atticus.ioReviews of atticus.io

Atticus is a genuinely good and easy-to-use tool. The interface is intuitive, the output looks professional, and communication with the support team via email was always friendly, responsive, and pleasant. Unfortunately, there is one critical issue for my use case: the PDFs generated by Atticus are processed in such a way that they no longer contain machine-readable or even copyable text. This makes them unsuitable for further conversion into an eBook. My publisher does not accept EPUB files and only works with PDFs. As a result, I am forced to switch to a different tool, even though I would otherwise be very happy with Atticus. What makes this especially disappointing is that the issue could likely be solved with a simple export option, allowing users to choose between maximum compression and a text-based PDF. Unfortunately, Atticus showed no willingness to acknowledge the problem or provide a solution. In its current form, the software is simply unusable for my publishing workflow, and the money I spent on it was effectively wasted. That is a real shame, because without this issue I would have been happy to recommend the product.

This is, quite possibly, the worst platform experience I have ever had. It's slow and constantly freezes or glitches, so be ready to do a lot of waiting and ctrl+shift+R to hard reload the page. Like, every single time I logged in, before I even did anything, I had to hard refresh because I would log in and the screen would just go white. The program cannot handle images; you'll have more luck adding images to a Microsoft Word document than adding them to a project on Atticus (and given how Word handles image insertion, that's saying something). Constant pop-up windows that have no scroll bar, so you have to tab through to the bottom button, and heaven forbid you hit it one too many times and have to start over. They have multiple settings set to sliders with no option to just type a size in, so good luck picking a rounded number of anything; you'll either have .99 or 1.01 unless you sit there and move the slider back and forth until you get it right. Incorrect measurements; for example Atticus showed my info page all fitting on one 'page' on an Kindle Fire, but when I used Amazon's tool to preview the ebook on a Kindle fire, it was on two pages. This also explains why, when I first submitted my manuscript for print back in 2024, Amazon told me my margins were incorrect despite me using Atticus to set them to exactly what Amazon required. At the time, I thought it was Amazon's fault, but now I know better. I occasionally get updates from them saying things like, 'We introduce a dark mode!' and I half wanted to send a message to them saying, "How about you make it so your website functions and THEN start working on aesthetics?" I'm sure this review seems harsh, maybe unreasonably so, but I literally cannot think of a single feature on this website I liked. I used Framemaker for my last book, and I will be using it for all my books going forward. If I could get my money back from Atticus, I would, but it's been way too long now.

Atticus was honestly my worst purchase as a writer. Formatting is impossible (God help you if you need to insert/move an image), simple things like indentations and quotes are unnecessarily complicated, limited fonts unless you go download more, slow and laggy, constantly needing to do hard refreshes, you can't toggle between panes from text input to formatting, and apparently it's a known problem that if you use them to make an epub or pdf, text-to-speech readers can't read the text. Imagine my surprise when my sister text me saying, "Why can't I listen to your book?? It sounds like it's having a stroke!!" Waste of money, would not reccomend to anyone. Get yourself a Framemaker subscription, master Microsoft Word, or just learn HTML formatting basics and do it yourself. But don't use this very expensive piece of junk. (Note: I posted my day of experience as far back as I could go, but it actually started before that when I published my first book in 2024 and continued until I tried to publish my second book late last year. I eventually had to reformat the book in Framemaker myself and rerelease it that way in early 2026.)

Initially I had a few minor complaints. It was a little glitchy. A few things I thought would be helpful weren't available. Small things I could live with. Then the real issues started. The cursor would randomly jump around. I'd be typing and all of a sudden the cursor is three lines up, randomly in the middle of a different sentence. I reached out to support and they said to refresh. Again, I learned to live with it. Refreshing constantly. It just became a part of the gig. And then I woke up with entire chapters missing. Just gone. I reached out again. They were able to restore some of it, but not all of it. Thankfully, it was in a doc I had uploaded from Google Docs and not one of the ones I started on Atticus. If it had been, I would have been SOL. I've already paid for it, so I'll use it for formatting. But I would NOT trust this site to write on at all. If you do, export after every single session.

I bought it and never got the installation link. Now im trying to get a refund.

The Atticus platform is problematic, consistently displaying "syncing" errors and crashing repeatedly, making it impossible to work and resulting in a terrible user experience. It's also unresponsive and causes a significant waste of time. The contrast with Vellum, which has never presented such issues, is quite stark. These are fundamental performance and usability issues that demand immediate attention.

I recently wrote a review explaining the flaws I found using this product. Potential crashing and loss of your book using "copy and Paste" I have discovered a new, more insidious issue. The software will randomly misspell a word after importing a word document. It took "July 12" and made it "Shelly 12th". It took "Original" and made it "oriMarilouI" Both Shelly and Marilou are characters in the book. These misspellings occurred AFTER proofreading . They occurred when the software exported the document for PUBLICATION! My experience with this software has been horrible. Formatting issues with MS word, import/export issues, random misspellings, No copy and paste. Potential unrecoverable data loss. I am an ex-software developer. I would never release this product in it's current condition. I make this review to help the developers not complain.

Fix the bugs! Look on reddit there are tons of bugs listed 5 months ago you didn't even fixed them. Now you sound like a cheap company. When i export my book, the font is changing... so buggy and slow to count the number of pages