Vellum is Mac software for designing and laying out ebooks and print books before you self-publish. I have been a customer for years and I have used it to format multiple ebooks and paperbacks, including my book I Can’t Believe I’m a Dad.
This review covers the workflow I actually use, what it costs now, and the two situations where I would tell you not to buy it.
Verified on vellum.pub on 21 August 2026:
| Edition | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Vellum Ebooks | $199.99, one-time | Unlimited ebooks |
| Vellum Press | $249.99, one-time | Unlimited ebooks and paperbacks |
Prices exclude tax. Both are one-time purchases, so you pay once and keep the software.
The important detail: you can download Vellum for free and format your whole book in it. Build it, style it, preview it, change your mind about the theme four times. You only pay when you want to generate the files you would actually upload to a store. There is no way to waste money finding out whether you like it.
Vellum requires macOS 13 or newer and there is no Windows version.
I write the book in Scrivener. When the manuscript is final and edited, I compile it out of Scrivener as a Word document. Then I import that Word file into Vellum and let Vellum handle the formatting and design.
You can do the same from Word directly, or from anything that exports a .docx.
Scrivener can compile finished books itself, so this is a preference rather than a necessity. I find Vellum quicker to use and I prefer the look of its templates.
Vellum carries across as much structure as it can find, so the better your headings and subheadings are set up in Scrivener, the less work this is. But you will still go through the book and tell it what is what.
In practice that means marking a verse as a verse rather than a chapter opening, converting bold lines into proper subheadings, dropping in ornamental breaks between sections, and reclassifying elements. On one book I had a section called “Mastery” that Vellum had read as the final chapter when it was really the epilogue, and switching it changed where it sat in the table of contents.
Footnotes and citations carry through from Scrivener or Word automatically, and you can add endnotes by hand by selecting text and choosing endnote.
Budget somewhere between thirty and sixty minutes for this, depending on the length of the book. It is tidying, not a skill you need to learn.
This is where Vellum earns its keep. You add elements from a menu: introduction, table of contents, copyright page, about the author, a page listing your other books, social links, endnotes. Vellum generates and places them correctly.
I usually end up deleting the versions I had typed manually in Scrivener and letting Vellum generate them instead, because it produces cleaner results and updates them when the book changes.
There is a preview pane on the right that updates as you work, and you can switch which device you are previewing: Kindle Paperwhite, Kindle Fire, iPad, Kobo, Android, or the print edition.
The themes are the design half of the product. There are a limited number and you cannot build your own from scratch, which is the honest criticism of Vellum. But they are good, and you can adjust individual elements: how headings are formatted, heading backgrounds, drop caps, the first paragraph, the paragraph after a break.
There is a judgement call here worth naming. If you find yourself deep in the weeds tuning paragraph spacing, your time is almost certainly better spent improving the manuscript or paying a designer. Vellum is meant to get you to “good enough that readers notice it looks nice” quickly, and it does.
Click generate, pick your formats, pick your print settings, and Vellum writes out every version you need into a folder: Kindle, Apple Books, Google Play, Kobo, Nook, and a print PDF. It includes large-print trim options if you want them.
For print, use Amazon KDP’s cover calculator first. Pick your binding, interior type, paper and page count, and it gives you a template to hand your cover designer and the trim size to select inside Vellum. Getting this backwards is the most common way to lose a day.
Vellum also keeps track of your projects in one window, which solves a real problem. Across a dozen books and every format each one needs, file management gets out of hand fast, and having them all in one place is genuinely useful.
Use a service like BookFunnel to send the PDF and Kindle copy to advance readers before you publish. They will find typos. When they do, you go back into Vellum, fix them, and regenerate everything in one click. Updating a published book is the same process.
If you are doing print at all, do print. It sells more than authors expect.
You are publishing one book. Two hundred dollars is a lot for a single title. Hire a formatter on a service like Reedsy and let them do it. Vellum makes sense when you have a catalogue, or you are building one.
You are on Windows. Atticus is the cross-platform alternative. It is $147 as a one-time purchase and runs on Windows, Mac, Linux and Chromebook as a progressive web app, with a 30-day money-back guarantee, verified on atticus.io on 21 August 2026. Feature-wise the two are broadly comparable.
You want free. Sigil is a free, open-source EPUB editor for Mac, Windows and Linux. Its most recent release at the time of writing is 2.8.1 from July 2024. I have not used it myself; other authors have recommended it to me. It is a more technical tool than Vellum and it will not hand you a designed book in an hour.
Your book is full of images. Vellum is built for text. Inserting images and illustrations is the part it handles least gracefully. A heavily illustrated book wants a proper layout application.
Vellum is expensive, Mac only, and I still use it for every book.
It takes under an hour to learn, it turns a finished manuscript into files that look like a publisher made them, and it removes the entire category of formatting anxiety from self-publishing. Set against the cost of paying a formatter per title, it pays for itself somewhere around the second or third book.
If you are earlier in the process, look at writing software for drafting the book first, or the best memoir writing software if that is the shape of what you are working on.
The full Vellum workflow on screen: importing a manuscript from Scrivener, tidying the chapters, choosing a theme, and generating the ebook and print files.
Vellum Ebooks is $199.99 and Vellum Press, which adds paperbacks, is $249.99. Both are one-time purchases and the price does not include tax. Verified on vellum.pub on 21 August 2026.
No. Vellum is Mac only and requires macOS 13 or newer. Running macOS in a virtual machine on a Windows PC is technically possible but it is a headache most authors will not want. Atticus is the usual cross-platform alternative.
Yes, and this is unusually generous. You can download Vellum for free and build, style and preview your entire book. You only pay when you are ready to generate publishable files.
You can, but it is not built for drafting. I write in Scrivener, export a Word file, and import that into Vellum for formatting. Vellum is a design and layout tool, not a writing app.
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