Early on in my book editing and copywriting career, I realised that the right equipment was crucial. While amateur authors can be content with simple books in Word, I needed Adobe Indesign. In this article we talk about all the Tools of the Publishing Trade, tools which help me run a publishing support business and may help you too.
First, there are the hardware and storage tools we use every day. For typesetting, promoting and editing, I needed an Apple Mac.
Since 2010, I have been using Macbook Pro or desktop (now the iMac M1). These are simply the best and most reliable for running complex programs and multiple items at once. Big screens and crystal clear.
It boggles the mind that people will spend $600 on a boring conference but not spend on stable computer power and a sharing and storage system, such as Google Drive. Just one time that your computer gets hacked or goes AWOL in some way, and you will be pulling out your hair. Any serious backup/storage from one of the paid services will SAVE your bacon.
Please note: we have an affiliation with some partners mentioned below and will be paid commission if you click and then buy, although this won't affect what you pay at all.
Similarly, the right software costs money. While you can doodle around with Canva freely, the Pro version offers flexibility with scaling sizes, instant re-sizing for various Social Media, and loads of photos.
Canva also have all these yummy templates which only require applying your own brand colours and fonts to a 5-10 minute job at worst. (Brand Kit is a Pro feature).
Canva is useful for making image with captions for social media promotions.
Adobe Indesign is a pro desktop publishing program, so it qualifies as a Tool of the Publishing Trade! It helps designers lay out coffee table books or mockups and creative works, like Childrens' books, colouring books, Journals, Workbooks, and brochures. You can also turn an Indesign into an ePub allegedly, but I never had much success with the outcome, except for once.
I use InDesign because in the '90s I used QuarkXpress and PageMaker as a desktop publishing assistant, which gave me an insight into how it all works. In Indesign, I prefer the Typography Workspace because it has the right toolsets, including my personal favourite: Glyphs.
Glyphs give access to printer ornaments and em dashes. Say no more.
Getting back to my point, most novices will find it incredibly stressful to learn InDesign without a tutor. It just bears no relation to anything word processor-like.
However, InDesign can't be beat for laying out pictures with text, something that MS Word has caused migraines when trying to achieve a fully designed page. It was built for pre-press work so has colour tools, image sizes, and PDF-X1 export options.
Try Pages instead, if you have an Apple Mac. More business tools are mentioned in my Freelance Tools of the Trade blog post.
These are modern-day printers' ornaments - used for book prettying.
I'm an editor. One tool of the publishing trade I might use when confronted with a lot of tedious grammatical errors or longwinded construction is ProWritingAid. Grammarly is fairly similar, but I got PWA with a promotional special. It seemed ideal for using as an import to Word or in the app itself. It is always ideal to buy a tool that helps you save time, although step wisely if relying on it. It is not a foolproof option for editing - nothing replaces a brain with a gift for grammar.
See ProWritingAid for the latest offer and a free trial.
Sometimes we must spend a little to meet our objectives, such as:
on hardware (recommend Apple Mac for stability and endurance),
on design software (recommend InDesign, Pages, Canva)
on a stable website development platform (recommend SquareSpace)
on fonts or illustrations - not a tool, but still handy.
While I use Getresponse here, you may also consider SquareSpace - a hosted platform. The SquareSpace.com feature list is very long. So view a general website design feature & benefits page. It starts from about $15 a month.
Building starts with a theme. It is a hosted platform, so save hours in time... This is called 'software-as-a-service'. It is better because there's no need to negotiate problems at hosting level or keep a platform and 20 plugins updated.
As someone who spends $45 a month just on website hosting, I give my advice that creating a solid website on a SEO-friendly platform needs a small budget like this.
My objective is not to get the cheapest tool but simply to have 'ease of use', speed, reliability, and most importantly an emphasis on QUALITY.