The top 10 most useful ebook writing software

The age of handwriting your ebook and typing it up later is long gone. While I am a lover of beautiful stationery, an ebook writing software can be much more useful.

In our selection, we review the best editing, writing and converting toolscurrently at the market. Some of them practically take you from the first idea to the virtual bookshelf, and others import your manuscript and transform it into a beautiful e-book. Of course, everyone knows Blurb, and we write a lot about Sigil, that being the favorite editor of our technical team, but people have different needs and there are many reasons why you would want to look for an alternative to these apps. What is more important to you: ease of use or number of options? Do you need somewhere to write and edit the text, or just import it from a doc file? Did we leave out your favorite? Drop us a comment, and we’ll do our best to write about it.

 

Reedsy Book Editor

  • Pricing: free
  • Platform: cloud
  • Output formats: epub, mobi, PDF

For a WYSIWYG ebook editor that converts into a valid epub, we recommend Reedsy’s editor. Reedsy’s aim was to create an online marketplace where writers and publishing professionals can find each other, and their platform offers great collaboration opportunities without the usual pain of following up version numbers and making sure that everyone is working with the right file. With this ethos, their publishing platform is cloud based: you can either write your whole book there, or copy and paste it in once you are finished. Just sign up with Facebook or Google to create your first book. My favourite feature is the automated front matter with an auto-generated copyright page. You can, as expected, add pictures and notes. On the downside, the customising options are very limited: this is the price you have to pay for them to be able to automatically generate your beautiful book.

Pros: Valid epubs. Free and simple.

Cons: Maybe too simple?

Vellum

  • Pricing: free to download, $199.99 to export books
  • Platform: macOS
  • Output formats: mobi, epub, PDF

Created with usability and elegance in mind, Vellum is an amazing software for creating Apple-, Kobo- and Amazon-approved ebooks and POD books with one click. While there are other, much cheaper softwares to do this for you, some of them even listed in this guide, Vellum is special: it creates not only professional but beautiful text-centric ebooks. If your goal is to create a book as elegant as a Penguin edition, Vellum can be your choice. The creators took care of everything: simple to use, easily imports from Word, and easy to change things even after the epub export.

Pros: Beautiful, valid epubs.

Cons: It is expensive – but this might not be a problem for Mac users anyway.

(Source: The Write Life)

Creatavist

  • Pricing: free to $200 per month
  • Platform: cloud
  • Output formats: web, Facebook stories, several ebook formats

Behind the plain and off-putting title page (which pretty much shares nothing about what you’ll find inside) hides an amazing app that is great for all your publishing needs: their motto is ‘create once, publish everywhere’ (COPE). Just sign up with Facebook and decide whether to publish under your name or create a profile for your publishing house, and you are good to go. You can use Creatavist to write and edit your books and stories, add pictures and audio and publish it on the web or download it as an enhanced ebook. It is great for creating magazines and scrapbooks and lets you publish directly to Amazon or Barnes&Nobles.

Pros: Create beautiful content easily. There is no need to write codes or have a developed sense of beauty, just choose a pre-designed layout. I cannot think of anything Creatavist couldn’t do for me: the options are endless. Great branding opportunities, built in translation service to popular European languages with the chance to easily monetize your project, there is nothing more you could want.

Cons: It is expensive. The Creative plan is only enough to have a look at the website and try out some features – if you would like to use it, you have to pay for it.

iBooks Author

  • Pricing: free
  • Platform: OS X
  • Output formats: PDF, epub, iBooks

For those of us who prefer the option to work online (ever had to work on planes and trains?), Apple iBooks Author is an excellent choice with amazing personalization opportunities and obviously the option of easily sell in iBook Store (but your book still has to go through the approval process).

Pros: Apple being Apple, you don’t have to be a genius to create beautiful multimedia content. Just flow in the text, drop in the pictures wherever you want them and you are done. And well, it is free.

Cons: It only works on a Mac. And while there is the option to export your content as an epub, you cannot be sure how that will look on an Android tablet.

PressBooks

  • Pricing: free (with watermarks) to $99 per book
  • Platform: cloud
  • Output formats: PDF, epub, mobi, XML

Just as Tumblr transformed the standard of personal websites with its ease of sharing different types of content, PressBooks intends to do the same for ebook and print book publishing. Aimed for self-pub authors and small publishers, it is, in fact a WordPress based application with limited personalization options unless you are familiar with CSS. You can write your book straight in the browser or import it from Word.

Pros: The platform was designed with books in mind, easy to use for a simple and clear design. Ability to export your book and take it wherever you want to.

Cons: Watermarked epubs and limited storage for pictures – better for text based books. Oh, and it also writes my password on the screen upon registration. I’m not an online security expert, but this doesn’t sound very safe to me.

Scrivener

  • Pricing: free 30-day trial, $19.99 (iOS), $40 (Windows), $45 (Mac)
  • Platform: Windows, OS X, iOS
  • Output formats: PDF, epub, mobi, HTML etc.

Scrivener is a bit of an outlier in this list, being not a conversion software but the greatest text editor ever made. It is very complicated to write long and complex texts as a Word document; if you want to change or check something later, it is almost impossible to find the right spot. Scrivener was created for compiling complex projects: books, research articles or screenplays. If you have millions of footnotes and endnotes, work with thousands of references or just would like to see your storylines in cute little windows, Scrivener is just for you.

Pros: What you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) text editor, inexpensive (one-time fee), amazing for working on long and complex projects and export it into literally any format you would like to. A writer’s best friend.

Cons: Limited collaboration options – your friend can only co-edit your article if they are also using Scrivener. There is no online interface for ease of sharing either. Scrivener is also very complex and takes some time to learn and explore.

Zinepal

  • Pricing: free to $14 per month
  • Platform: cloud
  • Output formats: PDF, epub, mobi

Zinepal is similar to Beacon in the sense that it recycles your existing material into e-books. Using it is literally as simple as using a stick: just give it your blogs RSS feed and click ‘create.’ It also lets you try it out without registering which is a great plus (I’m still receiving spam from everywhere else I ever subscribed to). After it created your book (it takes around five minutes), you can personalize the output. Don’t put your hopes high; all options look very newspapery.

Pros: Easily generate Amazon compatible e-books from blogs and existing web pages.

Cons: Outdated design, seems a bit pricey for what it does.

Calibre

  • Pricing: free and open source
  • Platform: Windows, macOS, Linux, portable
  • Output formats: PDF, epub, mobi

Calibre is the most popular ebook manager software ever created and is my personal favorite. It is mostly known as an ebook library manager: it pretty much handles every input and output format, can send your books to your reader on a wire or wirelessly, lets you easily edit metadata and is great to list your books according to specific information. If you are like me and have collected a library made of thousands of books, or have a nook and a kindle and a tablet, calibre does the work in the background and sends the right format to the right device, no questions asked. It is also great as an ebook converter for personal use, or if you would like to send your books to your friends, but the codes it creates are cluttered, and stores (like Amazon) greatly dislike it. (Ebooks created with Calibre usually fail the validation.)

Pros: It is free and amazing for all your conversion needs.

Cons: Creates cluttered code, stores don’t accept it.

Jutoh

  • Pricing: free limited trial, $39 (basic), $80 (plus)
  • Platform: Windows, macOS, Linux, Raspberry Pi
  • Output formats: PDF, epub, mobi, HTML

Although the user interface seems a bit off-putting, I have quickly fallen in love with Jutoh: it seems to be creating amazingly clean epub and mobifiles. The ‘Document Cleanup’ function is a must have: it offers one-click removal of all rubbish coming from the text editors (tabs, line breaks, etc.) It doesn’t even let you convert your book until everything is in order.

Pros: Clean, clutter free e-books imported from pretty much every type of documents. What’s not to love.

Cons: There are only pros. This is a perfect paid alternative to Sigil.

InDesign

  • Pricing: $19.99 per month
  • Platform: Windows, macOS
  • Output formats: PDF, epub, indd

In desktop publishing, InDesign sets the standards. No need can arise that cannot be solved using InDesign. The software today is used not only to typeset beautiful books but is here for all your publishing needs: you can create presentations, forms and websites using InDesign. With great customizability comes great… well, difficulty, when it comes to learning it. InDesign is by no means an intuitive, easy-to-use software. It takes some time to explore and master it. (It is probably worth it, though.) InDesign is amazing to create print-ready, press-friendly PDFs. On the downside, however, exporting your beautiful book into an epub might not turn out as well as expected. Sometime it is just easier to start it over from scratch and ditch the extensive formatting.

Pros: You can use the same software for all your desktop, web and ebook publishing needs.

Cons: There is no straightforward way of exporting a valid epub from InDesign. It can be done but requires skill, experience, patience and some coding. And yes, it is expensive.

(Source)

I hope you enjoyed this selection of the most popular ebook writing and editing tools currently on the market. We tried to provide a selection including free and paid options for all platforms and online work. Which one is your favorite?

Zsofia Macho writes, edits, translates and proofreads books and articles. She currently writes for PublishDrive, a fast-growing and intelligent ebook publishing platform that was created with international publishing in mind. 

This post was originally published on the PublishDrive blog

ebook, ebook conversions, ebook software

Comment

  • InDesign is looking a bit dated now. Definitely consider switching back to QuarkXPress if looking for full DTP in addition to eBooks. It has more functionality than ID, is faster, and has an aggressive programme of upgrades and updates, especially on a Mac where ID has been slow to respond to changes in the OS. Also, it’s subscription free. 😉
    For just eBooks, I’m finding Scrivener to be great.

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