The Easy Way to Create Beautiful Ebooks and Reports
A Side-by-Side Comparison and Review of Designrr and Sqribble
Introduction
Hi, my name is Martin Avis, from https://kickstartnewsletter.com
One of the mainstays of my business is producing ebooks and special reports, either to sell or to give away free to my subscribers.
Over the last 20 years, I must have produced hundreds!
Back in the day, I created my books on an old version of Word. Later I used OpenOffice and LibreOffice. More recently I find Google Docs is my go-to writing program of choice.
But here’s the problem. I am a writer, not a designer.
I have always felt that the books and reports I produce look a bit amateurish.
Content great, but layout? Less so.
Another problem has been consistency.
Although I try to use a style sheet to make sure I use the same fonts and other stylistic elements, the truth is that I more often than not forget to use it. The result is that my books didn’t really have much in the way of a consistent look and feel.
I could, of course, hire a professional to lay it out beautifully. But the fees can be very steep.
Here are two examples I just picked at random from Fiverr:
At today’s exchange rate, those are $308 and $710 respectively.
Note that they are not even for full books - just 3500 words and 15 pages!
Getting covers designed on Fiverr adds another £25 to £60 to the cost.
At the moment I am producing at least one book or report each week - and they are rarely that small! One of my latest reports, The Millionaire Mentality, is 6,220 words over 29 pages. So I would expect the Fiverr prices to be almost double those quoted.
While I can accept that a person writing their one and only masterpiece might want it professionally designed as a one-off, it wouldn’t be practical for me to do that on the scale I write them - especially for books and reports I plan to give away for free.
There is a top-end software called Adobe InDesign, which can produce stunning layouts, it is expensive - ranging from £19.97 per month (if you sign up for an annual plan) or £30,34 per month if you pay month by month. It also has a rather too steep learning curve for my poor old brain to cope with. As I said, I’m a writer, not a designer.
There must be a more affordable way!
The long and the short of it is that if you want to write ebooks, reports either for sale, bonuses, subscriber gifts, or as lead magnets, your choices for getting them to look good, affordably, are rather limited.
Especially if, like me, you’d rather be writing than spending agonizing amounts of time trying to make them look nice.
The reason for this comparison review
Back in 2016, I heard about a new ebook design tool called Designrr.
It looked good on the sale page, and the price for the basic version was very reasonable, so I bought it.
What I got was a WYSIWYG - what you see is what you get - design tool that lets you layout your existing text - either into pre-made professional templates or onto a blank canvas.
It was very similar to the drag-and-drop page layout tools that make websites.
I liked it, but there weren’t many templates, and frankly, they seemed a bit basic.
A few bugs and limitations made my early experience of using it rather frustrating.
It was possible to create nice looking books and reports with Designrr, but - for me - it all took a bit too long. I felt that it was a good idea, but not quite ready for work.
So, for the last few years, it has sat unused while I continued on with Google Docs, LibreOffice, and Canva to make the cover art.
Things changed in early 2020.
A new kid on the block
Realizing that I was writing more, I knew that I needed to come up with a better plan to make decent looking designs. So I asked around and people started mentioning a new program, called Sqribble, that turns your documents into nicely designed ebooks. It sounded very similar to Designrr and although none of the people who suggested I look at it had actual hands-on experience, there was beginning to be a bit of a buzz around the new kid on the block.
At the end of February 2020, I bought it to test it out.
What I found was a program - both Designrr and Sqribble are accessed online, so both work on either Mac or PC - that seemed, on the surface to be very similar to what I remembered of Designrr.
At the same time, I went back to my Designrr login and found, to my delight, that four years on it has benefitted from a lot more development.
Now, it turned out, is a very good time to compare both programs side-by-side.
Price Comparison
The basic version of Designrr is shown as $29 per month, but I have a link (below) that brings the price right down to a one-off $27 for a lifetime license.
Sqribble claims to be $197, reduced to $67, but using the coupon code ‘CINDERELLA’ on the payment page reduces that to $23.43 ($28.14 if you are in the UK because VAT is added)
So the basic version prices are very similar.
Both products have upsells, which add extra functionality, but for the purposes of this comparison review, I am looking at the basic versions only.
Besides, that is what I own and I can't comment on the upsells if I haven't used them.
The Basic Models
These are the claimed features - taken from the sales pages - of each program.
Broadly they are similar, but there are a few significant differences.
- Out of the box, Designrr has almost twice as many professionally designed templates.
- Designrr also offers over three times as many Google Fonts.
- Designrr says you can create unlimited eBooks, while Sqribble only says ‘Unlimited pages’.
*After having created three short (under 20 pages) reports, Sqribble told me that my ‘disk’ was 5% full. Although there is no mention of limited storage space on the sales page, I assume that 50-60 such small reports would be the maximum. While I guess you could always delete some to make more room, it seems to me that this should be mentioned upfront. I have not found any such limitation in Designrr.
- Both programs say you can import from a URL. In practice, this means you can input the URL of a blog or web page and import all the text and images from that page straight into an eBook.
*In Designrr it worked flawlessly, but in Sqribble, every attempt I made - using several different URLs - resulted in an error page and a message that Sqribble had timed out. See the second video, below.
5. Finally, Designrr can import from Google Docs and from Facebook, whereas Sqribble can’t do either as yet.
Upsells
For many people who just want to import a Word document or text file and make it into a decent looking PDF book, the basic versions are more than enough. You absolutely don’t need the upgrades.
However, both systems do offer enhanced features so I will briefly tell you about them.
Although you are given the impression, when you first buy the basic version, that the upsells may not be available later, or that they may be more expensive, you can safely ignore this.
Both Designrr and Sqribble offer the ‘upgrades’ within the main program and you can add them on, if you find you need them, at any time.
Designrr has two upgrade paths - the PRO version at $97 annually or the PREMIUM version at $297 per year.
The PRO version is, in my opinion, best suited for writers like me who create a lot of ebooks and reports but don’t need some of the more esoteric features that are included in the PREMIUM upgrade.
You get twice as many templates and cover designs as well as a very useful 3D Cover design tool. You also get the option to import from a PDF as well as several extra export options that are very handy if you are a Kindle (or other ebook platforms) publisher.
Sqribble’s upgrades are sold as separate add-ons.
The first, Sqribble PRO adds some extra templates and access to a huge package of (quite poor) PLR articles for a one-off $87. Among the list of claimed features is ‘Unlimited Storage’, which does suggest that the basic model is limited.
The second upgrade is Sqribble Fantasia 3D, which, as its name suggests, is a 3D Cover generator. It also turns your ebooks into Flipbooks. It weighs in at $77.
Finally, there is a monthly club that gives you extra templates every month. It is a one-time $47.
So, in order to upgrade them to broadly the same level, Designrr works out at $97 per year, while Sqribble is a one-time cost of $211.
Support
I have contacted the Designrr support desk twice since I bought it - once to get details of their affiliate program and the second time to ask a question about importing text files.
Both times I got a helpful response very fast. The first one, in July 2016, took 8 minutes, and the second, in February 2020, took 6 minutes.
I have only contacted Sqribble support once - due to the ‘Import from a URL’ function not working. That was 72 hours ago and I am still waiting. I’ll update this post if and when I hear back from them.
What surprised me on the Sqribble helpdesk page was that there were a few ‘previous questions’ listed, all showing that they were more than 2 years old. It was surprising because as far as I know, Sqribble only launched 18 months ago, and so there should not be 2-year-old questions!
Hands-on Demonstrations
Two other things that I didn’t mention in the video - and which put Designrr was ahead of Sqribble in usability - are an autosave feature and an undo button! Designrr has both, Sqribble has neither.
Training
Sqribble has a 31-minute video in their training area that talks through all the main features. It does cover pretty much everything, but I found it confusing and hard to remember later which feature was explained at which point in the video.
Designrr has a more comprehensive help section with individual tutorials that are very useful.
However, although at times I felt quite lost in Sqribble, Designrr is so easy to use that I have never had a need to resort to the help center ... yet!
Conclusion
I think it is clear from the video that Designrr has benefitted greatly from its 4 years of development. Paul Clifford, the man behind it has listened to what users have said and has consistently added new features as well as made some of the existing ones easier to use.
The result is that Designrr is now a real pleasure to use. Everything behaves as you would expect and the flexibility of design it allows is virtually infinite!
On the other hand, Sqribble looks and feels like a cheap copy of Designrr. It doesn’t work very well, despite the massive claims on its sales page and a lot of the things that look easy in their tutorial video were not in practice.
Thanks for watching - and now here is your free ebook
The Millionaire Mentality is a 33-page book that explore the reasons why some people get rich, while other just get by. There is definitely a secret way of thinking that successful and rich people adopt that puts them at a huge advantage.
Written in Google Docs and with pictures supplied by Pixabay, The Millionaire Mentality was then completely laid out and designed in the basic version of Designrr.
See for yourself how professional design can be at your fingertips - even if you don't have an artistic bone in your body!