Vellum — The Mac Formatting App That Sets the Standard

Among Mac-using indie authors, Vellum has an almost cult-like following — and for good reason. Developed by former Pixar engineers Brad Andalman and Brad West at 180g and released in 2014, Vellum produces the most beautiful ebook and print formatting of any tool available to indie authors. The typography is precise, the chapter header designs are professional, and the output is clean in ways that other tools don't consistently match.

I've used Vellum for formatting my own books for years. The learning curve is gentle — upload your manuscript, choose a style theme, preview on simulated devices, export. For a first-time user with a clean Word or Scrivener manuscript, professional-looking output is achievable in under an hour.

What Vellum Does

Vellum formats ebooks (EPUB and MOBI-compatible files for Kindle) and print books (print-ready PDF) from your manuscript. Upload a Word document or use Vellum's own writing environment. Apply one of Vellum's professionally designed style themes. Preview your book in simulated Kindle Paperwhite, iPhone, iPad, and print views. Export all formats simultaneously.

The export is the killer feature. Vellum generates KDP-ready, Apple Books-ready, Kobo-ready, and Draft2Digital-ready files in a single click. For wide-publishing authors, this eliminates the need to produce separate files configured for each platform — one Vellum project, one export, everything you need.

Pricing — Free to Format, Pay to Export

Vellum uses a distinctive pricing model: you can use Vellum to write, design, and preview your book entirely for free. You only pay when you're ready to export final files. This makes Vellum essentially risk-free to evaluate — design your complete book, see exactly what the output will look like across every device, and only purchase when you've decided it's worth it.

Both purchase options are one-time purchases with no subscription and lifetime updates included.

🔗 https://vellum.pub

Core Features

Real-Time Device Preview

Perhaps Vellum's signature feature: as you write or make formatting adjustments, the right-hand pane updates in real time to show exactly how the book will appear on specific devices — Kindle Paperwhite, iPhone, iPad, and print. This live feedback loop allows formatting decisions to be made and seen immediately rather than requiring an export and external preview. Catching spacing issues, chapter heading appearance, and scene break visual treatment before export saves significant revision time.

Book Styles and Style Themes

Authors choose from several professionally curated style themes — names like Artisanal, Meridian, and Oxford — that control font pairing, chapter title treatment, spacing, ornamental breaks between scenes, and title page layouts. Vellum does not allow fully granular font-by-font customization; each style includes curated font pairs specifically chosen for typographic harmony. This limitation is intentional: it prevents poor design choices and ensures the output meets professional publishing standards regardless of the user's design experience. The pre-designed styles are flexible enough for most fiction genres.

Section Breaks and Ornamental Flourishes

Vellum supports scene breaks with optional ornamental elements — asterisms, glyphs, or simple line space separators — that add a layer of visual professionalism subtle enough to feel like traditionally published formatting. The flourishes are genre-appropriate and match the overall style theme rather than being applied independently.

Automatic Table of Contents

A fully linked and properly formatted table of contents is created automatically from Vellum's chapter structure. Vellum correctly distinguishes between front matter, body chapters, and back matter, adjusting TOC entries accordingly. Authors can hide or rename individual entries. In ebook output, TOC links are properly functional for both device navigation menus and in-text TOC pages.

Ebook and Print Output

Vellum's print output includes automatic widow and orphan control, proper margin calculations for standard trim sizes, running headers and footers, and page-number management. The print PDF is ready for KDP Print and IngramSpark upload without additional configuration for standard trim sizes. For ebook output, Vellum produces files specifically configured for each major retailer platform — Apple Books, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, and Kindle — handling the platform-specific formatting requirements that can cause upload issues when exporting a single generic EPUB.

Automatic Back Matter

Vellum makes it easy to add standard back matter sections — About the Author, Also By, Acknowledgments, and newsletter or website call-to-action pages. Pre-designed layout templates for these sections ensure they match the style theme of the rest of the book. Hyperlinks in back matter are embedded cleanly and verified for functionality in ebook output.

Smart Typography

Typography is a core strength of Vellum. Smart quotation marks, properly formed em dashes and en dashes, correctly rendered ellipses, and appropriate kerning are handled automatically. These typographic details — invisible when done correctly, noticeable when done wrong — are part of what gives Vellum-formatted books their professional appearance.

Chapter Organization

Vellum structures manuscripts by chapter, with each chapter as a distinct block that can be titled, reordered, or deleted without affecting others. Drag-and-drop reordering is available in the chapter sidebar. This modular approach is workable for most fiction, though it lacks the scene-level navigation and complex organizational depth of Scrivener.

Vellum as a Writing Environment

Vellum includes a basic writing environment — you can draft directly in Vellum if you choose. Most authors don't, preferring Scrivener or Word for drafting and using Vellum exclusively for the formatting step. Vellum's writing environment lacks research management, complex organizational tools, revision modes, and the full editing capabilities of dedicated writing tools. For authors who write simply and linearly, it's a clean drafting option. For authors who outline, restructure, or maintain extensive research during drafting, a dedicated writing tool followed by Vellum for formatting is the more practical workflow.

Vellum's writing tools are deliberately minimal: word count per chapter, basic spellcheck, and Find/Replace. There is no read-aloud feature, grammar check, Track Changes, Comments, or storyboarding. These limitations are by design — Vellum assumes developmental and editorial work happens elsewhere.

What Vellum Doesn't Do Well

Vellum's formatting limitations are worth knowing:

• No full-bleed images, complex tables, footnotes, or endnotes — books with these requirements need Adobe InDesign or Affinity Publisher

• No cloud storage or native sync — Vellum saves locally; Dropbox or iCloud manual sync is your backup strategy

• No collaboration tools — no Track Changes, no Comments; editors must work in Word with DOCX exports

• No custom font installation — you work within Vellum's curated font set

• No Windows or Linux version — Mac-only is the definitive limitation

Recommended Workflow

The workflow that takes best advantage of Vellum: draft in Scrivener or Word, export to DOCX for editing passes with your editor in Microsoft Word (Track Changes), import the final edited DOCX into Vellum for formatting, preview across all device simulations, and export all ebook and print formats simultaneously for upload to each platform. This combines the organizational depth of Scrivener, the editorial capability of Word, and the formatting quality of Vellum — using each tool for what it does best.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

• The best formatting output quality of any indie author tool — consistently matches traditionally published book appearance

• Free to format — pay only to export

• Real-time device preview eliminates export-then-check cycles

• Single-click multi-platform export — one project, files for every retailer

• One-time purchase with lifetime updates

• Automatic widow/orphan control, smart typography, and TOC generation

• Minimal learning curve — professional output in the first session for most users

Cons:

• Mac-only — the definitive limitation that excludes all Windows and Linux authors

• No Track Changes or Comments — editorial passes require Word

• Limited formatting for complex layouts — footnotes, tables, full-bleed images require other tools

• No cloud storage or collaboration — local save only, manual backup required

• Writing environment lacks Scrivener's organizational depth

• No read-aloud, grammar check, or advanced editing tools

ScribeCount Author OS — Tracking Your Vellum Output

After formatting in Vellum and publishing to KDP, Kobo, Apple Books, IngramSpark, and your other distribution platforms, ScribeCount's Sales Dashboard tracks your sales across every platform Vellum exports to. The platform breakdown shows your income by retailer, and the format breakdown shows ebook versus print sales — letting you see which Vellum output format is generating the most income across your catalog.

Conclusion

Vellum is an outstanding formatting solution for Mac-using independent authors. Its output quality is the benchmark by which other indie author formatting tools are measured, its free-to-format pricing model makes it entirely risk-free to evaluate, and its real-time preview and single-click multi-platform export make the production workflow faster and cleaner than any alternative.

Its limitations are equally real: Mac-only, local-save-only, no collaboration tools, and limited capability for complex layouts. These constraints define the workflow rather than limiting it — draft in Scrivener or Word, edit in Word, format in Vellum, track performance in ScribeCount. Each tool does one thing well. Vellum's one thing is making your book look like it came from a traditional publisher.

For Mac authors, Vellum is the formatting tool. For Windows authors, Atticus produces comparable output on any platform. Both are worth knowing.

— Randall