Also on Mac, and cheaper, I've known people who liked Mellel, but I've never tried it: https://www.mellel.com NOTE TO OP: I looked back at the thread and see you aren't on MacOS. Sorry about that--will leave the links up in case other people find them useful.
tbh indesign is the industry standard... and you can get a free trial which is long enough to do one book... if you're doing lots of books $29.99/£19.99 a month is a reasonable cost to set against the income If you don't want to do that Affinity is a one off cost of rrp 49.99 (currently half that)
I just now experimented with this, Scribus does import .docx files. You have to left click on the text frame, and then click "Content". From there, you just click "Get Text", and choose your docx file: Scribus will import it for you. I have version 1.5.5.
That's the procedure I use, but I definitely don't have the option to import from .docx. I'm on version 1.4.8, which I downloaded and installed in mid-January. Are you by chance on a Mac? Maybe the Windows version hasn't caught up yet.
Aha. Version 1.4.8 is the latest "stable" version. the 1.5.x series is considered to be developemental, and not guaranteed to be stable. I don't do developmental versions -- I stick to the stable releases.
I use Linux myself. So far, Scribus works well for me, I've had no issues at all with it. I had no idea it was a development version, it certainly never gave me any problems, which I'm happy for.
William Gallagher, Dr. Who radio script writer and gentleman raconteur, has a Youtube channel called 58 Keys. He recently released a three part series on creating ebooks - . The first installment covers Apple Pages, the second goes through Vellum, and the third installment covers InDesign and Affinity Publisher. I use Mellel and I like it. Your mileage may vary. For epub, you get control over the spine. What I like about that, assuming I ever actually write an ebook, is that I can use a powerful editor that outputs to epub. Changes I make all go in one place, not format changes in Vellum that may not get replicated back in the source word processing file for later exports to Vellum. There are certain Mellel concepts that seem confusing on first glance. For instance, the table of contents is set by things called auto-flows, not header styles. It's cool, just go with it. An auto-flow lets you control boilerplate text. If your first chapter is titled "A Dark And Stormy Night," you can have that appear in the MS as "Chapter 1: A Dark and Stormy Night," and you separately control how it appears in the generated table of contents. So, you define your styles, call some of them headers if you want, and then define your auto-flows using styles. That's kind of the Mellel way. Features don't have hidden side effects. Gallagher is a hoot. I always look forward to his videos.
Yes, Scribus does that. The problem with Scribus is long books. You cannot delete or insert a page, for instance, without ruining your entire work. They tell you that you must plan it all beforehand. That’s nuts when you’re talking about a 300 page novel. What if you forgot to add a “thank you” page, or decided to add it later? I almost lost my mind trying to figure out how to insert a page inside a chapter only to discover that it isn’t possible. I couldn’t believe such a thing. If any of you know how to do it, please point me to the link.
I didnt like scribus for a number of reasons (mostly that i'm trained on indesign and after driving a Porsche you don't want to drive a pinto) but i don't remember that being a problem - don't you just go to Page/Insert to display the insert page dialogue then select how many pages you want to insert and after which page number ?
It does have an "Insert Page" function. The problem is that the function is dumb. If you have two pages that each have a single block of text, and they're linked -- if you insert a oage between them it wreaks havoc on the linking.
What @SapereAude said. You're thinking of Indesign, @big soft moose. It's like you said, after driving a Porsche... I searched online high and low how to insert and delete pages inside a chapter in Scribus until I came upon this forum for Scribus experts where someone posed this situation, don't know if real or example: a school year book. Imagine 300 pages already made, one page for each student in alphabetical order. Image a last minute transferred student called Anne. How do you insert it without ruining your work, was the question. That's when a Scribus expert admitted, just like was told SapereAude about Publish-iT, that Scribus isn't designed for long books. Exactly the same argument. So maybe the solution, if you really have to use Scribus, is to make each page of the school year book a different document, and aggregate them all up in the end. I thought this was ridiculous and never looked back. Let alone now that I've driven the Porsche. I was a bit shocked, to be honest. Any decent text processor must have the ability to insert and delete pages at will and make the text flow accordingly. So I thought it was surely my fault, I was missing something. Turns out I wasn't. It would be nice if Sribus developers would address this. Maybe I'd give it another try. Until then, expensive Indesign is the way to go if you want to look professional. (But not for ebooks, @SapereAude. For ebooks I recommend free and easy Calibre.)
Agreed on publishing software for ebooks. Unnecessary. Regarding InDesign, the one-time $25 Affinity Publisher looks nice. I believe a lot of layout formerly done in InDesign has moved to Publisher. The price isn't bad, either. I got Publisher, Photo, and Designer from Affinity. I've only poked at Designer, but Photo and Publisher are really easy to use.
I think I mentioned previously that I have purchased Affinity Publisher and Designer. (I skipped Affinity Photo because I already have multiple photo editors.) I haven't used it yet because I'm still busy trying to write the next book. First things first, and all that ... FWIW, I somewhere came across a link to an affordable book on using Scribus. I don't know if I'll ever go back and try it again but, in case I do, I bought a copy of the book. It's on Amazon (and it appears to be a product of Amazon KDP print-on-demand). The title is Creating Print On Demand Interiors and Covers Using Scribus 1.4.1 by D. J. Mills. I've seen other books on Scribus selling for $50; this one sells for $12.99. It's pretty basic, but it covers about everything you need to know to get up and running with Scribus. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1393479898/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
