If your mouth isn’t hanging open, read that last part again, because this is the heart of what makes Vellum so great. Look closely at the screenshot, because it displays what I feel like is Vellum’s most attractive feature, the ability to see IN REAL TIME what your book will look like on an iPad, iPhone, Kindle Paperwhite, or Nook Simple Touch. This is where you work on the innards of your book, all the words you hope and pray people read. Next, let’s check out the “Contents” page. (Vellum has plenty of tutorials and screenshots, but I’m including some of my own since I know exactly how they were created.) Then dump it into Vellum and get rocking! You’ll have to consult their website for all the specifics, but the quickest way is to have a page break before every chapter/section, and to center all your chapter/section headings. I’ll start by saying that it helps to have a Word doc with some minimal (minimal!!) formatting before importing it into Vellum. (Which always gets me in trouble when I try to build anything from IKEA!) I’m sure I should have spent a few more minutes watching and reading the Vellum tutorials, but I’m more of a “get my hands dirty” kind of guy. There’s a sophisticated slickness to the interface that seemed like a perfect fit with my MacBook Air. In more than a few words, it works nearly flawlessly, and in a way that can only best be described as “Apple-ish”. And if you need to make changes, or switch covers, or fix mistakes, instead of bothering your busy formatting person, you can “regenerate” new files yourself. (The price per book gets lower if you purchase more credits at once, 3 books for $99.99, 5 for $149.99, etc.) If 50 bucks sounds expensive, remember that you’d easily pay that (and much more) to get it professionally formatted by someone else. (Vellum uses in-app purchasing, a smart move, and something that keeps games like “Candy Crush” on the top-grossing charts.) Once you finish formatting your book, it costs $49.99 to kick out the ready-to-upload files for iBooks, Kindle, and Nook. But before you jump up and down with excitement, keep in mind that it’s only free until you “generate” an ebook. ![]() Over the past few years, I’d seen the music industry transformed by products that put the power in the hands of creators, and Vellum promised a similar shift for authors. But despite my skepticism, I was anxious to try it. According to Vellum’s creators, Brad West and Brad Andalman, the app made the process of formatting an ebook easy.įormatting easy? That was an oxymoron if I’d ever heard one. On December 12th, a day before my birthday, I spotted an article on DBW about a brand new Mac OSX application called Vellum. My stories were like super-charged engines in need of race car bodies in order to get out on the track. ![]() Though all the stories were fully edited, the only thing I possessed were basic Word docs. I was desperately trying to re-release my first two novels, as well as a brand new short story, as ebooks in time for Christmas.
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