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.
15 Comments
Annie Reed
I had the same learning curve about a year ago since I have a lot of single-author collections. Plus this lifelong PC user was trying to learn how to navigate a Mac at the same time. I feel your pain.
James Palmer
I found it fairly easy to use, but complex stuff like PhotoShop and InDesign make me crazy. The biggest problem in using it for me was that I had to use a Mac environment because I don’t have, and can’t afford, a Mac. Which is akin to using a pair of giant industrial robot hands to type on the keyboard of a laptop in a hermetically sealed room ten feet away. I eventually gave up on it and now use Atticus, which I like because I can access it at the day job. Another plus, Atticus has an easy “create a box set” setting. You can create a box set in under five minutes.
Mangala McNamara
Learning is fun… except when it’s not.
Since InDesign works so well… why not stick to it?
What does Vellum do (supposedly) that InDesign can’t? Or do you just not like how much processing speed Adobe orifice now use and that they have to be connected to the internet at all times?
(I had to move indesign off my laptop…. it was killing everything else. Briefly looked at Atticus, but that is all clouds based and I hate that… and I have a friend wrestling with it now, so still glad I didn’t try switching…)
I really don’t like Macs (after extensive use for jobs) so I’m not likely to really give Vellum the try you are…
… unless it really is that much better…???
dwsmith
I would have gone ot InDesign but didn’t have a quick handy template.
And want to learn this program which I wrestled partly to the ground in about 45 minutes tonight.
Michael W Lucas
My sympathies.
You didn’t ask for advice, but I’m gonna offer it anyway. This IS the Internet, after all! Th
Format your Word doc with styles before feeding it to Vellum. Make your story titles Heading1. Chapters within stories, Heading2. It flows straight into Vellum then.
I have Vellum. I use it for very generic fiction ebooks. Complicated ebooks must go through Calibre instead.
If you write books with many short chapters, Vellum produces print books with many extra pages. My last thriller had about 90 chapters. Vellum made a 350-page print book. ID got it to about 200.
dwsmith
Yup, did all that. Still was a mess, but tonight I learned how to clean it up and got it done in 45 minutes. Going forward every story will already be in Vellum and ready to upload as stand-alone shorts and I will build the collection from there as a boxed set. Learning, got a lot easier once I took InDesign out of my expectations in my mind.
Bonner Litchfield
For a collection, I simply use the story titles as chapter titles. But I do not have chapters within the stories themselves.
I have a novel with six of seven parts, and then chapters that keep incrementing throughout. IE: Part 1 , Chapter 1, Part 2 , Chapter 12 ….
Does automatically put the part listing on its own page. Fortunately, I’m good with that.
I believe you could use part titles as story titles, then hit the gear icon and uncheck numbered to have titles only.
Not sure about resetting the chapter numbering to 1 for each new part (story), though. Never had the need thusfar.
There’s always an ease and complexity balance with software. One can get up and running on Vellum way faster than with InDesign. But if specific requirements come in …
B. Apostol
Oh man, that sounds frustrating. I have only ever used Scrivener to compile. Been considering if I should purchase Vellum, but IDK.
Mike
I have run into an issue similar to what you’ve described. Typically, I try to import short stories separately into Vellum, rather than a single file (which doesn’t solve the problem, but keeps it more manageable for what I do next).
The issue, though, is when importing short stories as Word doc manuscripts, sections are separated only by the # symbol (in manuscript format), NOT using the correct-for-Vellum import way, which is to have a Page Break.
However, I prefer short story breaks to be their own separate chapters in the Vellum output (eBook or paper).
Therefore, the fastest way to convert my # symbols in short story manuscripts to chapter breaks in Vellum is to:
Do a CMD+F and search for the # symbol (or could be anything indicating the section or chapter breaks).
Vellum then brings up the next instance of that in the text area (middle section).
Then, right click on the text area and select the option to “Split Chapter at Cursor.” This effectively slices the text right at the cursor. So anything above the cursor becomes its own chapter. Everything below stays together as a separate chapter. And everything automatically renumbers.
Repeat that process for all the chapters/section breaks in your manuscript.
Also, if you need to, you can indent or outdent sections and chapters by dragging them in the left column.
This process is a little hacky, very manual, and very annoying, but typically only takes 5-10 minutes for a book with a fairly normal amount of chapters. And is still much faster overall than most alternatives!
dwsmith
Thanks. I only use chapters, so got that problem solved, however, discovered that the term “dingbat” is not used in modern publishing. Go figure.
Sean Monaghan
I’ve done collections in Vellum by using the .vellum files of each story, creating a new blank file and dragging in each .vellum file, rather than the original .docx file. Seems to go smoothly. I guess those videos would show all that. Of course, I’ve only ever used InDesign for covers and not interiors, so Vellum likely seems like chef’s knives to me… though a whole lot of stuff is just arbitrary and immutable. But I sure do get that going from one programme to another – Canva seems to do everything backwards after using InDesign.
dwsmith
Exactly how I am going to do it next time, Sean, because I am going to make sure all my short stories are stand alone and up and out. Thanks.
And finished it tonight in about 45 minutes…
Mangala McNamara
Woohoo!
Beat that sucker down!
My friend wrestling with Atticus usually formats in Word. All the way to her print-ready PDFs. She likes that she doesn’t have to update any edits between different programs (she is not a one and done short of writer)…
… but I have to say that I think it’s possible to tell when a book was formatted in Word. Little things like really large gaps at the bottoms of pages or quotation marks that aren’t attached to a word… and are the only thing on the last line of a paragraph.
It might be that happens in all formatting software… but InDesign doesn’t seem to let that happen.
Vellum either, I would imagine. I how not Atticus or Scrivener.
Doesn’t harm the story, but…
It’s a reminder that the extra effort is worth it!
Nissa Harlow
I can see how Vellum might not be intuitive if you’re used to InDesign.
My instinct with this, if you have some stories with chapters and some without, is to make use of Parts or Volumes (it’s your choice, but Parts would probably make more sense in this instance). You could still keep the standalone stories as separate chapters, or you could make them their own Parts. When it comes to numbering the chapters and Parts, it would be best to turn off automatic numbering and handle that manually (if you want numbers at all).
As for importing, you might have to do some of it by hand. You could create one Word document with all the standalone stories, then one doc each for the chaptered stories. Import the doc with all the standalone stories into Vellum first. Make that your main Vellum project for the collection. Then import each chaptered story into its own new Vellum project. Set each story up as a Part that has all the chapters in it. Then drag that Part from its project into your main Vellum project. Repeat for each chaptered story. Once that’s done, you can drag the stories around to reorder them.
I did an omnibus of four chaptered books with Vellum. I dragged and dropped the folders from each individual book into a new Vellum project and had each book set as a Volume. I had to reorder things a bit, but it worked.
Vellum’s as close as you can get to “easy” when it comes to formatting tools, but you still sometimes have to do a few little things by hand. Once you get used to it, you’ll be generating collections in no time.
dwsmith
Thanks, appreciate the advice.