Vellum 1— Dean 0

Just Got Hammered by the Learning Curve…

Vellum is just plain strange, and for years I designed the interior of books in InDesign and before that Pagemaaker. Well over a thousand books. But unlike those two programs, Vellum has more things you can’t do than you can.

And very little of what you can do is logical. And it does things automatically you don’t want done. (I got to learn how to turn some of that off.)

So I am working on putting a collection together. Not difficult, right?  I did hundreds of them in Pagemaker and InDesign over the decades.

First attempt was a mess as I tried to put one file in with an introduction and ten stories. One Word docx file. A lot of the stories have chapters… oh, oh…

My problem at that point was not knowing the program enough to edit anything. So much for simple. I watched about three tutorials on editing and could make no sense of it, so gave up, pulled all the stories into separate files and then tried to build a boxed set. (Of course there is no setting to build a collection. Boxed set for a collection? Seriously. And yes, I have looked at the anthology feature. Might try that next.)

Nope on the boxed set… I gave up and came back up to this office and tried to find an old interior InDesign file template without luck, so went to watching more how-to videos on Vellum.

My problem seems to be an inability to separate InDesign from this program in this learning phase.  And Vellum is made for one task and that is to help writers have professional interiors. I got that. Vellum is a dull dinner knife, InDesign is an entire set of professional chef’s knives.

So tomorrow comes battle two of this learning curve.

I am thinking the anthology route might be the best way. (Did the inventors of this never read a one-author collection?)

Tomorrow I will do Kickstarter Friday so will report back on Saturday night on this curve, if I am still alive.

I knew some of these learning curves would be difficult, but with all the books I have designed and everyone saying how simple Vellum is, I did not expect this learning curve to be this difficult.