Vellum book formatting
This is not something you can easily do yourself, as evidenced by the fact that interior designers charge a lot of money for their work. That’s a big mistake, and it’s why we recommend hiring a professional to design your book’s interior as well as the cover. Readers might not know why it looks unprofessional, but their gut instinct will tell them something’s off as soon as they open the book. If any of these decisions aren’t cohesive with the rest of the design, your book won’t look good-and it won’t represent you the way you want it to. Interior book designers make a LOT of artistic decisions, like: This may not seem obvious, so let me explain. Book covers look artistic.īut designing the inside of a book takes a lot of work too. The design effort that goes into a book cover is pretty obvious. I think there are some other ones that irked me, but that's the most recent.If you want your book to look professional, it needs to look great inside and out. The best science fiction stories with thought-provoking twists on /2/the… LilahSturges Definitely GLOW. Review: Vellum, the ebook generator for Mac with added prettiness If you’re interested in learning more about Vellum, here are some links to folks who are savvier regarding the program than I am (and have images to share *g*):
If you found this blog post helpful, perhaps you would be interested in the book, Starting Out as an Indie Author! You can learn more here. (You can read about how I format for Print on Demand here.) And if they ever add a print function, as they claim to be thinking about, that would be a huge time-saver. But at least in future, my newly published ebooks will look more professional.
Unfortunately, Amazon doesn’t seem to update the look inside feature with the newer, prettier e-book format, so one of the advantages I had hoped for is gone. I intend to switch over anyway, though, gradually replacing the files for all the books I have already published. I have only uploaded one book formatted with it so far, and I had some problems with the file for Kobo, so I am definitely not the expert. You can either pay $29.99 per title, $99.99 for ten titles, or get an unlimited license for $199.99. You don’t have to pay until you generate your first book. Once you have chosen a style, the final formatting recognizes simple scene breaks like *** and transforms them into into the ornamental break associated with your choice. There are several styles to choose from, designed to suit different genres. It does involve some setting up for the various retailers, but once that is taken care of, you can compile the e-books for all the stores where you sell your books at once. And if you use an aggregator like Draft2Digital or Smashwords, it also has a “generic” epub option. Not only does it create very professional looking e-books, it will generate different e-books for a number of stores simultaneously (iBooks, Kindle, Kobo, Nook, Google Play), so you don’t have to do that yourself. I haven’t used Vellum a lot yet, but it seems to be fairly straightforward, with a minimal learning curve (except for the fact that it is on a Mac). If only it acted a little more like a PC … ? I would much rather carry it around than some designer handbag. And it really is amazingly lovely, I have to admit - even though I’m not a Mac fan. So I finally broke down again and bought a refurbished sleek and shiny little MacBook Air on sale. Oh joy, I would never have to use a Mac again!įast forward almost a decade - and me drooling over the beautiful e-books of some of my colleagues created using Vellum. I have been a devoted Scrivener user ever since - and was incredibly relieved when Literature and Latte finally brought out a version of Scrivener for Windows. Yes, Apple makes pretty hardware, but it is outrageously expensive and somehow lives almost on reputation alone, which I find mildly baffling.īut - I broke down and bought my first MacBook back in the day when Scrivener was only available on the Mac. I am a PC user - pedestrian, mundane, and mostly immune to the Apple Cult.
I have a new program for that now: Vellum. But once Scrivener added epub export to its many wonderful writing tools, that is what I have been using as my default e-book formatting program. Okay, not ever since - my very first experimental attempts were uploading Word docs to Amazon and Smashwords, and they were resounding failures.
Ever since I started going indie and publishing books on my own rather than through a traditional publisher, I have been using Scrivener to create the epub and mobi files required by most retailers.