Chuck has over three decades of experience developing software. He's created systems for businesses ranging from Fortune 500 companies to Mom and Pop stores. His latest project is BundleRabbit.com, a service that allows authors to promote their books in DIY bundles and readers to get more ebooks for less money.

When he's not writing code, Chuck writes quirky short stories, usually with some sort of fantastical element. He's as surprised by this as anyone. Even after dozens of stories published he still stays up too late at night, feverishly working on the next tale.

He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his beautiful wife and their daughters.

The Author's Guide to Vellum by Chuck Heintzelman

Take the pain out of creating books!

Vellum helps you:

-Generate high quality ebooks
-Create professional looking print books
-Assemble boxsets in record time
-Create beautiful books

"The Author's Guide to Vellum" steps you through the software, explaining each feature, and has tips & tricks that can save you hours of time.

Don't have a Mac computer? No worries. "The Author's Guide to Vellum" shows you how to run this amazing software without owning a Mac.

Whether you're new to Vellum or an Advanced user, you'll learn something with this book:

-Why do some pages not show in the Table of Contents?
-How can I get a page to appear before the Title Page?
-How can I force my books to have blank paragraphs?
-Which pages can start on the left side of print books?


"The Author's Guide to Vellum" answers all these questions, and more!

 
 

BOOK PREVIEW

Excerpt

Chapter 1 - Introduction

This chapter provides a brief introduction to Vellum, what it does, and who created it.

What is Vellum?

Vellum is a software package that helps you create books. It allows you to package your manuscript as an ebook or print book.

Sounds pretty simple, doesn't it?

It is simple. And the software is elegantly designed. It's a joy to use.

But I heard Vellum only works on Mac computers?

Well technically yes, Vellum only runs on Apple macOS 10.11 or newer. But if you're a Windows or Linux user you can use the MacinCloud service and run Vellum for $1 per hour. See the Chapter 21 – Using MacinCloud for details.

What Vellum does

The purest, most honorable goal of software is to make your life better. If you're an indie author, Vellum does exactly this.

Vellum imports your manuscript and, with a few clicks, generates ready-to-upload ebooks for every major ebook retailer. And now with Vellum 2.0 you can also generate print books.

Vellum makes your life better by:

•Making it easy and simple to create ebooks

•Creating the interior file for paperbacks

•Saving you hours of formatting time

•Generating a final product that is simply stunning

Vellum's purpose is summed up best by its motto:

C R E A T E B E A U T I F U L B O O K S

We're long past the initial days of the indie revolution where an author could create a quick ebook, maybe push their Word manuscript through Smashword's Meat Grinder to get the MOBI, slap on any ol' cover, and then upload the ebook to Amazon. Well, I suppose you could still do that, but your sales will be affected.

Today's readers are more discerning. They expect a professional-looking ebook.

Today's readers expect the quality that Vellum produces.

Who's Behind Vellum

The creators of Vellum are Brad West and Brad Andalman—known collectively as "The Two Brads." They both formerly worked for Pixar, each with over a decade of experience developing software and building animation systems used on films like Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, and Toy Story 2.

How cool is it that they built software at Pixar to help creators build beautiful animations? Now they're doing the same in a different industry. Now they help authors create beautiful books.

In 2012, The Two Brads created a company named 180g (which I always think of as 180 grams, but that's probably not what it means). 180g is the company behind Vellum.

My Credentials

Who am I and why can I teach you about Vellum?

My name is Chuck Heintzelman. I'm a software developer, a writer, and—for the last couple years—an ebook bundler. I created and run the service at BundleRabbit.com. BundleRabbit allows anyone to become a "curator" and build multi-author ebook bundles. BundleRabbit has an ebook marketplace where hundreds of authors have uploaded their ebooks. Curators can choose ebooks from this marketplace, organize the ebooks into a bundle, enter sales copy for the bundle, upload a cover, and then … PUBLISH THE BUNDLE.

BundleRabbit distributes 70% of each sale across all the authors in the bundle. Plus a little sumpin sumpin for the curator.

Behind the scenes at BundleRabbit several things happen when a bundle is published and one of them is building the bundle. To do this I use Vellum because it literally takes only 5-10 minutes to drag and drop individual ebooks into Vellum and create a boxset suitable for publishing at Kobo, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and iBooks.

And the boxsets produced by Vellum are simply amazing. The quality is unsurpassed.

I've created over 70 bundles (boxsets) at BundleRabbit in the last year.

Unfortunately Vellum doesn't allow normal ebooks (EPUBs and MOBIs) to be imported to create a boxset. Nope. You have to use ebooks built with Vellum. (You can drag and drop multiple DOCX files into Vellum, but then you must edit the imported text.)

Which means at BundleRabbit I must covert each ebook to be bundled to Vellum. As of this morning I have converted 612 ebooks.

When you add together the number of ebooks I've converted to Vellum for BundleRabbit, the number of boxsets I've created, and the number of ebooks I've created in Vellum for my personal work …

I Have Created Over 700 Ebooks In Vellum

You could say I know a little about this software.