Vellum: New Ebook Production Tool Launches

Vellum styles

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If you’ve ever tried to produce a nice-looking ebook that works as well on your device as it appears to on your computer, you’ll know that it’s often a nightmare. Although there are several programs that will take your text and create an ebook from it, rarely are they easy to use. This is the problem that Vellum is trying to solve, for Mac users at least.

Vellum is a very good looking piece of software, with your chapter list on the left, text window in the centre and a preview pane on the right so that you can see what your book will look like when it’s an ebook. Whilst the preview pane only provides facsimiles of the iPad, iPhone, Kindle Paperwhite and Nook Simpletouch, it is nice to be able to see what your book will look like whilst you’re working on it.

This becomes particularly useful when you open the styles list and start experimenting with the built-in options. There are eight overall book styles, and then you can also choose from a small selection of options for your headings, first paragraphs, block quotes, ornamental breaks and the paragraph after a break. It is easy to quickly select a series of options that result in a very good looking ebook, which is rather the point of the software.

In terms of ebook output, I sent the sample files over to Baldur Bjarnason, the most knowledgable ebook wrangler I know, for his opinion.

“Judging by the sample files, the author of a text-oriented or simple text with images ebook will have no problems with Vellum's output,” Bjarnason said. “All the basics are covered, headings are headings and are correctly numbered (h1, h2, etc), and the files seem to be correctly structured.” Generally speaking, Bjarnason added, most simple fiction ebooks will come out just fine.

Where Bjarnason did slightly part company with Vellum was over their choice to produce separate ebook files for Nook and iBooks.

“There shouldn't be any need to create a separate Nook epub file if you structure the file properly (ie universal file that includes an html and an NCX TOC, as well as a CSS structure that is aware of the various foibles of various platforms). Of course, the path that Vellum's developers took is easier and more predictable so it’s actually hard to fault them for it.”

Indeed, if you open the iBooks epub in Sigil, you’ll get an error message telling you that there’s no NCX file and that Sigil has created one for you.

So Vellum does what it says on the tin: It does create nice, solid and attractively formatted ebook files for simple novels. However, Vellum still has quite a few flaws, some in basic usability and some regarding missing ebook features.

On the usability front, Vellum is very attractive as a piece of software, but also very annoying. You can only import from Word, and given that I work in Scrivener this means exporting from Scrivener to Word, then going through a formatting process in Word to make sure that your file is going to be interpreted properly by Vellum, before finally importing. There’s no facility to import existing epubs or other ebook files, so bringing in your back catalogue to tart it up is going to be tedious. And, sadly, there’s no connection to Scrivener. It might be a bit early to expect that, but so many writers use Scrivener that it would be nice if the two tools played nicely together in future.

Once you’ve got your content in, you start to butt up against Vellum’s prescriptiveness. For example, Vellum suggests that you don’t have chapter numbers as the chapters are automatically numbered for you. That’s fine in theory, but if you are repositioning chapters, the automatic renumbering makes it impossible to see at a glance which chapter you’ve just moved without checking the contents. Moving Chapter 1 into the third position will result in an immediate rename of Chapter 2 to Chapter 1, and Chapter 3 to Chapter 2. If you’re still tweaking the order of your chapters, this will get very confusing very quickly. And if you name your chapters with numbers so you can tell them apart, you’ll end up with them all numbered twice. Not helpful.

Worse than that, though, are the basic features that are completely missing from Vellum. You cannot put URLs anywhere but on the About the Author page, and even then you can only add URLs that Vellum says you can, ie your Twitter and Facebook username, a web URL and your email (all of which can be left blank if preferred). If you want to have two functioning URLs, you can’t. If you want to have URLs on any other page, you can’t. It’s an example of design trumping functionality, a recurring theme with Vellum.

There’s also no image support, so you can’t have any images other than the front cover. And there’s no support for tables, bulleted or numbered lists, endnotes, footnotes, or Markdown or LaTeX. There are no box-out options, such as the tips/notes/advice boxes often used in non-fiction books. And Vellum only exports to ePub for iBooks, ePub for Nook and mobi for Kindle. There is no option to output as HTML, text, .docx, or PDF, or any other file formats.

Styles are, as mentioned earlier, limited. That’s fine if all you want to do is chuck out a nice looking ebooks and don’t really care about the details, but if you want to keep to a particular style, for example, you want your headings in a colour that matches your cover or your branding, you can’t do that. I understand why Vellum provides only a few style options and that for a lot of people a restricted choice will be fine, but an advanced style function for users who want more control would be a good solution.

The cost of beautiful ebooks

The biggest problem with Vellum is the cost. At the moment, you download the software free, and then pay when you want to generate ebook files from your project file. If you want to produce a new book, you would have to either pay again, or have bought a licence that allows multiple book projects.  That wouldn’t be too bad if the costs were reasonable, but they aren’t. It will set you back $49.99 to output ebooks for one project, $99.99 for three, or $149.99 for five. It doesn’t matter if your project is an epic novel or a short story, you have to cough up.

I asked Vellum’s Brad Andalman about the pricing structure, and he said:

When we began talking to authors about Vellum, we had a fixed price in mind. It was higher than the Scrivener price point, but we thought authors who made a living from their writing would value the time they saved and the quality of the output from Vellum. And when we showed these authors how easy it was to use Vellum and how good their books could look, we got great feedback on that price.

But in the process, we also encountered many more writers who were not full-time authors, and were really interested in writing just a single novel or memoir. Per-book pricing gave us a way to make something accessible to the one-time author and something reasonable for the full-time author, especially when taking advantage of bulk pricing. And when we met again with these new authors and told them about our pricing, they were thrilled.

So that’s what we’re developing now: a price point that makes sense for these authors.

For me, that’s a non-starter. There’s just no way that I’ll pay even $30 to create ebook files for a novel, let alone a short story. I would much prefer to just buy the software outright and output as many books as I like.

I think the problem here is that Vellum think their market is bi-modal, split between authors who make a living out of their writing and producing their own ebooks, and people who just want to write one book. But authors who earn a living out of their writing and actually output their own ebooks, ie self-publishers, is a tiny, tiny percentage of all authors out there. If you’re making a living from your writing you probably have a traditional deal and aren’t producing your own ebooks; if you’re a self-publisher you probably aren’t making a living from your writing and don’t have money to throw around. The vast majority of writers who are producing their own ebooks are struggling self-publishers trying to do the best they can with crappy tools and a very, very small budget.

Vellum certainly shows promise, and for those self-publishers who are producing very simple books, have larger budget and use Macs, it will be a boon. For anyone who wants a bit more control over their ebooks, is producing slightly more complex texts, has less of a budget, or who doesn’t use a Mac, I’m afraid Vellum isn’t going to tick your boxes. Do keep an eye on it though: Vellum was only launched a week or so ago and there’s plenty of time for it to evolve into something both affordable and useful.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/suwcharmananderson/2013/12/19/vellum-new-ebook-production-tool-launches/
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