I’ve not been commenting on Literature and Latte recently, but when I did I sometimes suggested that authors look into using InDesign to format their Scrivener-written books for publication. It’s ability to handle complex formatting and create attractive books is impressive. I’ve strayed away from that advocacy because I’ve come to feel that for most authors Adobe’s $20/month subscription fee is too much and my sense, shared by many ID users, that Adobe isn’t spending much improving ID. I’m going to still be using ID, because I know it well and it earns me thousands of dollars each year laying out complicated science texts for another publisher. But I no longer think it makes sense for most authors.
Having just acquired a 2018 iPad, as I went looking for apps for it, I came across the Affinity family of apps for iOS, macOS and Windows. Affinity Photo offers most of the features of Adobe Photoshop for a single-purchase cost of $50 for computers and $20 for iOS. It’s almost certainly why Adobe has announced that an iOS version of Photoshop is in the works. Affinity Designer offers some of the features of Adobe Illustrator for those same prices, which are a tiny fraction of what Adobe is charging.
Affinity is now developing a competitor to InDesign to be called Affinity Publisher. At this time (early September 2016), you can download a time-limited beta version here. At present, there are only macOS and Windows versions but an iOS one is coming.
affinity.serif.com/en-us/publisher/
And you can find tutorials on how to use it here. They also get across well why a page-layout app can be better for creating attractive book than a word-processing app like Word.
affinity.serif.com/en-us/tutori … r/desktop/
I’ve watched the tutorials and played with the beta of AP. It’s features aren’t up to those of ID, which has about two decades of development behind it. As best I can tell, it doesn’t do endnotes or have GREP searches, both critical factors in those science books that I layout. But it does seem more than sufficient for print versions of novels, basic non-fiction, and even graphic-rich cookbooks. You can use it to make them look quite attractive.
I say print versions because the beta does not export to epub, either fixed format or reflowable, like ID does. Most of its export formats (including PNG and JPEG) make no sense for text documents. Those seem to have been carried over from Photo and Designer. The only one that makes sense for authors wanting to publish their books is PDF, which is what you need to publish almost anywhere. I assume that problem will be address, but for the moment, this is a print-version only way to create books. For Scrivener users that is no big deal since they can use it to generate the epub.
When Affinity Publisher leaves beta, Literature and Latte might want to work out an arrangement with Affinity where each promotes the other with its users. With the addition of epub export, Scrivener and Affinity Publisher would make a excellent pair of tools for independent authors.
–Michael W. Perry, Inkling Books
