and helped bring in author work and mass produced it, formatted, and got it out as a publishing way back in the day. And then on top of that, as I kept doing research, I found out that like just about every Roman with a name, you know, Atticus was either a philosopher, a writer. And I was like, OK, you know what? This is pretty cool. We’ll go with that. I loved it.
Laura
Awesome. So, OK, so real quickly, let’s jump into the chat here. And I’m sorry, I want to scroll up and make sure I’m going to get everyone’s. So can we give critique access to multiple people? So, you know, if I had several people in the critique group, so it’s not just limited to one person accessing at a time.
Dave
Yeah, as a matter of fact, like I said, I don’t have my what we call our UI UX wireframe. It’s kind of like what we send to the programmers who understand like the layout and flow. I don’t have that because we just sent it over to somebody. But imagine if, say, the screen we have here. All right. You see the writing. Let’s pretend you’ve clicked on collaboration in the middle. On the right, there will be a panel.
Dave
And like I said, it has those four levels of of collaboration capability you give. What’s awesome is that when somebody has accepted your link, OK, you know, they’re going to put in their name. What’s really cool is those names are going to show up on the right so that you can see who you’ve granted access to and under what level. So if you have, say, an ARC team of like twenty four, guess what, all twenty four, if they’ve accepted, will be right there on the right.
Dave
And on top of that too, we’re going to try to work that. It will actually turn green if they’re online, if they’re actually reading it at that moment. So you can actually see who’s working on it, reading it, participating at that moment and at the same time when the time comes that you’re like, OK, great, I’ve got all the feedback I want, I’m done. You can just literally click the X, X, X button and it will just remove their access.
Dave
And so now there’s no like random file out there, random access that somebody can take. And we’re going to make it that you can’t download a copy. If somebody tries to copy and paste — I mean, if they’re like a hardcore wiz, there’s maybe some ways that they could do, but it’s going to be super painful.
Laura
There’s always a way, but it doesn’t have to be super easy.
Dave
Yeah, that’s right. It’s not. It’s definitely not as easy as when you send them a Word document, you know.
Laura
Right. And that was going to be my question, is like if they’re opening a limited terminal instance or something, you know, pretend I said something technical, there, like, you know, that’s different than if I’m sending epubs or Word docs. You know, I’m a person, I found my release on a pirate site the week before it released. And I was like, time to clean my ARC team.
Dave
Right.
Laura
But that’s something that I think about. So this, that’s it’s not going to be an easy download is making me very happy.
Dave
OK. No, not at all. And then on top of that, too, like I said, the moment that it’s done and you click that X, they can’t access it anymore. And that’s not to be mean or anything. But that’s just for me as a writer. I would just love that accountability of knowing that every version that I’ve, you know, allowed people to see they can’t go back to it, they can’t pull it later, they can’t see it.
Dave
And now when I go to the collaboration, when I’m ready to publish, I can go to collaboration and verify. Everybody I’ve worked with does not have a copy anymore. And it is so it is clear it’s just me and the copy I’m about to upload on Amazon. So to me, that’s just I, I’m really jazzed about that.
Laura
One space to check everything. Yeah. Kate says A+ story title. Laura. Yeah. This, this is actually today’s work and I’m working really hard on not thinking about the fact that my today’s first draft is on the screen on the Internet right now. So that’s just, we’re just going to move on.
Laura
And PJZooFit asked, does this allow art collaboration with an illustrator? So would that be like a co cowriter level of collaboration to add art? Because I know this actually has art support.
Dave
So the only thing I can think of on art is that if you’re working with an artist and you want to upload an image, you know, to your book, you can definitely do that. With regards to formatting, though, if we go ahead and click the formatting button. And I’m going to explain one of the features that’s going to come out in the next week or two is right now we’re looking at kind of the chapter themes. And this is where in the top here you can select a different look or feel to how your book will look on all the different previews.
Dave
Right. And what we have set here is is is kind of like a set theme. But what we want to be able to create is an opportunity for those who want to specially design their own chapter theme, and we want to make it as easy as possible. So this is where collaborating with an artist might be a really awesome opportunity. You can change the way chapters look, or you can also upload your own special ornamental break. So if you want something really unique and create your own image there and have those show up automatically for your ornamental breaks.
Dave
But if we go back up to the top here. We’re going to have first off, we’re going to have this really awesome look to be able to see all the different chapter themes that we’re going to we’re actually having a whole bunch of, like, specialist design beyond what you see here. But when you click on Customize, then you’re going to be able to upload like full bleed images. You’ll be able to select whatever fonts you want where these words show up on it.
Dave
You can even create some unique things. One of the cool things I’m playing with is, is that, you know, you could create the image of, say, a tree branch with leaves. But as you go through the chapters, there’s less and less leaves on the tree branch until you get to the end where it’s a bare tree branch. Right. You can create something where, you know, maybe it’s footprints in the sand and the footprints get longer with each chapter you go.
Dave
But that’s where, you know, you can use the software to easily create those placements, but you have to have the images. And so that’s where working with an illustrator, if you really want to go that unique, you can or we’re going to have some amazing templates that you can use. We’re working side by side with book brush. They’re designing a whole bunch of images that people can use as well as using them to create their own special one.
Dave
So, again, to kind of answer that question, this is one way that working with a designer or an illustrator, you can use the software to create some beautiful, unique images, chapter themes and placements at will.
Laura
I’m going to shrink us down a little bit so people can see this, because I really like all these themes that we can just go through here and pull with the chapters. And in here on the right, it’s saying chapter one twice because I don’t have chapter titles entered. But you can pull that out if you don’t have chapter titles and all these things. So, yeah, I’m not going to lie. I just went in and giggled and played with this for a while when I first opened and installed, so rolled around and played with all my chapter titles.
Laura
So yeah. So that and I think I saw you have like full page images and full bleed images on the road map. Is that correct?
Dave
So full page images are now up. Full bleed should be happening by this weekend. And one of the other things, too, that we’ve made it is that you can now direct if something is to show on the left side or on the right side of a book. So say, for example, you want to set up a full page image on the left and then thus make the new chapter be on the right. That’s very easy to do.
Dave
So you can design some really cool images and have them be a part of it. And like I said, we’ll make a full bleed here very soon.
Laura
Cool. All right, so I do want to make sure that we mention, because this was not how I understood things when I first downloaded Atticus. And so it’s fine now that I know how it works. I just needed to understand that this is an entirely live piece of software. This is not a static app on my desktop. Everything I’m doing is basically opening a portal to the servers which are running things. I can start it and I can save offline.
Laura
So if I want to work on an airplane, should we ever get on airplanes again, if I work in an airplane or if my Internet is dead, I can still do this. But in theory, all the careful, careful measures that I take to make sure my cloud backups are actually get through to every device I’m using should all be happening automatically? Once I finish breaking all your stuff so we can be sure about that. And and I had a point.
Laura
Oh, the other thing is because everything is live and you’re not running it down, not downloading updates to your local machine, you want to make sure that you are refreshing the app when you open it up so you can use this either in a browser or I prefer to use it in the local app, which is what we see here, because I distract too easily to work in a browser. Thanks. So you can you can do this a couple of ways, but a really easy one is just up here behind my unicorn and kitsune, There’s a logo and you can click it. And Dave, please jump in here and correct me where I need to be more specific. But you can click.
Dave
Yeah, if you click the dog, that’s our special little thing. If you click the dog logo instead of the word Atticus, it basically tells our system to do a quick check to verify if we have any new features. And it just poof. There it is.
Laura
There now you can see it.
Dave
Yep. That little dog on the top left and there it is. It just did a check. And if we had a new feature update, which we just had a whole bunch of new features come out at three o’clock today. So if you hadn’t done that before, there might be some new things on there. Actually we found a whole bunch of ways, one of the big things that we just released today is, is that we’re working really hard to reduce the size of files.
Dave
So say, for example, you upload a whole bunch of images. Awesome. Our system, though, is now specially aligned to shrink those image sizes down as much as possible without losing any visual loss. And the reason why that’s really important is because the smaller your file size is right, the less money Amazon takes from you because they have that little digital cost.
Laura
I write epic fantasy. That download fee is a thing.
Dave
Yeah, that. Yeah, exactly. And what I’m actually really trying to do is when the time comes soon, I want Atticus like hopefully by this weekend by Atticus will be able to tell anybody, hey, we shrunk the size of your file from this to this, you know, so we saved you this much just by doing these special things to make it as small of a file as possible to Amazon. And I’m just a little bit of a marketing thing, but I’d love for you to know that I guess just saved you all that. And so that’s coming out hopefully by this weekend.
Laura
Yeah, that’s great, because I agonize over file size, because I like big books and I cannot lie. The other thing I’ll mention is — where do they go. Yeah. So because it is online, if ever something is going wrong and that quick click didn’t fix things, the basic always there log out and log back in, which did save me from a panic attack when I logged in and all of my work was gone, which this is fine. I’m only using this for play things right now because because it’s it’s in beta and I’m testing it. So I’m just not going to test it with my deadline project. But so I logged in and I opened up the app and everything was gone, and so I just was like, eerrmm, let’s log out and log back in. Oh, everything’s there. Right? So because it’s not local. Don’t panic if it’s not local. Is, I think, not a very clear way of saying that, but hopefully that makes sense.
Dave
Yeah. So we designed, so what we decided to do. Right. Especially because of the collaboration component, we had to kind of create this like what I call the best of both worlds for the online/offline capability. And by the way, I fly all the time. Well, I used to.
In the before times.
Yeah. Yeah. And I love writing while I’m on the plane and I’m definitely not going to pay that Internet fee. That’s ridiculous. Just to be able to access the, you know, no way.
Dave
So what we did was we created what’s called a PWA and it’s a progressive web app. And what it does is it kind of straddles between being online and offline. Through the PWA you create an account. And what this allows you to do is from that point on, if you’re on your computer, a friend’s computer, or whatever, you can always just go to any Chrome, you know, Safari, whatever it is, go to. I think, what it, app.atticus.io? I think it is. Yeah, I think you think I would know. Go figure.
Laura
It is! Because I tested it today.
Dave
You would go to that URL and just log in and now you can work on your work. Which is kind of a neat feature for some, something others would not want to do. But it is there, however, though, you can click a button and it will download this this app that will be on your computer, you know, for I’m on a Mac, so I’ve got the little dog icon on the bottom of mine. You can save it on to your desktop.
Dave
But the point, though, is, is that when you click it, it opens up just a specific box for your program, which is exactly what we’re seeing here. This allows you to connect to the server and it has your information there. But on top of that, right now, what happens is that you can open up Atticus and then you can disconnect the Internet and you can go off and do things. We have a couple of bugs we’re working on to make it that simple where I want it that you can just so long as you’re logged in on your laptop, you can still close your laptop, jump on the plane, open it up, and then you can immediately access all your stuff just like that without any Internet.
Dave
That being said, the only time that you would need to have Internet access is if you’re uploading a new Word doc, to the program or if you hit the export. OK, or if you’re doing collaboration because you need the Internet to collaborate. But that being said, is that’s it. And so because of that system, one of the things we’re going to be adding very soon is that if you choose that you don’t want it online, you don’t want that component, you can save it directly to your computer and you can access it that way.
Dave
But if you do it that way, you can’t do the collaboration thing because, you know, you’ve got to connect that. So we’re really making it where it’s kind of a best of all the worlds, so long as you choose the path you want to go. But there’s, you know, there’s no way you can’t have it online and also do collaboration. But, you know, and the cool thing about the saving components offline as well is that you can set up a backup system where we’ve got you covered on the server as well as you can have your own backup copies on your computer so that if, say, you pour wine on your computer, which I’ve done that before, full glass of wine and you lose the computer, we’ve got you covered on the on the cloud.
Dave
While say the other thing, for some reason something crazy happens. You know, you’ve got yourself covered because you have your own files as well. So that’s one of the other things is I just want a double backup for authors as well.
Laura
Yeah. And PJ’s asking, you know, does this save in case the computer goes kablooey? She put that question a moment ago. And I’m hoping this shows up here if you look at the top of the screen. And so if I do some stuff and you see that little “saved” pop up. Yeah. So it is a constant — not that paranoid Laura has Scrivener set to autosave every three seconds and backup constantly, no! But yeah, that is something that you can, it’s constantly running back there.
Laura
So great. OK, awesome. Sorry, I’ve got too many windows open, let me get back to where the heck I was, but yeah, so. We haven’t talked at all about how to get stuff in here. Excuse me. Obviously you can just open something and start writing here. And I do like, like I’m using project for a series name. I don’t know what it’s intended for, but that’s where it is for me. So I’ve got titles and projects.
Dave
One thing too, before you get into that. The home page. We’ve really designed it to really help, especially with either small publishing companies or serial writers or writers who write under different names. If, say, for example, you have a whole bunch of books, you either have a series or you write under two different names or whatever. Notice at the top where we have the display by. You can click that and we’ll break it down by either the project you listed by or the author.
Dave
And so this is where you can easily access a series or a group of books. But right now we have just the one recent and usually recent is the one that you most recently worked on. So that way you can quickly find the one you have that will be more important in the future for somebody who has like 20, 30, 40, 50 books in here. And yes, it can handle that. So we wanted to really think through how people can find their works, especially when they start adding so many different ones, right?
Laura
Yeah. Because I am definitely a file nester, in my files.
Dave
Right. Yeah. I wanted this to be a super clean, easy process. And even if push came to shove and you have some hundred books in there that you can use that little searching hard to find the most recent book. Excellent. Granted, we probably won’t have too many people test that, but we wanted to think about that from the beginning. Now, you talked about uploading a new book so you can upload a new book. You can just start.
Dave
And what we mean by that is I’m just going to start writing an article and that’s it. Otherwise you can upload. And right now the only thing you can upload is a Doc X, OK, so if you had a Word doc, you know, you can quickly just drop it in there and next thing you know, you just give it a title, author name and project and click Go Get ‘Em, Rocket and or excuse me, Go Get ‘Em, Atticus. That’s another program. And it will import what you have based off of the things you’ve done with a file.
Dave
And so that’s one component. However, though, I believe by the end of this week you will now be able to upload EPUB into Atticus. And you can also export word doc as well. And I think RTF files. So we’ll have those. One of the things I’m working on with the team is I would like people to be able to upload the Mobi file and have it immediately pass it and put it into Atticus.
Dave
The reason why I think this is going to be really important for authors is, for those who don’t know, come June 30th, Amazon will no longer accept mobi files. Right. They’re only going to accept EPUB. Well, they accept a couple, but they recommend it being epub. That being said, though, say, for example, an author has already published a mobi file. Maybe they used a different program, maybe they paid somebody to create it.
Dave
The problem is that that’s going to happen is if you need to update that book for some reason, maybe you’ve got a warning from Amazon because there were too many complaints or there was a spelling error or something like that, or you want to update your back matter to, you know, to add an also by or a list of your other books. And you want to add the most recent one in there, you’re going to have to start from scratch because you can’t take that mobi file and edit it right.
Dave
You’re going to have to either pay somebody else who has the original file and work on it or something. So what we want to do is we want to make it very easy for authors to take their already existing books. Just throw it into Atticus, Atticus, figure it out. You may have to work a little bit on the formatting because the formatting you use might be completely different or might have a font that we don’t register, but click, click, click pretty much make it look good, except that make your change.
Dave
And from that point on, it is there in your own database for you to access and do whatever it is you want. So that’s one of the key things that we really want to release because it might not be something people are thinking about now, but it’s going to be really big right after June 30th.
Laura
Coming soon. And Adam asks about importing a Scrivener project. Can we, are there plans to import a Scrivener project as is, or will there need to be an export bridge for that?
Dave
I would like to. The problem is, is that Scrivener and I think this is one of the things that’s really hurt them the most is the way that they design the program is what hinders their ability to come out with new features. I mean, let’s face it, like it took us, what, four or five years to get Scrivener 3.0 for PC. And that’s because the file system they have is like ridiculous. I think it’s something we can work on to work with that particular file so as to make it easier to import.
Dave
However, though, one quick, easy thing is, is that if you just export it in a Word doc and then just upload it as a Word doc, it gets right around it and there’s no problems in figuring that out. But I still kind of want to make it easier to work with. It’s just it’s a bear of a program to work with from a programming side.
Laura
Yeah, and and I’ll just show real quick, I just pulled in a docx. And this is a short story, so it doesn’t have a lot of chapters to break out, but you can see what with the title page and then there was a hard break and then the story itself that came in there. So and Atticus automatically parses those. So and then I can just grab this copyright stuff and bring it up here and, you know, tweak it.
Dave
And you can even convert it to the copyright page too.
Laura
What? Wait, let’s see, I do remember that now. OK. Oh but I’ve lost. Oh. Because I already have a copyright page. Yeah. That’s why. That’s why. Let me go get out of there. Right, now. Please become my copyright. Oh no it’s not here. Where is it?
Dave
I oh, I know what it is. Sorry about that. Our programmers actually — hit, I think we can hit the back button. Maybe we can do it in the top. Right. There’s a little back buttons undo. Does it? Oh, no, it doesn’t do the chapters yet. OK, so I had our programmer actually hold off on a change because we need to do something with the with the copyright page. Ay, caramba. But we can create a new one. So if you go down to the bottom where that little button is
Laura
and actually give me a second, I’m going to move this so that people can see it because I embiggened the windows so that everyone would be able to see what’s going on. But it also means that it’s harder for people to see… Let see if I can, oops, that don’t do that. Hold on. I’m sorry, guys. Let’s try this. There we go.
Laura
So down here at the bottom left. And you can see this will pop up and you can make all the things, and it will automatically drop them into, you know, formatter body and back matter. So.
Dave
There it is. Yep. All right, now, if we scroll back up to the top, one of the things that we did was we try to actually generate the chapter, the copyright chapter ourselves. And the reason for that is because the copyright chapter in a book is going to be in the bottom. It doesn’t stop at or start at the top. It’s also usually a smaller print. It’s got kind of its own format. So in this case, right now, we’re in iPad view. And so it’s going to put it at the top because that’s how the e-books work.
But if we were to flip to a book previewer and we started typing something in. Let’s see if let’s see if my lead programmer got this little thing changed. He actually had them flipped at one point, let’s see. OK, now, hey, look at that. So it took what it had because it knows this is print and it’s putting on the bottom.
Dave
Now, one of the things that we’re actually doing as we speak is we’re creating templates, make it as easy as possible for authors that you can choose a particular template for copyright and change out the appropriate information. There are certain copyrights that work really well with fiction, whereas there’s others that work really well with, you know, nonfiction components. And so we want to make this a really easy process. This is something I think we’ll have in the next week or two, probably two weeks.
Dave
But for the time being, though, when you deem this as a a copyright page, it knows that, OK, we need to force for the book to start from the bottom. So there’s like little extra things we do inside that one. Yeah.
Laura
And I really liked that there were so many of these ready to go. And then, of course, you can tweak any any of them individually. But I liked that the basic formatting was there.
Dave
Yeah. Another another feature we’re going to be adding before, I would say mid-July. I don’t know when particularly, but if say, for example, you have your own author page and maybe have maybe you upload all those mobi books and you want to quickly make some changes, we’re going to create this ability for you to create a template, your own template, so that you can import it into whatever you book you want so you don’t have to recreate the wheel, copy paste, copy paste, copy paste.
Dave
This is also going to be really important because maybe you designed your also-by and that’s, you know, the page where you list your other books with particular links so that when people click it, they can go buy your next book, which is really important, especially for marketing. If somebody got to the end of your book, they’re clearly a fan of you. So let them know what else you write. Well, recreating that over and over again can really be painful.
Dave
So one of the things we can’t wait to to add is that if you have created a particular page or chapter that you love, you can save it and you can just import it into other books very quickly. So that’s my own personal one. I’m just like I hate having to redo that one.
Laura
No, Grace had just put in the chat about a way to update back matter across multiple books at once. So that’s not a one click solution, but that definitely is a time saving solution.
Dave
Right. And from that point on, you can make little tweaks. Like I said, I one of the things I really want to do, especially with the uploading of mobis, is imagine authors having to upload their — like if you’re really going to shift to the system, you want all your books on there anyways. So uploading your 15 mobi files or whatever, spending a couple of minutes on each, making sure it looks good, and then just throw in your new back matter on all of them.
Dave
You make that one change to all your books, click the export button, move to the next, click the export button to move to, and now you can upload all the changes to all your books. That same thing, too, is if you come out with your 16th book and now you want to update just the also by page to all your previous ones, you can do that quickly. Hit the export button and all of your settings are saved right in there. So, you know, your book will look just as good as it did when you last exported it. But now with the update.
Laura
And we can do multiple we can save multiple templates like this, right? Absolutely. Some of us write both fiction and nonfiction. And I want to highlight different things in different places. Awesome. OK, yeah, great. Adam says this formatting looks awesome. A million times more useful than Scrivener’s compile. So yay.
Yes, I so I’ve, I’ve used Scrivener since 2007. Matter of fact I used to work for Apple way back in the day and I got a free copy of this new program and I’ve loved it. I mean I really do. So please don’t take anything I’ve said against it. I’ve used it, I’ve used it for my master’s thesis when I was in the military all the way through. And I love the program.
Dave
My problem is that I’ve always like, I’ve taken courses on how to use it, even after all those years I paid more for the courses than I did for the program. So that was my first thing that I want to eradicate. And we’re really getting on. I can’t wait to tell you some of the writing things we’re adding, but the second thing is that the formatting is just. Man, I mean, I hate to say it this way, but if they had fixed their formatting, then maybe I wouldn’t have been gung ho to to create this program.
Dave
And the fact that so many writers use Scrivener to write and also have to then pay for formatting software, you know, should have been an indication to that company that, hey, guys, you guys really need to step this up. You really need to do a better job with us. And so that was that was personally my own motivation on that one was. How can we enjoy the power of Scrivener but also have the power of formatting, you know and then, man, if we throw in collaboration, that’s pretty cool.
Laura
The thing that I love, that I needed Scrivener for was taking, again, like I said, I write epic fantasy. I’ve got freakin huge manuscripts. I got a 180,000 words. I’m not going to copy and paste all through it as I decide what chapter goes where. And so that’s what Scrivener was fantastic for. And that’s what I can do the same thing here, but without some of the bulk, because I don’t use all of Scrivener’s features.
Laura
Scrivener’s got some amazing stuff i’m just never going to use, you know, and it’s great for people who use them. That’s just not how my brain works. So so I’ve been playing with dragging things around and it orders all my chapter numbers and it’s great.
Dave
So, one of the things we’re going to be working on for the writing is we will be creating our own kind of outlining capability. But one of the things that I really want to do is we’re going to be working with all the other outlining companies so that you that you can use them, integrate them into Atticus, one of the big ones that I’m focusing on is Plottr as well as Factory.
Dave
So say, for example, you’re an author who likes to use those, too. You can export what you’ve done and upload it into Atticus and will be able to parcel that information in the right spot to be most beneficial while you’re writing inside the program itself. So that’s one way we’re handling that.
The next thing is with the writing section. Once we release in mid July, about 90 percent of our attention will focus to improving the writing area. And one of the areas that we really want to do is we want to be able to allow authors to set writing goals as well as create gamification to kind of help them as they write.
Laura
I saw that on the road map, yeah.
Dave
Yep. And we’re integrating as well as 4TheWords for those who like them, because I personally do. I think they’re a great company. So I while we’ll have gamification, the fantasy nerd in me, like, totally wants to keep the 4TheWords thing going.
Real quick for those of you who are not familiar with 4TheWords, it is basically a RPG where writing is your weapon.
Dave
It’s like your way to cultivate. It’s I don’t know, I love Lit RPG books, they are like my all time favorite. I can’t get enough of those. And so somebody created this thing where the more you write, basically, the more you cultivate your character and your battle and blah, blah, blah. It’s super cool. We’re not going to steal that. We will create a different gamification. But people who do those can, it will work with us as well.
Dave
But another thing is, is that I really want to create this system where I mean, authors get rewarded as they hit their goals. So this is going to be a secret feature that’s not going to be secret to this group. But one of the things that we won’t tell people that they’ll have to experience on their own is that when you say you set your goal for like two thousand words a day, the moment you hit the two thousand words, we’re going to have a little fireworks go off in the background. Kind of like you crossed the finish line. You know, I just I’m kind of like an Easter egg guy. I love to, like, hide these little things.
Laura
Hey, you know what, it works for my Fitbit. OK, give it to me in my words as well.
Dave
Absolutely right. Exactly. That’s right. And so we’re going to create like little little badges and little things so that as you keep hitting your mark, you’re going to go kind of up and rank in writing and you have the cross the finish line moments. And also too analytics is going to be really big. There will be an analytics page for you to see a lot more about your book as well as your writing style. You’ll know how many, not only how many words you’ve written, but generally how long it would take somebody to read it, how many pages on the Kindle, how many pages in the book.
Dave
So as you’re going through your book, you’ll see that, you know, we want to add some analytics in there to tell you most overused words and things like that.
Laura
Oh no no no. Too much. Too much.
Dave
Well, you can choose not to look at it, even tell it to. But that’s the thing is we want to create a platform where authors can take as much as they want or not. And again, you would go to a special, it’s not going to be in your face as you’re writing, but you can go there to check it out if you want to know.
Laura
That’s fantastic. I will go to ridiculously stupid lengths for a digital badge. So absolutely yeah. So Grace has a question about formatting differences between ebook and print. So if, for example, a book without images in chapter headers in the ebook, but does have images in the chapter headers in print, is that something that we can do?
Dave
That’s actually a really good question. That’s what I love about the beta right now is, is that we get those kind of things. So let’s go ahead and open one of your books that you have. And if you go, here’s how it would have to. Well, jeepers. For the chapter. For the individual chapter, I think the answer is no, but for everything else, the answer is yes. If you go to your front matter, open the what you have in the front matter, click on the title page.
Dave
Now click those three dots to the right of the title page. Oh, no, to the. I’m sorry. There you go. Yep. Now when you go to including you can choose at this particular page is included in ebook only or print only or none. So this is one of those options that maybe you don’t want your title page to show up in the ebook. Then you would click print only. I don’t remember why we have none, but there was certain there was a specific Oh, I know what it is.
Laura
That’s totally where I leave myself notes as the writer.
Dave
Right, that was it. Yeah it was, that people wanted to have a note section so they didn’t want to be a part of anything. They just wanted to keep it in there for their own purpose to later come back. And so that’s why none is. So that’s why I love working with the writers, because I never would have thought the none, like what? And it’s somebody’s like, yeah, notes.
Laura
It’s my digital sticky note. Yeah.
Dave
Now if you click on the chapter one. And you click on the three dots. You can still choose, so let’s see, it says merge with next chapter, convert to, begin on. OK, so yeah, we did not give the ability to choose if the body chapter works inside. And I was trying to think that through my head, I don’t think it would work because we still have to number it. So I was thinking, well, maybe if you created Chapter one with images and then chapter one again without images and said, well, this one’s in the book and this one’s in the book.
Dave
So I guess to answer your question, no, we do not have an ability to allow a different chapter theme for the book.
Laura
So it would be, duplicate the project, and then just have an eBook version.
Dave
That’s the key is, is that you could do it that way where you duplicate and there is a way that you can duplicate a book and you can call one the ebook and one the book, and then you can format the e-book the way you want and then format the book the way you want and just click export PDF for the book and export epub for the ebook. There you go. I guess that works. It’s not the easiest, but that is a way to get around it.
Laura
OK, yeah. Or I mean, and Grace mentions that she’s skipping the images in ebooks because of the file size. But if your file compression is really tight and efficient then that’s going to address that as well. So yeah. And the scene break images. Grace, let me hop over here. So there’s this nifty little button at the top that will drop in the ornamental breaks and then you go to actual formatting, which I have no clue now where I left that, hold on. How did I get here?
Dave
So you’re on formatting, and then on top left corner you can hit theme.
Laura
Thank you. I know had this, I saw this. Anyway, so we can scroll down and then select. And because these are I suspect, I haven’t looked, but I suspect they’re tiny little PNGs or something. So these are not going to add you know, you’re going to have one instance of it, called multiple times, so it’s going to be pretty tiny.
Dave
Yeah, those are almost negligible in their size, especially with our image compression capability. And if you go ahead and if you highlight, if you hover over the chapter itself and scroll down a bit. So if you go over to the book, scroll down, let’s go to where you have a chapter. There it is. All right. So now let’s go ahead and click one of those ornamental break images. And as you can see, it changes that.
Dave
Now, you can also upload your own custom image or you can also access our image library. So if you click that black button, there you go. You can see that we have a whole slew of them to choose from. We’re going to be adding a bunch more. OK, but you can also design your own little thing, whether it’s a pencil or a pen or maybe even that fox in the top left corner, you can make him into the ornamental break.
Dave
And so you can take that image and custom upload it and it will show up as your ornamental break. One of the other things we’re trying to work too that’s coming out soon, if it hasn’t already, is that you can then stylize the first paragraph under each ornamental break. That’s either coming super soon or it’s already been done.
Laura
Yeah, I saw that because it’s got. Where is that? Is that already in here? And it’s, it may just be in the leads. Yeah, it’s just it’s just in the first paragraph, not in the, after the breaks yet, but. Yeah.
Dave
But that’s coming real soon.
Laura
Because I used to do all that by hand and now it just happens. And I love that. So I guess. Yeah, OK, so hold on, got some things coming in the chat. Adam asks if it’s right that the ornamental break appears in the EPUB file only once.
Laura
Yeah, I suspect. I mean, Dave can answer yes, but normally we would just have the one file and then reference it multiple times. I’m assuming, Dave, that’s how it works.
Dave
Yes, that’s correct.
Laura
Yeah. Yeah. And Grace asks just image compression have different outputs between EPUB and PDF.
Dave
So, well, the good news on the compression component for PDF is, is that that one doesn’t cost you, whereas the file size for the EPUB does, and that’s where Amazon gets you. So while we still compress anyways, because it’s just part of programming as well, it doesn’t affect your effect. What it is, is that the color choices, the gloss of the page, the size of the pages, those things affect your your, your overall cost of the book production. That’s if you’re doing print on demand through like Amazon or Ingram Sparks or that sort of thing.
Laura
Yeah, OK, and I know we are getting tight on time, and you were very generous to give us more time than you actually originally had, so we don’t want to take advantage of that. So I’m going to say, anybody who has remaining questions, please get those in. And let’s do our final push here so that we can let Dave out at a reasonable time.
But, yeah, I’m honestly pretty excited about this. I love the idea of, you know, I can actually just open my phone now while I’m stuck in the BMV and add a few paragraphs without having to carry a computer with me. So I’m pretty excited about being able to just be a little more flexible in how I work.
Dave
Yeah, and that’s one thing that that I didn’t say before, is you can access this on your phone. It actually downloads like an app. You guys are going to see my phone. But there it is is an app. Oh yeah. Yeah. So you can do the same thing.
I haven’t even, I just access from my phone through the browser so.
Dave
Yeah. So you can download as an app on your phone, iPhone, Android, iPad, whatever but. Yeah.
Laura
OK, all right, well, Grace says that she bought it in May and can’t wait to try it, so she’s going to get that installed. This is awesome, Kate, I’m sorry. You can’t buy it right now. I’m sorry, but you can get on the waiting list for July, I think. Is that right? Dave?
Dave
Yeah. So if you go to Atticus.io and there’s an email that you can sign up for, what we’re doing is, is that in the first response that we send out is just saying, hey, here’s where we’re at, this is what we’re doing. This is where we’re going with this program. If you want to jump on right now, we offer it at one hundred and seventeen dollars as like the lowest price. It would be because we love your feedback.
Dave
We want your feedback when we do release publicly, though, in mid July. So what is that one month from now, the regular price will be $147 and that is for unlimited books and e-books. It’s not a subscription base because I, I personally hate those. I also would never want to build my writing on something where I at the moment I stop paying like kind of feels like I lose it. Right. And so no subscriptions and at one forty seven that still puts us was at fifty three dollars cheaper than Vellum for just e-books and one hundred dollars cheaper for e-books and books.
Dave
So we figure that’s a really even in the offer in the mid mid-July it really puts us right there. So.
Laura
Yeah, yeah, and Kate’s in the chat saying death to subscriptions, so, yeah, you’ve got a little feedback there.
Dave
Yeah, right. I mean, like I like for the word subscription. I think I think I think that’s great because it’s a gamification. And like, the moment you stop and I get it. But I feel like there’s just so many things in the industry where, like it’s always subscription based, everything is subscription based and I’m like, why does it have to be? I mean, even Word turn to subscription base now, you know, and I just would never want to create my author career on a platform where the moment I stop…
Laura
And I’m struggling right now with some Adobe stuff where Adobe’s verification is really wonky, so if you’re not, if you don’t have a perfect Internet connection when you open the software, you’re stuck. And I’m like, but I bought this, let me use it. And and yeah, it’s not making friends over here.
Dave
To this day I’m still using the last Photoshop they ever made because I will not move over to their sass.
Laura
No, I have a disc somewhere, of CS3. That’s like my emergency backup for when I just rage quit and flip a table. Yeah, absolutely. So so I don’t see any other additional questions coming in. Just general chat and enthusiasm. So that is good. So I think we’re going to wrap here. Thanks so much for giving us this extra time. I was thrilled that this worked out. And, you know, like I said, it was just going to be me talking and this was so much cooler.
Laura
So thank you. Very cool. Yeah. And everybody, you know, I didn’t check. We’re going to we’re going to see you’re getting thankyous in the chat. So I’m just going to wrap this here and then, guys, I will see you next week. And I have absolutely no idea what’s on next week’s calendar. I just didn’t even check that. So check it. It’s probably something really cool. I don’t remember. So. All right.
Laura
And Adam’s thanking you for developing this product because we all think it looks really cool, so. All right, everybody.
Dave
I can’t wait.
Laura
OK, Kate says it’s a create-in next week. Thank you, Kate, for being my extra mental brain. All right, everybody, have a fantastic evening or day and a great week. And I will see you next week. All right. Take care. Bye.
