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If you haven’t gotten far enough in your self-publishing career to worry about formatting your ebook, you’ve got some learning ahead. It’s not easy. In fact, it’s quite complicated. Instead of there being one format that all of the ebook platforms use, each of them has their own file type that they use. But before you go off and do that we’ve got a great solution for you. Brad and Brad are the creators of some great Mac software called Vellum and it takes all the difficulty out of the ebook formatting process to allow you to easily submit books in every format you’ll need. You can hear how to get and use Vellum on this episode.

Does your ebook need to be in ePub, MOBI, or PDF? Yes.

Every book publishing platform out there – iBooks, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo – has its own preferred way for you to submit your book for publication. Some of them even require their own technical format or file type (such as Amazon’s MOBI files). If you want your books to be available in the broadest possible way you’ll want to be able to submit them to all platforms. But you don’t want to become a software coding genius in order to do it. Enter Vellum, a powerful and beautiful piece of software that takes all of the guesswork and headache out of the formatting process so you can stay focused on your writing and be confident that once you decide on one of their pre-installed formats and make your own customized tweaks to it, your book is going to come out just as it should. Learn more about Vellum on this episode of The Self Publishing Formula.

This has got to be the easiest way to get pictures that work into an ebook.

They guys at Vellum have worked very hard to figure out the technical aspects of what it takes to place images into the content of ebooks. That’s because the two of them are former software designers for Pixar who decided to create their own book formatting software to make it simple for authors to produce beautiful books every time, no matter the publishing platform they use. That includes books with images. Find out how you can test out Vellum for free, on this episode.

Here are the options for formatting your ebook.

There are tons of tutorials on Youtube showing you how to use MS Word to create and format an ebook. That’s fine. You can go that route. When you do, you’ll wind up making a series of adjustments to your final product to dial everything in and have it come out looking how you want it to look. Alternatively, you can use a free tool (there are many of them online). That’s fine too. But wouldn’t it be better if you had one amazing tool to format your ebook perfectly, with great headings, drop caps, headers and footers, and images? You can do exactly that with Vellum. Find out more from the creators of Vellum on this episode.

Would you like $3000 worth of free editing and creative services for your book?

The Self Publishing Formula is holding a contest in co-operation with Reedsy to give one lucky winner $3000 worth of publishing services that could include editing, cover design, formatting, and much more. Anyone can enter and you can also get more entries by sharing the contest with others – and when they click on the link you shared with them you are entered into the contest again. This episode of the Self Publishing Formula contains the details of how you can enter to win, so be sure you take some time to listen.

Outline of This Episode

  • [1:14] Introduction to this episode of the podcast.
  • [7:41] The topic of formatting.
  • [12:09] Vellum – what is it and how does it work?
  • [13:14] What makes for good formatting in a book?
  • [16:10] How the two Brads got started in business and came up with the idea.
  • [19:36] The varying ways you can purchase the Vellum packages.
  • [23:38] How the guys came up with their pricing model and designed it for authors.
  • [27:36] Any future verticals for the business?
  • [28:53] The variety of looks Vellum can produce for your book.
  • [31:00] Future developments for the platform.
  • [31:53] Available tutorials and other ways to learn the software.

Resources & Links Mentioned In This Episode

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