This is one of the first questions authors Google when they realize writing the book was only half the job. There are more options than you'd expect — and most of them come with trade-offs nobody mentions upfront.
Here's an honest look at the tools people actually use to create books, who they're best for, and where each one falls short.
Microsoft Word — The Default That Most People Outgrow
Nearly every author starts here because they already have it. Word is where the manuscript lives, so it feels natural to just keep going and format it there too.
And for simple eBooks or internal documents, it's fine. Word can produce a clean enough result if you know what you're doing with styles, section breaks, and page setup. The problem is that "knowing what you're doing" in Word for book formatting is a whole skill in itself — one that most people underestimate. Things like mirror margins, chapter-specific headers, proper widow and orphan control, and PDF export settings are not intuitive, and getting them wrong produces files that printers and distributors reject.
Word is a word processor, not a layout tool. It was built for documents, not books. That distinction matters more the more serious your publishing goals are.
Canva — Great for Social Media, Limited for Books
Canva has gotten genuinely impressive over the last few years, and it's a popular choice for authors who want a visual drag-and-drop experience without a learning curve. For simple projects — a short eBook, a workbook, a lead magnet — it can produce something decent.
But Canva has real limitations when it comes to full book production. It doesn't handle long-form text well. There's no proper baseline grid, no paragraph style system, and no reliable way to manage a 300-page manuscript without things getting messy fast. The export options are improving but still don't consistently meet the PDF/X standards required for commercial printing.
If you're using Canva to mock up your cover or create marketing materials for your book, great. If you're trying to format your entire novel in it, you're going to hit walls.
Vellum — The Favorite for Fiction Authors on Mac
Vellum is the tool a lot of indie fiction authors swear by, and for good reason. It's clean, intuitive, and specifically built for book formatting. You import your manuscript, choose a style, and it handles most of the heavy lifting. The output looks genuinely professional for eBook formats — Kindle, EPUB, Apple Books — and it does a solid job with print as well.
The catch is that it's Mac-only and not free. There's a one-time purchase price that's reasonable if you're formatting multiple books, less so if you're doing just one. And while Vellum is excellent for straightforward fiction formatting, it has less flexibility for books that need complex layouts — heavy non-fiction, illustrated books, anything that doesn't follow a standard novel structure.
For a self-publishing novelist on a Mac who wants clean, fast results without hiring a designer, Vellum is probably the best DIY option available.
Adobe InDesign — The Industry Standard
This is what professional book designers use. InDesign is built specifically for layout and publication design, and it shows — the level of control it gives you over typography, spacing, master pages, and print settings is simply not available in any other tool.
The trade-off is that InDesign has a steep learning curve. It's not software you pick up in an afternoon. Understanding how to use paragraph styles, set up master pages, manage a long document correctly, and export print-ready files takes real time and practice. For most authors, learning InDesign from scratch just to format one book isn't worth it.
But for professional designers — and for anyone who wants results that genuinely match traditionally published books — InDesign is the tool. It's what we use at Literary Lab for every project we take on.
Atticus — The New All-in-One Option
Atticus is a newer tool that's been gaining traction in the indie publishing community. It works on any platform (unlike Vellum), handles both eBook and print formatting, and is designed to be simple enough for non-designers. It's priced as a one-time purchase and has been improving steadily.
It won't give you the same output quality as InDesign, but it's a solid middle-ground option for authors who want to format their own books without hiring someone and without learning professional design software. If you're a self-publisher on a budget who wants decent results with a reasonable time investment, Atticus is worth looking at.
So Which One Should You Use?
It depends on what you're trying to achieve. If you're formatting a short eBook with no complex layout needs, Canva or even Word might get you there. If you're a Mac user writing genre fiction and you want clean, professional results without hiring a designer, Vellum is the answer. If you want the highest quality output possible — especially for print — InDesign is the standard, which means hiring someone who knows it.
That's where we come in. At Literary Lab, we use Adobe InDesign for every book we format because it's the only tool that gives us the precision and control that print production demands. Whether you're publishing a novel, a memoir, or a business book, the result is a file that looks professionally made — because it is.
If you'd rather skip the software learning curve entirely and just get your book done right, let's talk.
The right software is the one that matches your skill level, your timeline, and your publishing goals. Just don't let the tool be the reason your book doesn't look as good as it deserves to.
Literary Lab is a book design and formatting studio for independent authors.