Alternatives

By product

• Vellum alternatives

  Vellum only runs on macOS. The real alternatives for Windows and Linux authors — what each costs, what it exports, and who it suits.

• Atticus alternatives

  Considering something other than Atticus? The real options — what each costs, whether your book lives on your disk or in the cloud, and who each suits.

• Reedsy Book Editor alternatives

  Outgrown the free Reedsy Book Editor? What the alternatives offer that it does not — design control, print production and working offline.

What to check before you switch

Almost everyone who switches formatting tools does it for one of four reasons, and it is worth being clear which is yours before comparing feature lists: the tool does not run on your computer; it costs more than the books are earning; it cannot do something specific your book needs — verse, tables, a complex non-fiction hierarchy; or the workflow has stopped scaling, which usually means a series that has to be re-exported by hand.

Only the first is absolute. The other three have a threshold, and it is worth working out where yours is: switching costs you an afternoon of re-styling per book, and for one more title that is often the wrong trade.

What actually moves between tools

The manuscript, and nothing else. No formatting application reads another's project file — none of them publish the format — so the route across is always the same: get the text out as a Word document with its heading styles intact, import that, and choose the styling again.

The styling is the quick part. What you have to protect is the structure: export from wherever the manuscript genuinely lives rather than from the formatting tool you are leaving, so chapters arrive as chapters instead of as one continuous stream of paragraphs to split by hand. If the book started in Scrivener, go back to the .scriv project.

What you will lose, and it is worth knowing in advance

Custom typographic tweaks made inside the old tool — manual page breaks, hand-adjusted spacing, one-off styling on a particular chapter opening. These are not in the manuscript, so they do not travel, and rebuilding them is most of the real work in a switch.

Your ISBNs, metadata and cover files are unaffected. Anything already published stays published; a re-upload with a new interior is a normal update at every retailer, not a new edition.