Tools & hiring
Atticus, Vellum, or a Professional Formatter: What Your Book Needs
An honest comparison of DIY book formatting tools like Atticus, Vellum, and Reedsy Studio against hiring a professional formatter: costs, limits, and how to decide.
Quick answer
If your book is mostly plain text and you are willing to learn a tool, Atticus, Vellum, or Reedsy Studio can produce a clean interior for many novels and memoirs. Hire a professional formatter when the book has images, tables, footnotes, complex front matter, a fixed-layout ebook, several platforms to pass, or a deadline where a rejected file is expensive.
Not every book needs a professional formatter. That is worth saying plainly, because most comparisons of formatting tools are written by people selling one.
Plenty of self-published novels are formatted well by their authors using consumer tools. And a meaningful share of the manuscripts we are hired to fix started in a tool that was the wrong fit for the book. The useful question is not which option is best in general. It is which option fits this book, this budget, and this deadline.
What the DIY tools actually are
Four tools cover most of the do-it-yourself market:
- Vellum: $199.99 for ebooks, $249.99 with print output. Mac only (macOS 13 or newer). One-time purchase.
- Atticus: $147, one-time purchase. Runs in the browser on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chromebook. Exports both EPUB and print PDF.
- Reedsy Studio: free, browser-based. Formats to EPUB and print-ready PDF from a fixed set of templates.
- Kindle Create: free, from Amazon. Output is locked to Amazon’s Kindle format, so it cannot produce files for other retailers.
Prices and requirements change, so check the tool’s own site before buying.
What DIY tools do well
For a plain-text novel, memoir, or straightforward narrative nonfiction, these tools produce clean, professional-looking interiors. That is the honest baseline.
They are a good fit when:
- The book is body text, chapter headings, and standard front matter.
- You are happy choosing from the tool’s built-in design templates.
- You publish several books and can reuse the tool across all of them.
- You have the patience to learn the tool and check the output carefully.
The per-book economics favor tools for series authors. A one-time purchase spread across five novels costs less per book than hiring anyone, and revisions stay in your hands.
Where the tools hit their limits
Every one of these tools is template-bound. You are choosing from preset designs, not designing a book. That is fine for many novels and limiting for everything else.
Expect trouble when the book has:
- Photos, illustrations, or figures that need precise placement.
- Tables, sidebars, callouts, or multi-column layouts.
- Heavy footnotes or endnotes.
- A children’s picture book layout, which needs fixed-layout production the consumer tools do not really handle.
- Full-bleed artwork or background color running to the page edge.
- IngramSpark distribution, which checks files more strictly than KDP. One tool-generated PDF may pass Amazon and fail Ingram’s preflight — see our guide on KDP vs IngramSpark formatting.
- A design brief the templates cannot match, such as a series look carried across books or a brand-specific interior.
There is also the cost nobody prices in: your hours. The tool fee is not the real cost of DIY. The real cost is the evenings spent learning the tool, rebuilding the file after a surprise, and re-checking every page after each revision.
What each path costs
Rough market numbers, so you can compare like for like:
- Reedsy Studio or Kindle Create: free, plus your time.
- Atticus or Vellum: $147 to $249.99 one-time, plus your time.
- Professional interior formatting: from around $150 for a straightforward ebook at the value end, to four figures at premium design agencies. Illustrated and fixed-layout books cost more than plain text everywhere.
If the book is a one-off and complex, hiring is often cheaper than it looks once your hours count for something. If you write in a genre with clean interiors and plan a backlist, a tool pays for itself quickly.
A short decision checklist
Format it yourself when:
- The interior is essentially all text.
- A template look is good enough.
- You have more time than budget, or a backlist to amortize the tool across.
- Your launch date can absorb a week of fiddling if something goes wrong.
Hire a professional when:
- The book has images, tables, footnotes, or complex front matter.
- You need a fixed-layout ebook or a children’s book interior.
- You are distributing through IngramSpark or any other platform beyond Amazon and want the files to pass each platform’s checks the first time.
- The deadline is real and a rejected file would be expensive.
- You want a custom design rather than a template.
If you format it yourself, still do the checks
DIY does not mean skipping production checks. Before you publish, work through our KDP paperback formatting checklist for print and confirm the ebook behaves in a real previewer, not just in the tool that made it. Our guide to EPUB vs KPF vs MOBI covers which files each retailer actually wants.
If you hire, ask these questions first
Any competent formatter should have clear answers to:
- Which platforms are the files prepared and tested for: KDP, IngramSpark, Apple Books, or any other platform you plan to use?
- Exactly which files do I receive: print PDF, EPUB, source files?
- Are revisions after proofing included, and how many?
- What happens if a platform rejects the file?
Vague answers to those questions predict vague files.
Wellset Books handles print interior formatting and eBook conversion for authors whose books have outgrown the templates. If yours has not, we will say so.