Vellum: Beautiful Book Formatting Without the Headache

You've finished your manuscript. Months — possibly years — of work, and it's done. Then someone mentions formatting, and the warm glow of completion evaporates.

Formatting a book for publication is genuinely tedious. Each format has its own requirements: Kindle wants a specific ePub structure, print-on-demand requires precise margin settings and print-ready PDFs, iBooks has its own quirks. Do it yourself from a Word document and you're in for hours of wrestling with stylesheets and trying to understand why your chapter headings look different on different devices. Pay a formatter and you're adding a meaningful line item to your production budget for every single book.

Vellum was built to solve this problem — and if you're on a Mac, it solves it beautifully.

What Is Vellum?

Vellum is a Mac-only book formatting application that takes your manuscript and produces publication-ready ebook and print files with minimal effort and maximum visual quality. You import your Word document, choose a style, and Vellum generates clean, professional files for every format you need — Kindle, ePub, Apple Books, Kobo, and a print-ready PDF — at the same time.

The output quality is genuinely impressive. Books formatted in Vellum have a polished, bookstore-quality interior that's difficult to achieve through manual formatting — particularly the beautifully designed chapter openers, ornamental dividers, and consistent typography.

Who Is It For?

Vellum is the right tool for:

• Mac-using indie authors who format their own books and want professional results without the learning curve

• Authors publishing multiple books who want to recoup the one-time cost through saved formatting time and fees across their backlist and future releases

• Writers who care about the interior quality of their books — not just whether they display correctly, but whether they look beautiful

• Authors in fiction and non-fiction — Vellum handles both genres well

The Mac-only limitation is significant. If you're on Windows, Vellum is not currently an option for you — we'll address alternatives below.

Check out books created with Vellum

Key Features

One-Click Multi-Format Output

This is the central time-saving feature: you set up your book once in Vellum, and it generates all your output formats simultaneously. Kindle ePub, standard ePub, Apple Books ePub, Kobo ePub, and print-ready PDF — all from a single source. No reformatting the same book six times for six different platforms.

For authors publishing wide through multiple retailers, this is transformative. What previously required either hours of manual work or paying a formatter for each format is handled in minutes.

Gorgeous Chapter Styles

Vellum offers a range of beautifully designed chapter opening styles — different combinations of chapter number display, title treatment, ornamental elements, and spacing. These are the details that separate a book that looks "self-published" from one that looks like it came from a major house. You choose a style, and Vellum applies it consistently throughout your manuscript.

Automatic Table of Contents

Vellum generates your table of contents automatically, with clickable links that work correctly in ereaders. No manual linking. No worrying about whether the formatting is correct for each platform's requirements.

"Also By" Pages

Vellum makes it simple to add an "Also By" page — a list of your other books with clickable links — to the back matter of every title. For authors with a growing backlist, this is one of the most effective and underused marketing tools available. Every book you sell becomes a vehicle for introducing readers to your other work.

Device Preview

Vellum shows you exactly how your book will look on a range of devices — Kindle Paperwhite, Kindle Oasis, iPad, iPhone, Kobo — in real time as you make formatting decisions. No more "let me upload to the preview tool and wait" workflow; you see the result immediately.

What We Love

The output quality is genuinely bookstore-grade. Books formatted in Vellum simply look better than most manually formatted indie books. The typography, the spacing, the chapter opener design — everything is polished. Readers may not consciously notice, but they feel it.

It is remarkably easy to use. Unlike Scrivener, which has a meaningful learning curve, Vellum is intuitive almost immediately. Import your manuscript, choose your style, generate your files. The complexity is handled by the software, not by you.

Generating all formats simultaneously is a genuine joy. Once you've experienced clicking "Generate Books" and watching Vellum produce six output files in thirty seconds, manually formatting books seems unthinkable.

What Could Be Better

Mac only is a genuine limitation. This is the most significant drawback, and it's a hard one. Vellum has not released a Windows version despite years of requests from the community. If you're on Windows, Vellum is simply not available to you.

The one-time cost is significant upfront. ~$330–$400 AUD is a meaningful investment, particularly for authors at the beginning of their publishing journey. The economics only work clearly if you're planning to format multiple books — which, if you're serious about your author career, you are.

Customisation is limited by design. Vellum's styles are beautiful, but they're fixed. You can't adjust typography in fine detail, create fully custom page designs, or produce highly specialised interior layouts. For most commercial fiction and non-fiction, this isn't an issue — but for illustrated books, cookbooks, or highly formatted non-fiction, Vellum's limitations become apparent.

The Windows Alternative: Atticus

For Windows users (and Mac users who prefer a subscription model), Atticus is the most direct alternative. It's a cross-platform formatting and writing tool that produces similar output quality to Vellum, works in your browser, and charges a one-time fee of around $170 AUD. It's a solid alternative that's worth investigating if Vellum isn't available to you.

Pricing

• Vellum Ebooks — Around $309.99AUD (one-time purchase, unlimited books, ebook formats only)

• Vellum Press (eBooks + Paperbacks) — Around $489.99AUD (one-time purchase, unlimited books, ebook + print formats)

There is no subscription, no per-book fee, and no limit on how many books you format. The one-time cost covers every book you'll ever write — which is the frame that makes the investment make sense.

For authors who would otherwise pay a formatter $50–$150 AUD per book, Vellum pays for itself within three to eight books, depending on your production complexity.

• note: prices as advertised on Vellum website at time of publishing this post

The Verdict

If you're on a Mac and you're serious about the quality of your published books, Vellum is one of the best investments you can make in your author business. The time savings, the quality of output, and the sheer ease of use make it genuinely remarkable.

Our recommendation: If you're on a Mac and you have two or more books in your pipeline, buy Vellum Press. If you're on Windows, look at Atticus. Either way, stop manually formatting your manuscripts — your time is worth too much.

Are you using Vellum or Atticus for your book formatting? Or are you still doing it manually? We'd love to hear your formatting workflow in the comments!

Want to discuss this with other writers figuring out the tech? Come share your thoughts in the Author Hub — it's free to join.