How to FORMAT AN EBOOK Using Vellum (PROFESSIONAL + EASY)

what's up my friend Abbi here and welcome back to writers life wednesdays where we come together to help you make your story matter and make your author dreams come true it's been a while since I did a video about indie publishing so that's what we're gonna be focusing on today more specifically how to format your own ebook now if the idea of this freaks you out you are not alone when I first started researching indie publishing I was very daunted by the idea of formatting my own ebook like how do you even begin to make an epub file or a mobi file like what even is that luckily there are tools you can use to make this process a piece of cake and I'm so excited to share it with you so roll that intro and let's get started why does your story matter good question what if I told you that there's a science behind every great story I don't just teach you how to write I teach you how to change the world with your story and make your author dreams come true okay so you might be thinking why Abbey why would I format my own ebook when I could just hire a formatter to do it for me a couple reasons first obviously money you're going to have to pay a formatter to format every single book you publish and if you later find errors or you just want to change something in the book formatters usually charge extra for revisions secondly and more importantly in my opinion the control when you format your own ebook you get to decide exactly how the finished product is going to look which in my opinion plays a big role in the overall reading experience okay so those are the two main reasons why I chose to learn ebook formatting instead of just hiring it out now let's get into the process it all starts with a beautiful software called vellum now and I first heard about vellum I was like oh not another software that I have to learn how to use please know guys there is no learning involved it's so simple it's so easy it's fun even it's a miracle that this video is not sponsored okay I just genuinely love this software with vellum you can form my ebooks as well as print books but I only use it for ebooks because I tend to get really elaborate with my print formatting and vellum is more minimal with its options for print for my print books I use Microsoft Word and I'm gonna actually make a video about how I use Microsoft Word to format my print books I'll make that pretty soon the link will be here when I do but for e-books vellum is amazing and I would be lost without it the unlimited ebook license is $200 and the e-book and print package is 250 and in my opinion it is worth every penny because if you end up hiring a formatter to do this for you you'll probably end up paying the same amount for one book and then you also won't have immediate control over revisions which is a deal-breaker for me the only unfortunate thing about vellum is it is a Mac only software so if you use a Windows machine sorry however there is a way to format ebooks using Scrivener which of course works on Windows so maybe I'll make a video about that comment below and tell me if you'd like to see a tutorial on that but for now let's get into this tutorial I'm gonna show you how to format a beautiful ebook using vellum actually we're gonna do a hundred days of sunlight so I'm gonna show you how I formatted 100 days of sunlight and just how easy and fun it is to use vellum let's go okay so let's open vellum and let's start afresh so I have 100 days of sunlight here but I'm going to import it as a Word document because I want to show you what it looks like from scratch if I'm starting from the very beginning so I'm gonna click import Word file and I'm just gonna bring in the paperback version of it for the sake of this normally I would bring in just my final proof-read final final copy that that isn't formatted for the print book but it doesn't really matter for the case of this because the margins don't really matter it doesn't matter what formatting you have on your Word document once you bring it into vellum it's going to format it like it's gonna do a ton of the formatting automatically which is amazing so as you can see it's broken up all of the chapters into separate documents so it already found the different chapters that I had listed out just because it it recognizes when you write chapter or if you have a heading it will recognize that as a new chapter and automatically split it into all the chapters that you need so if you thought that once you import the document you're gonna have to go through and change or split all the chapters you don't have to do that it does that automatically which is amazing so first things first let's start to clean things up normally it would have a it would recognize a chapter title so if I wrote chapter 1 here it would put chapter 1 up here like automatically now for my ebook for 100 days of sunlight I didn't put chapter 1 chapter 2 I didn't do all that I just did the point of view character and then for the subheading you go into this little gear right here and click add a subtitle and then this for the subtitle I put the the subheading which is day 21 the book follows obviously days going by this is these all caps letters are something that I put into the print version so normally you want to have any special formatting if it came directly from your proof reader or your editor so I'm just gonna fix this right here and if you're looking at me doing this and you're like oh wait that looked kind of cool like how you have a little piece of text at the very beginning like the first line is different don't worry because vellum has those styles like built into it and it will automatically do it to the text that you want without it having to mess up the formatting because the thing is this if I kept this all caps because I'm like I want that to be all caps it would mess up the font because people on there on their Kindle devices they can change the size of the font right if you have a Kindle or an e-reader you know that when you zoom in it changes the font makes the font bigger then your line of text that you thought was gonna be just the top line becomes two lines and then it just looks bad so what you would do for that is you would go into styles and styles is is the fun part okay I'm gonna go back to the title so here I have obviously the title page loaded in from the word document but this is not the title page you want on Kindle so this is going to be the title page that shows up on Kindle so I can just delete this one altogether so to delete it you right click and click remove and then it's gone okay here's my copyright page there's some categories in Belem that you can categorize this is just like it's optional but you can categorize it as if you convert it convert it to a copyright page and then it just automatically lists it as copyright on the title page you would put in your metadata your information okay you put your link to your website it obviously already got the the title and the author name from my document but if for some reason it puts like your editors name in there when that's happened to me before you just click edit title info and then you put your information here exactly as you want it I'd also recommend putting your eBook ISBN in there because it's good to just have that metadata in there and then on up here on this tab you'll see a place to put your e-book cover so if you click that you can go to your book files wherever they may be and grab your cover photo okay so there's the cover that will show up in the e-book now you can change the style of how this looks we're going to do that in a minute but first let's finish categorizing some of these pages so this loaded in as just a untitled document this is the dedication page so I want to go to this gear again go down to convert to and choose dedication now I'll show up without a heading which is what I want and I want it to show up as dedication in the cop in the contents okay and then we go to the first chapter so I already put the title in there and the subtitle and the text begins as a normal and we're going to go up to the gear and then convert this to a chapter so now it's going to show the number and if you don't want the number there which I didn't for my book you might want it there depends on your writing style and the style that you want in your book so to get rid of that number if you don't want it you just click on the gear again go down to numbered which is checked as you can see when I click it it unchecks and it deletes the number so you would just go through all of these chapters and put it in the right information you would put in the title of the chapter and a subtitle if applicable for this book it's a little bit different it's not your standard chapter one chapter two it's just the the point of view character's name and the date so I want every chapter to be considered to be labeled as four categorized as a chapter but I don't want the number so I would just do that to every single chapter and then of course I would take out this formatting again when I did this the first time this formatting wasn't in here so now we're gonna go up to the Styles tab Styles is the fun part okay this is where vellum gives you the option to try different styles and see which one you like the best so they have several different themes and as you look over here in the preview window you'll see those different styles go by as I go through them it starts with different themes and then you can go down the list of the different elements and decide what you like for each element from there you can go to different elements of it like if you didn't want this little squiggly thing you can change just a heading and they have different styles here I kind of like that one but I don't want like this swirly drop cap on the first line what I prefer is something like this where the first few words are all caps or the first line is all caps so as you can see this is what I did for my print book it was all caps italics but for the case of a ebook you don't want to make that four line of text all caps because like I said when you zoom in you make the font bigger it screws up the text so you want to choose a style from this style panel that vellum provides you with okay and then we go to the ornamental break I don't have an ornamental break in here so I'm gonna go back and put one in just to show you what it looks like an ornamental break does not go here in the story but I'm just gonna add one so if you go up to this little star icon or asterisk whatever it is at the top you can select ornamental break that's like a time change mark whatever you call it time skip and let's go back to styles to look at the different styles we have available here so this is just like a little standard swirl a really minimal clean line a faded line snowflake for like a winter themed book I guess but you have different options here so I think I went with just the plain line but the cool thing is that if you insert if you go to your your book and you insert these ornamental breaks with this with within vellum like you don't just put a line there if you go through and find every place that has an ornamental break and you put an ornamental break through this menu that will give you the opportunity to change the style of them across the whole book without having to worry that one of them is different okay now let's talk about inserting images into your eBook so that's that's one of the things that I was like oh no am I gonna be able to do images because images are really important to me I want to be able to have images in the book because there's images in the print book there's little illustrations and I wanted it to have the same feel so yes there is a way to put images in your eBook and if you already inserted images into your print book or into your Word document file then they will automatically load into the e-book like you see right here but they may be lower quality because they were in the word document so you probably are gonna want to delete it altogether and then put it back in so I'm just gonna delete that even though it was the right image this is going be part one and it's called the smell so let's insert this image over again because I want to make sure it's the proper quality so go up to the asterisk and we're going to insert an image okay so here are my images these are all the illustrations that go in the book I'm going to insert the one that is for this part which is the vase of flowers so as you can see it inserted itself in there this little attention symbol it wants in a description for accessibility so if for some reason the Kindle had a problem and couldn't display the image you just want kind of some alt text there and here you can change the size of the image as well you can make it like super large or small whatever I think I set mine on medium you should see the little green checkmark the image meets the size requirements if it doesn't then you can learn more about size requirements by clicking on that Help button and you can check out this article there's a bunch of help articles that are linked in here so if you ever have trouble with any part of vellum they're really good about getting back to you as well if you need to contact them okay so as I mentioned this is a part in the book okay so chapters are gonna go with in apart this could just be a chapter like a divider but I wanted it to be labeled as a part in the contents so to do that you're going to want to find all the chapters that go in the part okay so I'm gonna start here right underneath the title smell I know that there are quite a few chapters but the way that I'm gonna find the next where the next part begins is to just like skim through them real quick and find where the next part starts so there it is this is taste I'm just gonna call it taste so that I know where it is in the folder here and you can see all the chapters between smell and taste I obviously haven't labeled them how they should be so I'm gonna click the first one hold shift and then click the last one now they're all selected right click this whole portion here and click create part from selection now that we'll drop them all into this menu here and I guess I should have done this inserting the image first because okay the the smell thing is on a different page whatever doesn't matter we can just recreate it real quick put this here if you don't want it to say part one again go down to numbered uncheck that it won't say part one it'll just have the part title and then you can go up to the asterisk insert the image let's just pop that image in there again and we can put the alt text in to make it happy and yeah so there it is the image shows up you can make it as large or as small as you want and now here is the part that I'm looking for so I'm gonna delete this one because I don't need that anymore and these are all the chapters that belong in smell as a category and I can even collapse these different parts as I'm working in this interface just to keep everything a little bit more organized but when I go back to the contents you'll see well now you'll see an option to exclude chapters within parts so if you wanted to hide it and just be like part 1 part 2 part 3 I personally don't want to do that because I want people to see how many chapters are in each part but as you can see over here on the preview window you see smell and then it's indented a little bit and then there's all the chapters that go within smell so I would just go through this document and you know go to taste do the same thing go through all these chapters and find where taste ends there it is at hearing and then I would put hearing here just to make sure that I know where that is go to the top of that section hold shift go to the bottom select all those chapters right click create part from section and part two I know it says part one but it's not part one it's because I told it not to number it so if I take the numbers off it goes away I'm just gonna remove that because I don't need that anymore now we have the section that is taste I can do the same thing with inserting an image click image and I have to download that image because I my cloud and there it is there are my waffles yay okay so there's the image there's part two I would just go through this whole book and do that okay that's what I did when I formatted this so let's go back to styles and look at this one more time because there's a few more things that you can do here for instance with a photograph you can have different formatting for photographs so you can put like a drop shadow frame on it if you wanted to some kind of frame and outline there's different frames you can choose from I personally think no frame looks the best but it depends on the style book you're writing maybe for like a historical fiction if you have photographs or something it would be cool to have a border or a frame for that for the headers and footers this is not for ebooks okay this is for print books so I'm not gonna really talk about that you can choose different styles for your print book if you have the print version of it but like I said I don't I don't format print books in this software I use Microsoft Word so that's a different video for a different time this body section is also for the print books so don't worry about that if you're just using this for ebooks okay so let's skip right to talking about back matter I'm gonna go through this and label them all as they should be in a minute but first let's go to the acknowledgments and convert this to acknowledgement so I think there's one for that right yeah acknowledgments okay and actually already categorized it as acknowledgments because it it recognized the word acknowledgement so that's what I mean the software is so intuitive it's amazing okay so you can scroll through this preview make sure it looks all good looks great to me so there's my acknowledgments page and now this is a bonus page so this is the page I have at the end of my book that talks about the bonus website and as you can see there's a link here the link is already active because it recognized that it was a link but I would put the title in here and then for you is is kind of a subtitle so I'm gonna put the subtitle as or you delete that I don't need that and as you can see that looks really nice right there you can also format this text here so let's say I wanted to emphasize these bonus features I can go up here and italics this I can bold it I can underline it I like bold so I'm going to leave that bold and that really stands out better amongst the rest of the text there's too many spaces you can always delete spaces you can tighten up this text within the vellum editor as much as you want and as you can see all of these links are active active active active because it recognized that these are active links from my word document so I love how intuitive this software is it's amazing so all these links are active if somebody has a Kindle that is linked to Wi-Fi that they have they have Wi-Fi or Internet access on their Kindle they can click these links and go directly to my youtube channel my facebook my Instagram my website and the bonus website of course and then I have the about the author page okay so this is about the author I'm gonna convert that to about the author obviously it puts the title right in there so I don't need that and there's my bio there's my photo it has a little warning flag on it let's see what that's about okay that's just the description for accessibility so I'm just gonna put my name here because if the image doesn't show up people know what it was it was a picture of me and the image meets the requirements so that's great I could put a link here to my author website if I wanted to but here's the cool part you can go down here to the built in social media links that velum provides you with and you can add as many as you want you can add Amazon but bub Goodreads Pinterest snapchat YouTube Twitter Facebook Instagram you can also delete the ones that you don't use so I think I put in my Amazon Amazon is really good to have you can also move these around so if you want Amazon to show up first boom Instagram is more prominent for me than Facebook I can put in YouTube of YouTube super prominent from of course so I'll put YouTube in next and then I would just populate these with my links so I'm going to show you what this looks like let's put in my youtube link and it doesn't want you to put the whole HTTPS thing you just put youtube.com slash your name okay instagram.com slash make your story matter turn the page and there are the cute little social media buttons that are active links that people can click through and go to my Instagram and my YouTube and Amazon Facebook and however many other ones you want to do now I don't have more books yet but if I wanted to provide people with links to more books I could add a new document here and I'm going to categorize this as a also by and I could put an image in here this is what this is what I highly recommend people do for their um their series if you have a series and you want to promote the other books in the series this is what you got to do insert the cover of the book or even better if it's a mock-up and it has like the the different books in the series and then in the text you're going to write some promotional copy that encourages readers to pick up the next book obviously right continue the series this is not a series so don't go thinking a hundred days of sunlight as a series it's not okay this is just an example if it was a series I would do this I would link the next book ok so you click on this the three dots you would put a web link in here okay you can also put a store link so if it's another book and you want to put the different stores that it's available at if you have it on Kindle and apple and nook and Kobo and Google and maybe on your website populate all of these links or if you just want to do a web link you can just send people directly to your store okay if you have an online store on your website or just to your website whatever that's also really good if you have a Facebook pixel and you're tracking people who go to your website and I'm getting a little bit more detailed here but there's just so many different opportunities here this is a really important part of your book in fact if you have a series I would make sure that this goes first maybe right after the acknowledgments because you want to get people before they leave you don't want them to just finish the book and then put it down if there is another book in the series you want them to continue reading it and you want to load up this document here with links okay so you can link the image of the book you can also link the cop the text here okay so if you want to insert a link there you can insert a web link or a store link okay you can do so many things with this final page and I highly recommend that you do take advantage of this final page because it's a great opportunity to get people to read through your series okay if you have a series or if you just have other books eventually I'm gonna add this to the back matter of a hundred days of sunlight when I have another book out it's gonna be a different standalone it's not gonna be a continuation of a hundred days of sunlight but it's you know it's an also by page so also by this author you might want to check out this book and that's another reason why I love having software like vellum why I love having the control over my eBook so that when I come out with a new book I can go into my vellum right here and I can add in all my new books into the back matter of the e-book and with all the new links whereas otherwise I have to contact my formatter and I'd have to ask him to do it and I'd have to wait and I'd probably have to pay extra for those revisions and you know I probably have to have the mobi file that he originally sent me because he might not have it anymore you know I mean so it's like it's it's way easier and just way more convenient and at your fingertips to have this access to your own ebook file and to be able to custom and make it look beautiful without having to go to a formatter and pay all this extra money okay so let's say that this book is complete I know it's not I know all the chapters say untitled but I'm just gonna I'm just gonna pretend that they are exactly what I want them to look like and in fact for reference I'm going to just open up my my real version of one hundred days of sunlight okay so this is the final final final version of the e-book obviously you can see all the titles are all the chapters are properly titled they're in their proper little sections here so let's go and export this book it's actually called generate so you're gonna go up to this this top icon here with a little arrow pointing to the book and click generate this is just trying to upgrade me to vellum press I'm not now I don't want that I'm just wanting to do the e-book obviously so I'm just gonna generate it for all ebook platforms if you want to see what those are you can click on the three dots and it shows you it'll be generating a separate file for each of these okay you'll be generating a file for Kindle and Kobo and Apple and Google and Nook and you can also do a generic epub that's always good to have so I'm gonna click continue and then select a folder for these books to go in so I'm gonna create a new folder and just put that hmm yeah let's just do it here Phil um test example I have these published elsewhere on my computer so I just want to put them in a new folder to show you guys so I'm gonna choose that folder and then click generate and then sit back and watch vellum do its magic this is the part that blew my mind when I first got it I'm like oh my gosh this is amazing I can just sit here and watch this little pinwheel spin and watch these beautiful green check marks up here like is there anything more satisfying than that like just sitting there watching those green checkmarks and knowing that you don't have to code anything it is doing the work for you okay boom it's done complete generation complete and now show my files it will bring me right to that folder and as you can see it made a new folder for each version and in each version let's go into the generic ePub it will have a cover photo and the ePub now the cover is in the ePub file okay but this this cover photo is just it's there for if the website that you're uploading to is like hey we also need a cover photo it's a really convenient to have it there I've used that so much honestly that feature just it's it's great to have your cover photo in all the places okay so here's the epub generic epub and I'm just gonna open that to show you what it looks like it will open in Apple iBooks and here it is boom one under days of sunlight and you can just scroll through this and check that everything looks right if nothing if something looks off you can go back into like like let's say there is a typo here or let's say I'm like oh I don't want it to say created with vellum I want to take that off of there we can go back into vellum and then go to where where is that the copyright page yeah here it is included include created with vellum if you don't want that little watermark there we uncheck it and then go and generate it again and when you go to generate the files again they will save over the files you just generated okay that's another feature I love of about bellum is it doesn't save like a million copies and then you don't have to go searching through them trying to find which ones right it just over writes the original files which I love so much so going back to the files that it generated you'll see that for each site there may be a different file so for nuke they accept eep-eep hubs for Kindle they like mobis okay so there's a mobi file for Kindle and you can download Kindle previewer from amazon's from KDP amazon website you can find the Kindle previewer download it install that and then you can preview this you probably saw it initializing while I was generating these but I have the Kindle previewer I can open it open the mobi file like that and it will take a little bit longer to load this in the Kindle previewer but you can also view it on Kindles website when you go into KDP and you upload the mobi file it will give you the option to look at it before you publish it so you don't have to worry about having this preview are necessarily if you don't want to download it or if you can't okay so that's it I could go on and on for hours probably and go super in-depth on all the different features I love within this software because there are a lot of different features to use but it's also a very minimal setup which I love because you can just keep it super simple if you want to have a clean beautiful well formatted book that is professional and responsive it's so so good for that so boom that's it that's how you format a beautiful eBook using vellum and it's so simple to use and honestly I just I can't recommend the software enough I love it again I am NOT getting paid to say this however I do have an affiliate link in the description box below this video so if you want to give vellum a try please use my link and it will help me out as well for me it's like a no-brainer okay if you have a Mac computer and you have a book that you want to self-publish you need to use vellum okay guys that's it for me comment below and tell me do you use vellum to format your ebooks if not what are you waiting for link in description smash that like button if you liked this video and be sure to subscribe to this channel if you haven't already because I post writing videos and publishing videos every single Wednesday and I would love to have you here in the community also be sure to check out my patreon because that's where we go beyond writing videos and take storytelling to the next level the patreon community is not only the best way to support what I'm doing here on YouTube but it's also the only way to connect one-on-one with me and get my guidance and advice on your story so go to patreon.com/scishow and rock on leave me alone oh my gosh focus [Music]

Channel: Abbie Emmons

Views: 27,847

Keywords: vellum, how to format ebook, how to make your own ebook, professional formatting, how to use vellum, vellum review, tutorital, ebook formatting tutorial, authortube, abbie emmons, writerslife wednesdays

Id: phus9fRekR4

Length: 33min 20sec (2000 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 15 2020