Quick Start Guide to Atticus

Welcome to this quick Atticus overview!

This guide will walk you through everything you need to get started, from creating your account to exporting a beautifully formatted book.

Once you purchase Atticus, you’ll receive a confirmation email. Open it, click the link to set your password, and log in. You’ll automatically land inside the Atticus dashboard.

You can also download and install an app version of Atticus. This will always be tied to your browser, but it will open in a standalone window. The app version is not compatible with all browsers, so we highly recommend using Chrome.

If you have any questions on how to install Atticus, check out our article titled:

Can I Download Atticus?

To log out completely, click the Profile icon in the top right, and then the Logout button. You’ll know you’re successfully logged out when you’re returned to the Log In screen.

Once you're on the dashboard, you’ll see three different ways to begin working in Atticus. The first being “Upload a Book”, the second being “Start a New Book”, and lastly “Create a New Boxset”.

This allows you to import an existing manuscript as a DOCX file. Before doing this, we highly recommend checking out our video, which explains how to pre-format your docx for Atticus. As the video shows, with a couple of simple tweaks to your Word doc, you can ensure that your chapters, headings, breaks, and spacing import cleanly into Atticus.

Please note that we always recommend uploading a preformatted DOCX file rather than copying and pasting text from other programs, as this helps avoid possible hidden formatting issues.

This lets you begin a manuscript from scratch inside Atticus. Once you create a new book, you’ll be taken directly into the Writing tab, where you can begin writing in your chapters and organizing your formatting structure as you go.

Once you have a book or books started, as you see here, you can click on the three dots beside the title and time stamp to delete your book or duplicate it.

If you scroll down the page, you’ll find your Master Pages Gallery. When you’ve created Master Pages, they will appear here. You can click the thumbnail image to open and review the page, or you can click the three dots to Rename the page, Sync to All Books, or Delete the page.

If you click “See All” to the top right of your book thumbnail images, you’ll be brought to the My Books dashboard. From here, you can see All, Books, and Master Pages, which we’ll get into more later.

To the right, you can search for a specific book by title, or organize your dashboard by recently added (default), date modified, alphabetically, or the project or version – all details you set according to your needs and preferences.

You can also view everything either in the default Grid view or change it to List view if you prefer.

When you upload your manuscript, or while you are in your book, Atticus will have a tab named Edit Book Details.

This is where you enter the essentials for your Title Page: Book title, Subtitle, Author name, Book Cover, and Publisher Details.

You can also choose more export options in Edit Book Details.

If you’d like a backup copy or a version of your manuscript to share with editors, you can also export to .docx. This is perfect for an editor.

Atticus automatically saves your work every few characters, but if you’d like an extra layer of protection, you can press this Download Snapshot button to force sync your book to our secure servers and download a .json file, which can be used to restore your account if anything out of the ordinary were to happen.

On the left side, you’ll see your Navigation Panel. This is where all your chapters, front matter, and back matter live. Front matter includes things like your title page and copyright page; back matter includes things like acknowledgments or an about-the-author page.

You can drag and drop to rearrange anything, add new chapters, or insert front/back matter pages from the menu.

In the center is the writing editor where you’ll do your drafting and revising.

At the top of the editor, you’ll find your basic formatting tools, bold, italics, headings, lists, alignment, and other writing essentials.

At the bottom of the screen, you’ll see your word count, sprint timer, and auto-save indicator, which we will go over more in depth with the Writing Overview tutorial.

You’ll also notice the “More Tools” menu on the top right. This includes helpful features like Find and Replace, your writing goals and habit tracker, and additional preferences.

If you'd like a full-length video going over this section of Atticus, here's the link: Writing & Editing Overview within Atticus

Once you’re ready to move beyond writing, head over to the Formatting tab.

Here, you can either customize a theme from scratch or choose from Atticus's professionally designed styles. If you want to customize a theme, you will need to click the three dots next to the theme name and select Edit or Edit as New Theme.

Think of themes as the master style guide that governs the overall aesthetic of your entire book. Within themes, you'll find a comprehensive collection of settings, including Chapter Heading, Paragraph settings, Scene Breaks, Foot and End Notes, Line spacing, and most importantly, Trim size. We even include which trim size is compatible with American and International printing, as well as which publishers have which preference from the options.

Our video on Formatting not only covers each setting within your theme, but also teaches you how you can customize them to fit your book-writing needs. Here's the link to that video: How To Format in Atticus

Everything you see in the Previewer, on the right of your theme, updates instantly as you adjust your theme.

Underneath your Previewer, you will find another place where you can export your book from Atticus.

You can export your file in two different ways: PDF and EPUB. EPUB is a reflowable format, allowing content to adapt based on the device's screen size. This makes it ideal for various eReaders and mobile devices.

PDFs have a fixed layout, maintaining the same appearance regardless of the device. This ensures consistency, but may lead to challenges on smaller screens. This file is ideal for documents that will be printed and put into a paperback/hardcover.

As you customize your theme, Atticus automatically applies your settings to both your ebook and print layouts at the same time.

Once you’re happy with everything, click Export, wait a few seconds, and Atticus will generate your files and save them directly to your downloads folder.

On behalf of the entire Atticus team, we welcome you and wish you all the best of success with your writing and formatting. For more tutorials and instructions, we recommend our Tutorials page, YouTube channel, and Facebook community