Vellum is a gold standard for beautiful ebook and print formatting, but it’s Mac-only, and it’s a formatter, not a planner. If you’re on Windows, or you haven’t written the book yet, Vellum can’t help you today.
What Vellum does brilliantly
Vellum turns a finished manuscript into gorgeous, professional ebook and print files with minimal effort. Plenty of indie authors swear by it for exactly this step.
The two gaps it doesn’t fill
It’s Mac-only, so Windows writers need a different tool for formatting entirely. And it only enters the process after the book is written; it has no beat sheet, trope tools, or arc tracker for the drafting stage.
What to use before Vellum
Plan and draft in a tool built for romance structure first: a 13-beat romance-native outline, a trope selector, a character arc tracker, a scene generator. Then, once the manuscript is done, move to Vellum (Mac) or another formatter (Windows) for the typeset files.
Two different jobs, two different tools
A planner’s job is to get you to a finished draft. A formatter’s job is to make that draft look professional. Neither one does the other’s job well, so stop expecting one tool to do both.
Free while you draft
Romancery is free for one project, forever, for exactly this stage.
Plan your romance in one place, free
Romancery is a romance-specific planner: a 13-beat structure, a trope selector with beat-level hints, character arcs, worldbuilding, and series mode. Free to start, forever. Start planning free →
Coach or teach writers? Recommend the tools you already use and earn free Pro through the Romancery Ambassador program.
