vellum – H.D. Knightley

Vellum is f*cking amazing. Okay that’s it.

Fine, I’ll say more. I’ve published 4+ novels as ebooks now. At least 8 other books that were image heavy and I barely lived to tell about it. It sucks. Every e-reader requires a different method, a different file, different margins, fonts, or sizing, a different upload site. Each e-reader format required a different password/process for uploading and conversion.

Then, besides all of that, sometimes in the magic blinky moment of document creation the file would end up wonky. With no reason at all.

Here’s a for instance: Violet’s Mountain print book is beautiful. Lovely margins, fonts, styled headings. I was very proud.

Then to format it for kindle I had to strip it of all of that and after tweaking and begging and pleading to the universe ended up with a file that was big Times Roman for headings and small Times Roman for the body. And it sucked. But I gave up and went with it. Even though the chapter headings came literally right after the previous chapter’s final sentence.

I published it because it was “good enough.” And I couldn’t find any tools for making it better.

Then I found a typo on page 56. I fixed the typo, reloaded the exact same file and from then on the title page looked like this:

Violet’s Mountai
n

What the…?

That is not how it is supposed to look.

Enter Vellum. I heard about it at Christmas, and downloaded the software the first week in January. I Learned how to use it in about an hour and had completely renovated Violet’s Mountain within two hours. I pushed a button, generated it for all formats, and voila. It was done.

It is beautiful. There are fonts! There are page structures that look pretty and make sense! There are chapters that have their own pages and I didn’t have to locate eye of newt or break out the giant caudron. Witchcraft skills are optional.

I am not an affiliate. (Crap, maybe I should be?) But if you’re getting ready to publish anything, I can’t recommend it highly enough.