There's reviewing and there's reviewing. You know that the tiniest single-function utility gets examined, turned upside down, poked about with and possibly even shaken a bit. You also know that doesn't take long. There are things like Microsoft Word which take a month or more of serious use with betas and previews before more serious use with the final release. Then there's
Vellum 1.2.5. We've had this software for about six months, maybe seven. You can't say we're quick with the news on this one, but complete, we are.
However, you also can't say we skimped either. On day one of our trial, the developers 180g sent us the text of a sample book to try out in Vellum. We couldn't tell you what that book was -- it was definitely some public domain, out-of-copyright novel -- because we didn't look at it once. Instead we kidded the developer that we're a bit more thorough than that, we would take this app for publishing e-books and we would stress test it with a real book. A new real book. Start to finish.
Listen, be careful what you say within earshot of
MacNN management.
For this is what we did. Seriously. If you want proof, go
buy the book we published with it. We'd be okay with that. We had an advantage in that one of us is a book author and so not has not only gone through this process with big, international publishing houses but also had a book in progress. As it turns out, it wasn't as much in progress as we thought so to get Vellum properly bloodied, we had to do some work.
Go skip months of works and updates, don't mind us, and
read the summation where we pick out the software that survived a rather gruelling process of planning, writing, researching, editing, rewriting and finally publishing a book. Of the dozens of applications covered in the process, around half a dozen made it to the end as our picks of the essentials. Our picks of the tools we will use the next time we do this madness.
Vellum 1.2.5 is one of them. Our first impression that it was good and rather gorgeous hasn't changed, it's just deepened. Things have happened over these months that have altered book publishing just a touch. It's enough of a change that Vellum is no longer so automatically the best option but it's at the very least one of the best options and it's the one we recommend.
Write your book in any application you like then save it in Word format and drag it onto Vellum. You can also go into Vellum and choose to create a new book. When you do that, though, we did find it momentarily confusing: to then bring in a Word document, you have to choose File/Reimport.
Over the months we had many reasons to start all over again and Reimport -- all problems with our book, not with Vellum -- and we also added text in chapter by chapter. We could drag in a chapter or create a new Untitled one in the existing book and paste text into there. You typically start by dragging in an entire book in one go but then thinking about it in chapters is convenient because Vellum lets you drag the chapters around. It has controls for whether chapters are automatically numbered, it has controls for the design of chapters.
Overall the design is based on one of only a few templates and in our use we found we kept using the same one. It's not an app with a vast range of options but what is there is very well done. Always and forever, we resist templates in apps because everybody uses the same few and your work immediately looks like a lot of other people's. That is as true with Vellum as it is with, say, iBooks Author but we do very much like the templates in it.
It's also slightly confusing where you enter other details about your book: at the top of a panel listing all your chapters there is the title. Click on that and you swap from seeing your text to seeing information about your text. Set the title here, add in the ISBN if you have one, set the author information and so on. You can also add the cover image and we'd like for that cover pane to include information about sizes before you drag a photo in. However, Vellum is very good at retrospectively telling you an image is or is not big enough and then it will tell you the minimums you need.
Vellum is slanted toward getting the cover, this other information and your text into one place ready to submit to online book services like iBooks and Amazon. However, you can edit your text in it. You could write the entire book in Vellum and we might not recommend it but you can and we did write several hundred words directly into it. It's not a word processor so it has limited features but writing in it is enjoyable.
Sending the finished book off to online book stores is simple: one single Generate button does the lot. Press that and you create an iBook, a Kindle and a Nook copy of the book. Except when you first get Vellum, there isn't a Generate button: there's a purchase one.
You get the Vellum app for free but each book you produce requires a fee before the Generate button is live. That fee is $30 for a single book, $100 for 10 or $200 for as many as you want. There is an immediate argument that there are alternative applications that do this for free and in particular Apple's iBooks Author. However, we weren't playing around testing out this software with sample text and we weren't messing around creating a book for the hell of it. We did this seriously and we used the app extensively and if you do that, if you are doing this professionally then those fees are the cost of doing business, and they are extremely good. Go book a cover designer and tell us $30 is expensive.
One thing to be clear about: having paid your fee, you have lifetime access to your book. You don't have to pay again just because you spotted a mistake and need to generate an updated version.
Apple's iBooks Author is important for other reasons than cost, though, and this is the key thing that has changed since we began tinkering with Vellum. Until the last couple of weeks, iBooks Author was solely able to create iBooks to go on sale in the iBooks Store. It specifically could not create any other form of ebook such as a standard ePub one. Consequently Vellum's ability to let you make one book and have the software automatically create gorgeous versions for iBooks, Kindle and Nook simultaneously was a big deal.
We still think it is. We're still testing out the new iBooks Author but what is immediately apparent is that now it can make regular ePub documents for these other services, you have to say so at the start. You also have to give up a lot of the functionality that makes iBooks Author such a great tool. Much as we do adore iBooks Author, Vellum is easier and more straightforward in part because it offers fewer options. If you're going to throw away iBooks' advantages in making iBooks then Vellum wins for doing all three at once.
You've picked up on the subtle hints that we like Vellum. It could've gone either way: we liked it enough on sight to try this project with it and that meant spending a very great deal of time in Vellum. We could have ended up hating the software. Instead, we kept finding tiny new touches that we just found delicious. Such as how it works when you add illustrations in: you just drag in to where you want it and can add in extra information like weblinks.
We did hit a snag with weblinks in that several times we somehow introduced a space before the http part and iBooks regarded that as a serious error. It refused to submit the book until these were fixed and finding that space was hard. It would be good if Vellum could do more of a standards or format validation before it completes generating the e-books.
Vellum requires OS X 10.9 or later and the app itself is
free on the App Store.
Who is Vellum for:
Us. We really like this app, have you picked up on that? It made books we like and it made them look gorgeous plus it was as easy as it claims it will be.
Who is Vellum not for:
Plenty of people don't like Vellum's pricing and would rather pay a one-off fee for the app instead of a per-book cost.
-William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
Readers: do you have an app that you'd like to see us review? Developers: do you want us to take a look at your app? Send your suggestions to our Tips email.
Top