Learning Drains Fear…
Noticed That Numbers of Times Lately…
And again, tonight. I had a book all together in a Word docx file and needed to get it run through Vellum. My safety net (Kris) was working in the WMG office, so I fired up on the book at my desk in the WMG office and right at the end, 25 minutes later, I got stuck on a question that Kris didn’t even know the answer to.
But I put the entire book together, laid it all out, back matter and everything, and got it entirely ready in the Vellum step to get to stores in just under 35 minutes.
And no fear.
Learning has drained all the fear away.
I had been living with this fear of Vellum, mostly because all the buttons are so tiny, and secondly because everyone said it would be easy. But I have a detailed procedure now and am learning where all the tiny little buttons are, and the fear has vanished.
Got that way with covers as well. Learning combined with doing just makes fear vanish. Amazing.
Now headed to my writing computer once again for some words before me and the two cats asleep in my office call it a night. (Or morning as the case is at the moment.)
4 Comments
James Palmer
Vellum is great and easy to use once you get the hang of it. My problem with it is that it’s not available for the PC, so I have to use a Mac virtual machine to run it. This can be rather clunky at times.
djmills
James, have you looked at Atticus. Similar to Vellum but run on any operating system.
James Palmer
Yes, I use Atticus now and love it.
Mangala McNamara
I’m in the same position. I looked at Atticus. I liked that it’s a one time fee, but I don’t like that it’s all online and cloud-based. But they were great and have me a refund quickly.
I use Adobe indesign. Haven’t yet found anything i need that it doesn’t do. By itself (w/o the rest of the Adobe suite) it’s ~$27/month. My single biggest publishing expense right now… but very worth it.
I going it pretty easy to get started with for print book formatting. (I use Sigil for ebooks.)
And following Dean’s advice I use it for covers as well. (Along with GIMP of i want to do more image manipulation. )