Best Free Mac Publishing Software
- Choosing Desktop Publishing Software. The best desktop publishing software is easy to use and provides lots of beautiful templates and graphics for you to use. These programs should be useful for professional level projects or at-home creations. You'll want to make sure the program you choose has all of the features and tools you need.
- Make your message more visible with top-of-the-line desktop publishing software for Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS. Presentation is key in today’s competitive marketplace. The tools in Creative Cloud have comprehensive controls, high-quality templates, and themes designed for any digital or print publishing project you can dream up.
Here are 10 of the best free tools and self-publishing apps to help with your book publishing and promotion.
We all need some help. The following list of ten free book publishing software and writing tools are the ones I use almost every day. So I can vouch for how useful they are.
May 10, 2016 Read this 2015 review about the best free desktop publishing software. Find out what our top pick is. You will also find many more freeware reviews in countless categories at Gizmo's. Introduction Commercial Desktop publishing programs are expensive. But don't despair, there are two excellent desktop publishing programs that are totally free.
There are so many aspects to being a self-published author. It is sometimes hard to count the number of hats you need to wear every day.
If you have the best online publishing tools and software, you are one step ahead.
In This ArticleHideMy ten best and most useful free self-publishing tools1. Canva2. Shaxpir3. ProWritingAid4. Sonar5. KDP Wizard6. Calibre7. ImageOptim8. BookCore9. GIMP10. Kindle CreateSummaryMy ten best and most useful free self-publishing tools
You have to write, format, design, publish, promote, market, blog, and then find time to connect with our readers.
So you need the best publishing software you can find.
These free book publishing tools will save you a lot of time to do what you do best — writing a book.
1. Canva
Canva is a must-have free tool for all authors and bloggers. Images are vital in attracting attention. But you should use unique images and never copy or download images from Google Image Search. Canva is a great graphic design tool that solves this problem with ease. There are loads of professionally designed templates. You can find Facebook headers, social media posts, logos, ebook covers, business cards, and Twitter posts, just to name a few. There is a paid option. But the free version comes with plenty of free images, graphics, icons, shapes, and backgrounds for almost any image project you can imagine. You can upload your own stock images to use with Canva. Then you can create truly unique images for your blog or online magazine and use on social media. Best of all it is user-friendly and very easy to use. You can create stunning ebook covers with Canva. Choose from hundreds of templates or create your own from scratch. If you are looking for a free writing app to write a book or novel, then Shaxpir really packs a lot of features into its free version.The main feature is the Manuscript Builder, where you can use drag-and-drop tools to rearrange any part of your manuscript.You can also move and change the order of your scenes or chapters.You can set writing goals for your book project and keep track of your progress. Importantly, it lets you take notes about your events, characters, and places.You can collect and save any concept art you find and add your margin comments.There is also an in-built spellchecker.There is a lot of free software designed for writing books. But Shaxpir offers you the widest range of features I have seen in a free version.You can download Shaxpir for both Mac and PC. There is also an option for cloud access. Prowritingaid is a fantastic grammar and writing checker. It includes so many checks and reports to help improve your writing. It is one of the best writing aids for self-publishing authors. The tools and reports dig deep into your text and offer you a huge range of suggestions to improve your writing. You can add extensions for Chrome, Microsoft Office, Google Docs, and Scrivener. Accounting software for mac. It allows print checks and basic inventory and services, create and manage an inventory item as a service. It has a free version for businesses with less than five employees. It has more than 20 preconfigured reports, which can be saved as PDF or CSV files. You can also directly email or fax reports through the software.Moreover, Express Accounts features General Ledger and Journal and Balance Sheet. Likewise, it is simple to use for basic accounting need with a browser-based add-on to allow multiple users without the need for additional licensing.Likewise, Express Accounts generates basic reports including income statement analysis, cash flow statements, invoices, and balance sheets. There is a free version of ProWritingAid available that offers you plenty of functionality to help you check your writing. Authors might think about the modestly priced premium version, which includes all the reports and editing tools. ProWritingAid is my number one go-to editing tool when I need to work intensively on book manuscripts. Whenever you publish a book or ebook on Amazon, you need to add seven search keywords. Don’t rush into this because finding the best keywords is vital to the success of your book. There are many ways you can do Amazon keyword research for free. But one of the best free keyword search tools for Amazon keywords is Sonar. Al you need to do is enter your seed keyword and then check the results for the best ideas and related search phrases. You can then click on any of the suggestions to find even more possible keywords for your book. It shouldn’t take you long to find plenty of ideas for your Amazon search keywords. However, because it is a free service, you won’t be able to access search or sales volume for each keyword phrase. If you want to access real-time sales and search data you will need to use premium software like Publisher Rocket. KDP Wizard gives you easy access to all of your book data and files in a quick and functional format. It works directly in your Chrome browser. The KDP Wizard browser app is the Amazon KDP tool for listing and editing all your book information in one place. There is a Rich Text Editor for book descriptions, to make optimized product descriptions simple. You can search & select categories easily, speeding up the listing process. Easy access to keyword profiles, authors, contributors, descriptions, pricing profiles, and more through smart dropdowns. Copy all page attributes from one listing tab to another, to save time when creating multiple new books. Check out all the features that are available to manage all your books on Amazon. Best of all, there is a totally free version you can use. Without a doubt, Calibre is the number one ebook tool every indie author should have. It does everything you could need to do when it comes to ebook creation. It also a great free tool for converting from Microsoft Word to mobi and epub ebook files. It is also an ebook reader, ebook library and can sync to e-reading devices. For those with a little technical skill, you can also edit HTML, epub, and AZW3 (Kindle) or mobi. ImageOptim is a free software application for Mac and Linux users. It reduces the size of images before using on blogs or websites by using drag-and-drop. Quick, easy, and very efficient. (Windows users can try File Optimizer.) BookCore provides a powerful book sales tracking platform for self-publishers. It’s a fully automated sales tracking and analytics service that generates reports, monitors rankings, and tracks reviews on multiple marketplaces. It’s free to use and works on mobile, tablets, and laptops. Working with images is a regular task for authors now. But Photoshop is very expensive. GIMP is a free open source alternative that works exceedingly well on all platforms. If you are new to image editing, it will be a learning curve. But no more so than for Photoshop or any other image or DTP software. For Mac users, there is also Seashore. I also use it from time to time for book design mock-ups for covers. Kindle Create is one of the must-have self-publishing apps for all authors. It is the best ebook publishing software for authors. It has all the tools you need to easily create and format perfect ebooks for Kindle. It will automatically create a table of contents. It is very easy to learn how to use it. You will be up and running in no time at all. You can also use this app to format your print book. You need to download and install the web app on your computer from Kindle Direct Publishing. It is available for both PC and Mac. You can watch this short video for more information about Kindle Create. Note: An alternative free app for Mac users is iBooks Author. However, it is an ebook creator software tool that is best suited to interactive ebooks. There is a wide range of free book writing software, free word processor applications, and online tools for self-publishing authors. Apart from my favorites listed above, I use quite a few more to help save me time. Not everything is free nowadays. But if and when I am convinced a tool, application, or online service is worth paying for, I will. But most online writing tools and applications a self-publishing author needs to use each day are available for free. Create stunning documents with iStudio Publisher. Powerful and intuitive page layout software for desktop publishing. Designed exclusively for Mac. Featured by Apple in ‘Apps for Designers’, iStudio Publisher is perfect for designing anything you want to layout and print, and comes with world class support. Join over a quarter of a million users and design, enjoy, and smile! Why Choose iStudio Publisher? Produce beautiful, professional quality documents with ease, including newsletters, brochures, adverts, flyers, invitations, menus, reports, posters, greetings cards, and yearbooks. Start with a professionally designed template or a blank document of any size. Who’s Using iStudio Publisher? Anyone can master iStudio Publisher quickly, regardless of age and experience. New to page layout and desktop publishing? Our Video Tutorials and Rapid Start Guide will get you up to speed. Experienced? You’ll love iStudio Publisher’s sophisticated features. iStudio Publisher in Education Are you a student? Do you work in education? Get 40% discount on single licenses from our webstore. We also offer an Educational Volume Licensing Scheme for schools, colleges and universities. All text, images and visual effects are held within shapes. Create, combine and style your shapes to achieve great looking documents with ease. Use the Toolkit for creating, editing and laying out document content, including shapes, text and images, via direct interaction with your mouse. A wide selection of pre-designed shapes for quick results, arranged in seven groups. Also draw your own shapes using the comprehensive range of drawing tools. The Inspectors are organized in a separate window and provide a control panel from which to manage your document and apply style settings to shapes, text and images. Use the fully adjustable snap grid to help with sizing and aligning shapes. There are independent controls to show or hide the grid and turn the snap-to-grid function on/off. Horizontal and vertical rulers that auto-scale and auto-label. Click the drop-down control where the rulers meet to choose between millimetres, inches, inches (decimal) and points. The canvas is working space next to the document pages/spreads, which isn’t printed or exported. It’s a convenient place for storing alternative content to swap in/out. The toolbar gives you an easy-to-access, duplicate set of controls for the most frequently used menu items. In many cases a keyboard shortcut is also provided. Open multiple windows on the same document, with independent zoom and view settings, all live. Show or hide a Thumbnails Navigator. Smooth pan and zoom up to 5000%. Choose to show or hide grid lines, text wrap runarounds, text baselines, glyph bounding boxes, and invisible flow items. Optionally work in live preview mode. iStudio Publisher supports true spread editing, allowing you to lay out two pages next to each other and create content ‘across the fold’. Ideal for brochures and newsletters. Master pages are for holding repeating content you want to include on multiple pages, for example, headers and footers. Automatic page numbering is included. Easily draw shapes from scratch using the four drawing tools. Create sophisticated lines with the Multi-Line Tool. Choose from seven line segment types. Use the Reshaping Tool to adjust the geometry of Library shapes and shapes drawn from scratch. Simply reposition the control points (orange) and Bezier handles (purple). Place text columns in any shape. Easily change the number of columns, column spacings (gutter widths) and inset distance within the shape. Create flow links between any combination of text columns and paths, and over different pages or spreads. Useful for splitting an article between non-adjacent columns. Wrap text around any shape (image) and adjust the offset distance. Choose between a tight wrap that follows a shape’s contour, or a box wrap around a bounding rectanglar. Write text along curved line paths, around shapes, and at any angle. Applies to shapes from the Shape Library and to those drawn with the drawing tools. Adjust paragraph alignment, justification, and indents. Set line and paragraph spacings to auto-scale or fixed values. Add tab stops. Fine- tune character spacing (tracking). Use any font installed on your Mac. Apply text effects: bold, italics, underline, strikethrough, superscript, subscript, outline and shadow. Stretch text non-proportionally. Insert a wide range of image types including JPEG, TIFF, PNG, GIF, PSD, PDF, EPS and AI. Images are stored at their original resolution to achieve maximum print quality. Comprehensive scaling and fitting options (within any shape), including tile and tile rotate. Change image DPI, and align, flip and rotate images within shapes. Choose colors for text, lines, fills and shadows via the standard Mac OS X Color panel. Capture monitor colors and save favorites to a swatch table. Design in RGB or CMYK colors. Add shadows to shapes, lines, images and text. Adjust the offset angle, offset distance, color, blur and opacity. Reducing an object’s opacity reduces its shadow weight. Adjust the opacity of shapes, lines, color fills, images and text. Use partial opacity gradient fills as masks. Combine shapes of partial opacity to create interesting effects. Group shapes together to enable them to be selected as a single unit for repositioning, resizing, rotating or copying. Nested grouping is supported to any level. Create bulleted and numbered lists by using a combination of tab stops and paragraph indent settings. Choose any Unicode symbol as a bullet character. iStudio Publisher document files are XML based. Paste in RTF styled text. Print documents directly or export as PDF, EPUB (text only) or RTF format files. Create a multi-page booklet from several sheets of paper printed on both sides and folded in half. The page imposition (reordering for printing) is handled for you. Produce PDF files ready for printing at a commercial print shop, satisfying all of the typical requirements, including high resolution images, CMYK colors and embedded fonts. A copy of your document is automatically saved every 5 minutes, without interrupting you. NOTE: This is not an implementation of the Mac OS X Auto Save and Versions feature. Comprehensive Help pages presented in the standard Mac OS X Help Viewer. Includes context sensitive Help – click a question mark to go straight to a relevant Help page.
Best Free Mac Publishing Software Windows 7
Great Looking Page Layout
Show Me How.Toolkit
Shape Library
Inspectors
Snap Grid
Rulers
Canvas
Toolbar
Document Viewing
Viewing Options
Spread Editing
Master Pages
Drawing Shapes
Adjusting Shapes
Text Columns
Text Flow Linking
Text Wrapping
Text Around Curves
Text Layout
Text Styling
Photos and Images
Image Layout
Colors
Shadows
Opacity
Grouping Shapes
Bulleted and Numbered Lists
Compatibility and Sharing
Printing Booklets
Commercial Printing
Auto Save
Help Pages