I am currently in the “completely bewildered” stage of preparing to self-publish my work, with the goal of releasing no less that five (three, absolute minimum) books next year. I’m considering several options, thinking about services I might need, looking at necessary or unnecessary software, and so forth.
I have just finished (?) editing the first volume of Jake and the Dynamo. This may sound like unnecessary fiddling, since the book has been edited and even published previously, but I am treating the next release as if it is the first, a complete start-over, and I want to present readers with the best, cleanest, most professional text I can. This new version is, at present, almost 3,000 words shorter, entirely because of improvements in style and grammar.
One thing I’ve thought I would likely do is purchase Vellum. Although it’s enormously expensive, it is more or less the only software that prepares a manuscript for multiple formats with minimal hassle. Its creators allow you to download it and use all its options, forcing payment only when you’re ready to generate the files.
Thus, I have been sitting here sipping a gimlet (one part gin, one part Rose’s lime juice, and nothing else, as Raymond Chandler explains) while familiarizing myself with Vellum and getting a handle on what it can—and can’t—do.
It is as user-friendly as it claims to be, but that seriously limits its abilities. Some formatting I have in Word, formatting I thought was quite minimal, has been stripped out of my Vellum file. For example, it doesn’t allow lettered lists:
This is a little disappointing, but I can easily envision a reason for it: The idea is maximum compatibility across readers and file types. I found some software previously that allowed for edting EPUB files in XML, and I originally thought that put me on easy street since editing XML is something I can do, but I soon discovered that editing files by hand was time-consuming and also produced unexpected results in different types of eBook readers.
Vellum, despite the claims in its advertisements, feels very limiting. It offers only a handful of styles with minimal customization, few fonts, and few layout options, but it also keeps you from inadvertently creating messed-up files that don’t work on major platforms. The few layouts it allows look good. Sme things I want, such as handwriting fonts in a few spots, aren’t possible—but then again, that’s the kind of thing that wouldn’t show up on most e-readers anyway, and eBooks are where I can expect the most sales. Kindle, for example, strips out all custom fonts and uses Amazon’s proprietary font in their place.
Also, in this first run, I experimented with Microsoft Word’s styles to produce the cleanest, lightest manuscript I could. A lot of what I did transfered straight into Vellum, and Vellum was even able to intuit some of the document’s features (most especially, its section breaks). Some things, however, did not transfer—particularly, text that was set to be in all caps (rather than typed in all caps by hand). To make sure everything is kosher, I probably need to make a few more tweaks to my DOCX file before I import it to Vellum again.
