There are a lot of steps if you are trying to publish a book and if you are trying to publish a book without taking any external help then you must do everything by yourself.

While designing, the book cover might seem like the most difficult task and you might even need to hire a cover designer to do it.

However, the most difficult task or rather the task that has a pre-determined set of rules and that needs to be done perfectly is the book’s layout.

It is simply an integral part of the book that cannot be ignored no matter how good the book design experience is for the reader.

Be it best-selling authors or new authors in the industry, be it physical books or digital copies, the book’s internal layout is something that no one gets wrong.

SO, WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?

The critical problem here is that it is quite a time-consuming and difficult process to get the book’s layout perfect. There are professionals who do it and if you are someone who wants to do everything about their book then you must at least use a professional print book formatting software.

They are many options and let us talk about one of the most popular options in this blog.

WELCOME TO THE VELLUM SOFTWARE REVIEW

Vellum is a book formatting software that is geared towards beauty. People can use this software to format a beautiful book and this includes print book formatting as well as eBook formatting.

This software is easy to use and geared towards non-professionals who are not accustomed to formatting a book.

While there are excellent options like Adobe InDesign, however, they are difficult for a beginner and quite complicated.  However, Vellum is for people who love DIY.  It is for the people who do not want to leave any part of the book to be done by someone else and who always like to be hands-on with everything.

HOW MUCH DOES IT COST

Vellum comes in three versions

• FREE – This version is available to anyone who downloads the app. However, there are a few things to notice. This is not a free version but a free trial version which lasts for just 15 days.  You can do everything that you do in all the paid versions but you cannot generate and export copies of the formatted book.  However, this version will help you understand the app and how it works.
• VELLUM EBOOKS – Just as the name suggests, this version is only capable of generating ebooks. You can generate an unlimited number of ebooks from this paid version which costs a one-time $199.99.  this is already quite high compared to the other softwares but this is a one-time payment and not a subscription model.
• VELLUM PRESS – This is the most expensive version of the app which will allow you to do everything that this software is capable of. There is a one-time fee of $50 extra and this version is geared for professional use.

HERE ARE THE FEATURES OF VELLUM

• BOOK STYLES

This is one of the most popular features of this app as this allows the user to already select from a good list of aesthetic and professional book styles.  Depending on the book style that you choose, you can see the changes in the book’s headers and footers, caption, block quotation, heading, first paragraph, body and ornamental break.

 

• IMPORT CAPABILITIES

While this is not a special feature, having this featured in a book formatting app is important. Vellum identifies DOCX files and generally does a good job in identifying chapter headings and is able to automatically separate chapters.

 

• PREVIEW MODE

This feature is quite useful if you are trying to export your eBook for a certain platform.  While working on the project you can preview what the book will look like on different platforms such as Kindle, iPhone, Android tablet, Kobo etc.

 

• EBOOK AND PRINT BOOK GENERATOR

Vellum lets you generate different types of ebook formats and also preview what they will look like on each platform.  Additionally, you can also find a good interface when you are trying to generate a print book as it does a good job of optimising and formatting for print.

There are important features that also make this one of the best book writing software.  However, there are some things that we do not like about this software.

One of the most important drawbacks is that there is no windows version and as we know windows is the biggest PC platform and them not having a windows version cripples the software from good markets.  There is also no option to add footnotes.  Adding images is also quite difficult.

If you are someone who does not want to spend so much on a book formatting software and if you are someone who likes to depend on and trust professionals for doing this then we are here to help you.

We are Orange Publishers and we are the fastest growing and most popular self-publishing book house in India and we will not only ensure that your manuscript is edited but we will also use our custom book formatting proprietary software to format your book and will also have our experts examine it manually.

This is an error proof step far better than Vellum.

Of course, since you’re publishing with us, this process is completely complementary and after we are done formatting the book, we can move forward with the publishing and book marketing which is also under the same roof.