Tracy Atkins
Founder, author and book designer. Tracy wrote and sold his first software at fifteen, spent two decades in technology, and has published three books of his own. He still reads the review copy of every interior Cantos delivers.
About us
We help authors cross the finish line.
BookDesignerAI comes from the team behind BookDesignTemplates.com, which has spent fifteen years making self-published books look like books for authors around the world. Cantos, our designer, now does that work in hours, with a craftsman’s care, in six languages.
More than 70,000 authors have trusted our designs. More than 300,000 books have gone to print with our work inside them.
A note from Tracy
I started writing my first novel in 2011 and published it the next year. When it came time to turn the manuscript into a book, I found the part nobody warns you about: a finished story is not a finished book. The margins, the running heads, the way a chapter opens, the way a line of dialogue sits on the page. Readers never notice any of it when it is right, and they cannot stop noticing when it is wrong.
That is why, that same year, I began working with the book designer Joel Friedlander of San Rafael, California, on the templates that became BookDesignTemplates.com. First-time authors kept telling us the same thing: I wrote the book, but I have no idea how to make it look like a real one. So we gave them professionally designed templates and a way to do the work themselves in the word processor they already owned. Joel passed away in 2021. The care he put into every page is still the standard we hold ourselves to.
BookDesignerAI is the next step on that road. Cantos is not a gimmick that spits out something for you to fix. It is a book designer we trained on everything we learned in fifteen years, and it reads every word you wrote before it sets a single page. You upload a manuscript. You get back a book that looks made, not generated. You see the whole thing before you pay a cent.
And your words stay yours. We claim no copyright on your book. We never use your manuscript to train anything. We built this for authors, by people who have spent their lives around books.
You bring the story. We help you cross the finish line.
Tracy Atkins Founder, BookDesignerAI and BookDesignTemplates.com. Author of Aeternum Ray, The Silicon Vow and Daimon.
What we believe
A book should look made, not generated.
Cantos was trained by book designers on real books. It follows the same rules a human designer follows, and it is measured on every build against the standard a printer and a reader expect.
See it before you pay for it.
Every author gets a complete proof copy of their book for free. Payment releases the print-ready files. Nobody should buy a book design on faith.
The story is the author’s, always.
No copyright claims, no training on your manuscript, no selling or sharing it. You can delete your files and your account at any time, permanently.
Fifteen years, in short
- 2011
Tracy begins writing and designing books, and starts working with Joel Friedlander in San Rafael, California, on a new kind of book template.
- 2012
Tracy publishes Aeternum Ray, the novel that taught him what a finished manuscript still needs.
- 2013
BookDesignTemplates.com opens with a promise: a professional book interior any author can finish in Word, Pages or LibreOffice. Authors in dozens of countries take it up.
- 2015
A distribution agreement with Ingram Content Group puts our designs in front of authors publishing everywhere in the world.
- 2026
BookDesignerAI launches. Cantos designs the interior, the cover and the marketing kit, copyedits the manuscript, and translates the finished book.
- 2026
Six languages. Cantos builds books in English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese and Italian, each with its own typographic conventions.
Who does the work
Cantos
Our book designer. Cantos reads your whole manuscript, decides its structure, sets it in one of twenty foundation designs, checks its own work, and asks you when it is unsure. It designs covers, writes the marketing kit, copyedits in six languages and translates finished books.
Stanza
Our help desk. Stanza knows your project, your files and your receipts, answers in English, Spanish, French or German, and hands anything it cannot fix to a person.
Six languages in the book, four on the screen
Cantos lays out, copyedits, covers and translates books in these languages, with the dialect you choose.
- EnglishUnited States
- SpanishMexico, Spain, neutral Latin American
- FrenchFrance, Louisiana Cajun
- GermanGermany, Austria, Switzerland
- PortugueseBrazil, Portugal
- ItalianItaly
The app, our emails and Stanza speak four languages today: English, Spanish, French and German. An author writing in Portuguese or Italian uses the app in one of those four, and gets a book entirely in their own.
Every finished book can be translated into any of the other five as a separate edition, with its own cover and its own marketing kit.
What we will never do
- Claim any rights to your book. It is yours before, during and after.
- Use your manuscript to train an AI, or let anyone else.
- Make you pay before you have seen the whole book.
- Hide what Cantos did. Every book ships with a plain-language receipt of every change it made to your manuscript.
- Pretend a machine is a person. Cantos is a tool. The hard, beautiful, human part is writing the book, and that part is yours.
See your book before you decide.
Upload your manuscript and Cantos will design the whole thing, free. Pay only if you love it.