Quick Start Guide

Welcome to Atticus! This introductory tutorial will show you how to get started with Atticus, including installing the app to your computer, laptop, or mobile device. 

Create Your Account

Once you’ve purchased Atticus, you’ll receive an email to create your account. If you don’t see it right away, try doing a search of your entire inbox, including folders like promotions, spam, and junk, for the subject line: Create Your Atticus Account, or the from email hello@atticus.io.

Click the button that says Get Started with Atticus and it’ll open up in your default browser. Now you can set up your password. Your login will always be your email address. 

Once that’s done, you’ll redirect to the main Atticus dashboard. 

You can use Atticus on any web browser of your choice by logging into app.atticus.io from any device that is convenient to you at the time. 

If you plan on moving between devices, it’s important to remember to fully log out of Atticus on one device before logging in on your next device. This will force sync all your hard work and make sure it’s ready to go on your next device. 

Install App

If you find working in a browser too distracting, 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, and we highly recommend using Chrome if possible.

If you’re logged into Atticus, in the top right, you’ll see an Install button. Click this to install and open the app instantly. Every device is different, and depending on your operating system, browser, and extensions, if this button is not working, you can also look to the browser bar to find a similar icon. It will prompt you to Install Atticus and, again, open up the app automatically. 

If you are on a Mac, you may want to move the file from your Chrome Apps folder to your Applications folder.

On most Windows and Mac devices, you can also right click on the icon in your taskbar when the app is running to pin it for easy access in the future. 

Atticus Home Dashboard

Your Home Dashboard will be simple to start, but will eventually fill up with any books you’ve created or uploaded, with the most recently worked on book showing up first. You can start a new book from scratch, or upload a word document here. 

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

If you click Edit Detail, you can add a book cover by uploading your custom eBook cover artwork, give it a subtitle, and more. When you’re done, click save. 

You can organize your dashboard by recently update, projects, author, or version – all details you set according to your needs and preferences.

Writing in Atticus

When you’re ready to work on a book, click on the title or cover from your dashboard. This will bring you straight to the writing page where you can dive into writing or adding to your manuscript.

You can open the More Tools menu to set your Writing preferences and any goals you’d like to track. 

Also in this menu, you’ll find the Find and Replace feature, which helps you locate and replace content anywhere in the book you’re working on.

While writing, you can use the main toolbar to adjust your styles as you would in any other word processing program. You can also boost your productivity with some timed writing sprints.

If you’d like to see the preview while you write, you can click on the Formatting tab, and click on Content over in the left panel. 

You’ll now see your navigation panel on the left, your work on the center of the page, and a preview of what the chapter looks like on the right. 

You can add new chapters by clicking “add chapter” or you can add front matter, or back matter by clicking on the three dots and selecting what page type you want. You can also drag and drop your chapters anywhere they need to be. 

As we’ve mentioned previously, we don’t recommend copy and pasting content from other programs into Atticus. If you have your book created and you find you want to import additional content, instead of copy/pasting, you can Import Chapters. This is very handy for front or back matter pages that you may have saved separately from your main manuscript, or teaser chapters for future books. 

You can also create Master Pages of often used pages such as your Also By page inside Atticus. This will allow you to quickly add it to any book in your account as needed. If you have to make changes to a template, you can choose to have the change affect only that individual use of the page, or you can click to Apply Change to All Books Using This Master Page. This makes updating your Also By in all your previous books an absolute breeze!

Formatting in Atticus

Once you’re finished writing and editing, you can click on Formatting and Theme to start choosing your Formatting preferences.

You can start from scratch or choose one of the Atticus designed themes and customize to your liking.

You can customize and save all the elements, including:

• Chapter Heading Settings
• Paragraph Settings
• Scene Break Settings
• Note Settings
• Print Settings
• Advanced Settings

We have a complete step-by-step tutorial to help you design a unique theme of your own, along with many other helpful tutorials to help you master all the features Atticus offers.

Export Publish Ready Files

When you’re ready to export your fully formatted book, you can choose from ePub or PDF underneath the Previewer in the Formatting tab. The files Atticus exports are ready to publish using any major publisher, including KDP and IngramSpark. 

If you’d like a back up copy or a version of your manuscript to share with editors, you can also export to .docx. Atticus is both a writing and formatting program, so the special features you add to the design elements of your book will not be recognized by Word, but all the important content and chapter breaks, etc will be exactly where you need them to be. 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. 

At any time you can click Home to go back to your home page. If you press the Save button from here, it will force sync your entire account and the .json file downloaded will be a back up of all your books currently saved to Atticus. Logging out of Atticus completely will also automatically back up your entire account. 

Create a Box Set

If you have formatted multiple books in Atticus and you would like to combine them into a Box Set, it’s now an incredibly quick and easy process. 

From your Home dashboard, click New Boxset

Select the books from your account that you would like included, making sure to click in the order you would like them to appear in your box set. 

Click Next and Enter the details for your new box set. Atticus will then compile all selected books into a single file for you.

Atticus will automatically generate Front Matter for the box set as a whole, but if you click the title of an individual book from the left navigation panel, you will find each book also has front matter, including an individual title page, copyright page, and Table of Contents. You are welcome to keep or remove these details for each book as suits your box set needs. 

You can now set your theme for the entire box set, make any other small adjustments and export the file into a single PDF or ePub, ready for publishing.

Support and Troubleshooting

If you ever open Atticus and find yourself facing a blank screen, this means your version needs a bit of a refresher. It’s easy to remedy by simply doing a Hard Refresh. 

On most Windows machines, you’ll want to press CTRL SHIFT R. For Mac devices, it would be CMD SHIFT R.

For more tutorials and instructions, we have a variety of helpful resources to choose from, depending on your learning style preferences. 

We also have a YouTube channel and Facebook community with further live demos and community interaction. 

On behalf of the entire Atticus team, we welcome you and wish you all the best of success with your writing, formatting and, of course, publishing!