I just used Vellum for the first time to prepare files to upload on KDP, Amazon’s e-book platform. I’ve dragged my feet on doing this for over a year. Instead I’ve resorted to my past, lazy use of uploading Word files.
Author Christiana Miller mentioned Vellum to me last year. “It’s easy,” she said. “Even for people who aren’t Tech geeks. It’s intuitive. It allows you to add flair and fanciness to an otherwise plain looking manscript.” I’m paraphrasing.
But like a lot of people, and a lot of writers, I was intimidated by the process. It would be hard, I thought. I’d become overwhelmed and do something wrong and it would look lousy. And anyway, uploading from a Word doc was fine so why mess with it?
Well, one reason is a table of contents. I released a short story collection last month and there isn’t a table contents. In the print version I have one, because Shadowridge Press is good with print layout. But not in my digital version that I’m responsible for.
Today finally, when I’d put off uploading my Word doc long enough for The Rainbox, I decided to give Vellum a shot. OMG, it’s AWESOME!!!!! Why did I wait so long?
This is how I felt when I finally started eating avocados, or using floss picks, or doing Yoga.
For one thing, it’s free until you actually need to upload your book to Kindle or any of the other platforms. For another, you can VERY EASILY do neat things like restyle your section breaks instead of using the manual *** I had before. You can select to have the first letter in each chapter be a big pretty CAPITAL letter…And there’s a table of contents, and it puts everything where it’s supposed to go. And organizes things like Acknowledgements. You can use their headings or make your own.
I am not a Tech person but it was a breeze. The only issue I had when I dragged and dropped my Word doc into the program (that was easy) was that there were about 50 chapters. In real life there are 9. I quickly figured out how to merge chapters (highlighted the ones I needed with CTRL+Shift and clicked “merge chapters.”) Then I read through and added in the section breaks which the program had mistaken for chapter breaks.
Scrolling through and viewing the document in the program allowed me to see a couple of typos I had missed before as well. This made me very happy.
To purchase the document which gives you five different file types for different platforms that you can edit anytime, forever, is just $29.99. If you pay $99.99 you can do 10 books. Unlimited is $199.99. I don’t have that many books so I opted for the bundle of 10.
I highly recommend this software for anyone who wants a better looking e-book and wants to have fun setting it up. Currently this is only available on Mac computers, not PCs.
Soon I’ll be updating all my books on Kindle with my snazzy new software!
-Tracy
To see more of Tracy’s thoughts on writing, life, cooking, and home repairs, please visit her WEBSITE HERE. Also, please visit and follow her on Amazon for updates on upcoming titles and author appearances.
Tracy L Carbone's Bit of Everything Site 