There’s new formatting software in town!
I’m a formatter. I have been since 2011 when I learned html so that I could format my own books, and those of other authors, into an ebook. Since then there have been so many innovations, new ways to format your book. There is now everything from Jutoh (highly adaptive and filled with incredible features and loads of ways to personalize your book) to Vellum (a super-easy way to format, but only if you work on a Mac). I have tried them all!
And now we have Lacuna.
Lacuna is a really nice program for both Mac and Windows which makes formatting your book so easy! You can choose from pre-loaded styles or create your own. I have found the software to be extremely versatile and easy to use.
At the most basic level—for those who merely want to take their Word document and have it turned into an ebook and a PDF for print-on-demand, you upload your book, choose a style, and boom, it’s done!
For those who would like to add a little more personalization to their book, you can change add dropcaps, or small caps to the beginning of the first paragraph of each chapter, change the font of your chapter titles, and add images.
Personally, I love adding images either above or below my chapter titles. In fact, for my Zodiac series, I have a different image depending on the POV of the character in each scene (the zodiac symbol of that character). With most formatting software, you can choose one image to top all of your chapters. Lacuna allows me to change the image chapter by chapter. I was also able to replace the title on my title page with an image—a png of the title from the cover since I couldn’t get exactly the same look as the cover designer had.
As with many apps made for formatting, you can write in Lacuna, but you’ll always have the ebook or print version (depending on what you choose) sitting next to your typing window.
As you can see, I created a new “unnumbered” chapter. I was playing with the options you can see in the tool bar above the main window. In case you can’t read the text in the image: you can add images and smart quotes. Even more fun, is you can add “handwriting” (there are a number of different handwriting fonts to choose from), callout boxes (very easy to change the background color and spacing), and images of texts (including whether it’s been read and/or what time it was sent). So, there are a lot of fun extras you can add to your book. And I didn’t mention the footnotes and tables, which are there as well. For section breaks, you can add in your own images or use those that come standard with the app.
There are many different pages for front and back matter you can add but there is one feature missing—the ability to link with different e-retailers. You can’t do it. In Jutoh, you can put in conditional formatting, in Vellum, you can upload links to each of the e-retailers where you sell your books and then compile your book for each one. Lacuna only has the ability to create two different “Other Books by the Author” pages — one for ebook and one for print. (If you don’t specify a print version, it will list the url of the link.) I have spoken with the developer of the software and they are working on adding this feature.
All in all, Lacuna is a really easy way to format a book and it does create both an ebook and print-on-demand PDF. If you’re a PC user who doesn’t have access to Vellum, this is an answer to that. Or even if you work on a Mac and would like to use software other than Vellum, Lacuna is a great option.