If you’re interested in using a professional page layout program for your books after writing them in Scrivener but can’t afford InDesign, you might want to check out Affinity Publisher. Although it is new, it has got almost every book layout feature an author might need except EPUB export and footnotes/endnotes—and for a one-time price of $50 rather than the $20+/month rent for Adobe’s ID.
For the week of Thanksgiving 2019, aka Black Friday, all their apps are 30% off. That includes a Photoshop-like Affinity Photo and an Illustrator-like Affinity Designer. For all but Publisher there are versions for macOS, Windows, and iOS/iPad. That’s $34.99 for the computer versions and $13.99 for the iOS version.
Their three apps also work together much better than Adobe’s, so if you do graphic novels or any graphic-rich document, you might find them all useful. There is even a toolbox for comics. affinity.serif.com/en-us/store/ … x-toolbox/
I do complicated science texts, so I have to use ID for the endnotes, but I’ve begun to use Affinity Designer for the illustrations. It is a heck of a lot cheaper than subscribing to Illustrator via Adobe.
If you’ve used Affinity Publisher to layout a book, you might comment on that here.
Apple just selected Affinity Publisher as the Mac app of the year, so if you’ve been wondering what tool you should use to turn that book you’ve written in Scrivener into something that looks purty, you might want to check it out. Here’s the story:
Affinity Publisher is a page layout program like Adobe’s InDesign, Quark Express, and the former PageMaker. It allows you to control with great finesse what a book looks like on each page, far more so that a word processing program like Word. They have powerful tools for making page layout efficient and attractive. Where Affinity Publisher beats the rest is what it calls StudioLink, which gives close integration with its graphics programs, Photo and Designer. That’s a real plus if you want to create graphic-rich books.
The only two major downsides with the current version is there’s as yet no endnotes, which probably doesn’t effect most Scrivener users, and more seriously no EPUB export for creating ebooks.
Oh, and to celebrate that award, Affinity is extending their 30% off on everything off for another week, which should mean until about December 9, 2019. That means the Mac and Windows versions are just $34.95. There’s as yet no iOS version.