What software did you write your book in? Did you format the book yourself or did someone else do that? If it was outsourced, who did it and how did you find them?

I’ve written books in Microsoft Word, Apple Pages, and Google Docs. The software one uses to write is, by and large, completely irrelevant.

If you are planning to submit to a publisher, you’ll need to be able to export to a Word file, but fortunately, just about everything on the market (even Google Docs) can do that.

There are dedicated book-writing apps out there, Scrivener being the most popular, but they aren’t necessary. In fact, I found Scrivener to be a hot mess, and useless for collaborative writing.

I have formatted some books, both for myself and for others, and also had my books formatted by others.

If you’re formatting a book for professional publication, there’s really only one serious choice: Adobe Indesign. (I hear there’s still a few stragglers clutching QuarkXPress in ancient, bony hands, hissing “Adobe will never rule me!” in a dry cackle, but I’ve not laid eyes on one myself in a donkey’s age.) Back when I did prepress and design for a living, I used QuarkXPress, InDesign, and on one regrettable instance Frame Maker, though like Quark and the telegraph, FrameMaker has been discarded in the dustbin of history.

This is what an InDesign layout looks like:

In cases where I haven’t done the page layout myself, the person who did was found by my publisher.