I'm a book editor. For years, I watched the same thing happen on nearly every non-fiction project I worked on.
The writing would go well. The developmental edit would go well. The copyedit would go well. And then the book would hit formatting, and the timeline I'd promised the author would start to slip.
It wasn't anyone's fault, exactly. Non-fiction formatting is genuinely hard. Tables don't cooperate. Images don't stay where you put them. Kindle and print need different things. And the real killer: any meaningful edit after formatting meant the formatter had to redo significant chunks of work.
So either the author stopped editing (bad for the book), or the launch date moved (bad for everyone), or we crunched the end of the project into something tight and stressful that didn't need to be tight and stressful.
I kept thinking: this shouldn't be the part that breaks. The writing is the hard part. The editing is the hard part. The formatting should be a button.
So I built the button.
bookset is the tool I wish I'd had on every non-fiction book I ever worked on. It's designed specifically for the stuff that actually trips non-fiction projects up — tables, figures, captions, sidebars, hierarchy — and it's designed so that a late-stage edit doesn't blow up your timeline. Upload the new version, regenerate, done.
If you're a self-publishing author, an editor, or a small publisher who has lived the formatting-timeline problem, this is for you. I built it because I needed it. I hope it gives you back the weeks it's given me.
— Laura Kluz