In this episode of the Production and Distribution stream of the Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast, ALLi nonfiction adviser Anna Featherstone speaks with Brad Andalman, co-founder of Vellum, the popular book formatting software used by thousands of indie authors. They discuss Vellum’s origins, its evolution, and how it fits into the book production process—especially for authors looking to maintain control, streamline workflow, and update files efficiently. Brad also shares insights on how authors use Vellum in unexpected ways, recent feature updates, and how the team prioritizes new tools based on author feedback and publishing trends.
Listen to the Podcast: Vellum Co-Creator Brad Andalman
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About the Host
Anna Featherstone is ALLi’s nonfiction adviser and an author advocate and mentor. A judge of The Australian Business Book Awards and Australian Society of Travel Writers awards, she’s also the founder of Bold Authors and presents author marketing and self-publishing workshops for organizations, including Byron Writers Festival. Anna has authored books including how-to and memoirs and her book Look-It’s Your Book! about writing, publishing, marketing, and leveraging nonfiction is on the Australian Society of Authors recommended reading list. When she’s not being bookish, Anna’s into bees, beings, and the big issues of our time.
About the Guest
Brad Andalman is the co-founder of 180g, the company behind Vellum—the Mac-based software that simplifies professional-grade book formatting for indie authors. He launched the company in 2012 alongside Brad West after more than a decade at Pixar Animation Studios, where he helped build next-generation animation and rendering tools.
Read the Transcripts
Anna Featherstone: Hello writers. It doesn't matter if you're in the Northern Hemisphere or the Southern Hemisphere, writing fiction or non-fiction, our chat today is relevant for indie authors everywhere.
I'm Anna Featherstone, ALLi's non-fiction advisor, and it's our lucky day because we're going to be chatting with one of the creators of Vellum, a tool which has been used by thousands of indie authors to create their books. Welcome Brad Andalman.
Brad Andalman: Thank you so much. Great to be here.
Anna Featherstone: Yeah. So, you are joining us from San Fran, and I'm coming to you from the mid-north coast of Australia on the unceded lands of the Birpai people, and it's a beautiful morning here.
To begin with, I'm just going to mention that ALLi is software neutral. So, the organization doesn't recommend one tool over the other. There's lots of tools out there you can use to help produce your books, and you can even use some of the distribution platforms to produce your books or outsource it to freelance designers.
But I'm feeling pretty lucky that we've got Brad in the chair to chat today about how you can format your own books, and how that can work strategically and tactically for authors.
But first I'd like to know a little more about the man who is literally behind so many books, including nearly all of mine.
So, Brad, firstly, what genres are you enjoying reading currently? And do you mostly read print, eBook, or audio?
Brad Andalman: I'm not a big genre guy. I guess the genre that I read most would be literary fiction, although lately my friends got me to read Murder Bot, so I guess a little sci-fi thrown in there.
But yeah, I've been in this book club with my friends for 12 years and every month we nominate a different book, and we all read different kinds of things. So, at any given point I'm reading a wide variety of things.
So, I'm not really pigeonholed.
Anna Featherstone: Including non-fiction?
Brad Andalman: You know what, it's been a long time. The book club is limited to fiction, so I don't actually read a ton of nonfiction. I'm mostly a fiction guy.
Anna Featherstone: And do you do you listen to any audiobooks?
Brad Andalman: I don't do audiobooks. Although not exactly true. So, my girlfriend and I, we will occasionally visit this place about an hour north of here and we'll always listen to an audiobook there. So, we'll get through one or two a year because we don't go up there that often, but otherwise I read mostly in print to be honest, which is funny given that we started as eBook only.
Anna Featherstone: Exactly.
The Vellum Origin Story
Anna Featherstone: So, tell us about the Vellum origin story.
Brad Andalman: There's two of us, the two Brads.
I'm Brad Andalman. I live in San Francisco now and started Vellum with my partner Brad West. Both of us worked at Pixar before, making animated movies, and we both stopped around the same time and we knew we wanted to do something together and we knew we wanted to do something that was both creative, involved design elements, but also, we knew we wanted to write professional level software.
We had done some of that at Pixar too, and we didn't have a fantastic idea when we stopped working at Pixar, and so we were talking about some things and actually Brad's wife, Amber, was reading a series and was like obsessing about when the next book was going to come out.
This was already 13 years ago, and she was following the author's blog, and the author was like, the book is written, I just need to get time with my formatter who's all booked up. Amber was like, what is formatting and what's going on? Why can't I read this book?
So, Brad got curious, and he looked into it, and the idea was, how can we put the power of formatting into author's hands? Can we make it easy?
Both Brad and I love book design. We both had experience working on the design side of things but also working on the software side of things. So, pretty quickly came up with the idea to create the software that will help authors get out of this sort of bottleneck in a way.
Anna Featherstone: Wow, that's amazing. Filling a need and doing it well.
What Vellum Is and How It Works
Anna Featherstone: So, how do you describe what Vellum actually is and does?
Brad Andalman: Typically, we say that it's formatting software to take your finished manuscript, apply beautiful design to it, and generate files, eBooks and print interiors, that can be uploaded and distributed on a variety of retailers.
So, that's the simple tagline, but we have a lot of authors now who write in Vellum, which is not exactly how we designed it, but a lot of people like our sort of minimal interface, they feel like it helps them focus.
Some people never actually upload to distributors but just have it for their own needs. So, there's a lot of people who use Vellum in a lot of different ways, but mostly people have their finished manuscript, they bring it into Vellum to apply the variety of design elements to it.
Anna Featherstone: That's actually interesting that some people are writing in Vellum. That kind of rings true for me where there's authors who, until they can see their book visually in book form, they like creating it to look like a book. So, they do a lot of formatting maybe in word to try and make it look bookish. So, I can see that would work for some people actually, visually seeing it as a book. Very interesting.
Brad Andalman: We get that a lot. It surprises us. We wanted people to be able to edit in Vellum, so we added a lot of stuff to allow people to be able to write in it. But you nailed it because what we hear a lot is people love the fact that they can look in Vellum's preview.
So, Vellum has a middle pane where you can write or see your text and edit, and then the right pane, which is the preview, which you can preview in eBooks or print, and people love viewing their book as a book in this right preview pane. People feel like they can actually read and edit in a way, it gives them some amount of separation for the text. So, we hear from people who scan and read in the preview and then go back and make their edits in the middle pane.
Anna Featherstone: You don't have spell check or anything? Yeah, we have spell check. Okay. So, that's not how it's mostly used, obviously, but some people find that works in their production process like that. how many books do you think have been created with Vellum?
Brad Andalman: Oh my God. I don't know. I have absolutely no idea. I think that one of the tenets of how we started is, this should be in a way like Microsoft Word. Authors should be able to use this, it's a tool, and we don't want to take a profit like some, which is fine.
That's a fine business model, but really, we are like, hey, an author should be able to buy our software and use it to make as many books as they want, and we don't track that. It's all private. People can be working in remote Australian outback and never attach to the internet, and we don't know. We won't know and that's fine.
So, we really don't know how many books have been created. We don't track that kind of information I will say that we like to play a fun game, and we'll go to genre, like the Amazon top 10 free lists, every month or so, and we'll be like, how many of these are Vellum books?
So, we'll look at the romance, we'll look at Urban fantasy or whatever, and in the last few years, six to eight of them are all Vellum books. So, it's fun to see the reach there.
Anna Featherstone: That's quite incredible, and also just shows how practical the tool is, especially for those authors, which we'll talk about a bit later, who use it in their production process because they're producing so many books.
So, are you seeing any growth in any particular genres using Vellum?
I have to say romantasy. Everyone knows this, but we're seeing it too. It's just really taking off, like Rebecca Yarros' novels, which just went through the roof, and she started with Vellum, I believe, and just with the success of those Fourth Wing books, that has really sparked a renaissance in that. It's a fun genre to play in. There's some Australian authors really doing well in that space too, and later this year I'm going to the Romance Writers of Australia Conference, which is being literally held at the end of the world in Tasmania, It's such a great group of people, entrepreneurial, creative. Even though I don't write in that genre, by any measure of the imagination, it's just going to be fun to be around all the romance writers who are doing so well.
At ALLi, we were talking about whether we should have Vellum interview in the design part of the podcast or in the production and distribution side because you span both things.
I think how an author chooses to produce their books is critical to so many things, including efficiency, economics, and marketing. So, when I'm chatting with an author and they're like, oh, I just want to get my book out there.
I'm like yes, you can outsource the design, but we need to go a bit deeper. How many books are you actually going to write? Is this just going to be a one and done? Sure, just outsource it. It's so easy. But if money, isn't growing on trees for you and if you're going to be writing more books, part of your production process may be bringing that in-house, learning that software, so you can go forward into your career, knowing how to do it.
Then I know some authors with multiple books, obviously, they love using Vellum because they can update the backlinks, which we'll talk about a bit. But also, some of those authors are now too busy to even bother with doing all that updating, so they outsource it.
So, I think when we talk about production of books, there's different stages and different ways. It's very individual for each author.
Vellum's Role in Book Production
Anna Featherstone: So, where in the book production process do you feel Vellum fits best and how does it change or simplify a workflow?
Brad Andalman: Good question. I love hearing that you didn't know whether to include us on the design side or the production side, because both of those are truly so important to us. But in terms of the standard, what we normally recommend, is we recommend writing your book in whatever software you feel comfortable. So, we're software agnostic about where you write your book. As long as you can get it into a docx, which is an open standard, you can then bring that into Vellum.
Almost any writing software will be able to export to docx writing, software like Scrivener has a compile that is tailored for Vellum input. So, we recommend writing and editing in whatever software you want.
Then bringing that into Vellum and then doing the final formatting, that is applying the style, the design elements, choosing how you want it to look, and then using Vellum to generate those final files.
Vellum can generate eBooks for a variety of platforms, which we can get into later, and also it can generate a PDF print interior, that you can upload to any service that can do print on demand paperbacks or hardbacks, or whatever.
So again, there's so many ways people have slotted Vellum into their pipeline, but that is the canonical, when we first started out writing Vellum, where did we think it would slot in?
Anna Featherstone: I find being able to convert my manuscript into a fully formatted book and retain control of that process gives me this huge efficiency and speed. Like you said before, I don't need to wait on an interior designer to fit me in, I can make changes at will. So, if three months later, I find one error or a stat I want to change in my eBook or my print file, I can just go in and do it myself. So, I love that ability to be in charge of what I want to make changes to, and not to have to pay for those changes as well. I can just do it myself.
But are there some situations where you'd recommend outsourcing over DIY with Vellum? Like for highly designed non-fiction books or illustrated content?
Brad Andalman: Yeah, there are some things that Vellum is definitely not the right tool for. Highly illustrated books, again, people have done it in Vellum, but if you're writing, certainly a graphic novel or something like that, coffee table books, anything that isn't text first, I would say, those things are better designed in a tool like InDesign, or some other online resources can do this too.
Vellum really is more about text-based books, and one of the reasons for that is Vellum can generate eBooks and print books at the same time, and those eBooks are reflowable. So, some children's books, for instance, if they're for very young ages, you want that text to be positioned over the images. That's not right for Vellum.
Vellum's approach is reflowable so that people can read it on their Kindle or their phone and change the font size. So, books that really require this interplay between image and text, Vellum's not the right tool for.
Anna Featherstone: Can you speak to the whole Mac/PC thing? I know, because I've worked with some authors and I'm like, oh, Vellum would be great for your project, but they're PC users. So, talk us through the divide.
Brad Andalman: There's just two of us. Actually, we recently hired someone to help with support, her name's Catherine. So, she's not a Brad.
Anna Featherstone: Is that a 200% growth this year?
Brad Andalman: I know, huge. We're blowing up.
But for 12 years, there's been two of us and there's a couple things. We like the Mac ecosystem. There's a lot of things that we get for free by working on the Mac, and also we knew the software, we knew how to write on the Mac. So, we wrote Vellum, and we thought, okay, are we going to be writing more software if Vellum doesn't take off? And good news for us, Vellum seems to be doing well, and we just have so many ideas for what to do and how to grow it, that to do a PC version would take away from that.
So, there's various ways, I don't know how nerdy we want to get into software design, but at a high level, focusing on another platform would take away, it would slow down development on our current platform. Even if we hire another team, we still would have to be in charge and would still slow it down.
Anna Featherstone: You decided to do one thing.
Brad Andalman: That's exactly it. We just decided that's where we wanted to focus. It's not because we hate PCs.
Anna Featherstone: How do you respond to authors who feel overwhelmed by tech and formatting, and they just think they need to hand off their books?
Brad Andalman: I get it. Certainly, in this day and age, tech can be really overwhelming, and I wouldn't fault someone for saying, I don't want to learn a new tool; Vellum might be too complicated.
Actually, we have formatters who you can hire, we know of, who use Vellum, so that's fun too.
Anna Featherstone: Probably a Vellum formatter would end up being cheaper in the production process than a designer using InDesign or a more complex program?
Brad Andalman: Yeah.
Anna Featherstone: Because it's quicker for them.
Brad Andalman: Yeah, exactly. Also, I don't know if all formatters do that, but you can also then, maybe later if you write more books, you can pay your old formatter to get the Vellum file and then you can take over formatting from then on, update your back matter, do that kind of thing.
Anna Featherstone: So, that's actually maybe a really good point for authors, if you are using a person formatting in Vellum, to make sure that as part of your contract, you can have access to that file, because as an indie author, that's you still maintaining control of your production process.
Brad Andalman: Yeah, I think that's a good idea. I also want to say though, that one of the things that we strive for is making Vellum really easy to use.
So, I would say that I understand being overwhelmed, but it's also a free download, so if you have a Mac, you can download it and you can try it out. Catherine is there to help, even if you haven't purchased a license or anything. So, you can totally download, play with it and see how it feels to get over that, I don't know, the nerves or the anxiety of dealing with some new technology.
Anna Featherstone: That just makes me think about poetry. I've seen some people want to put poetry really beautifully into a book. Can they do that with Vellum, or would they need to do that somewhere else and bring in an image of that?
Brad Andalman: We have authors who write a ton of poetry in Vellum. Again, it's not expressly designed for poetry, especially if you're doing something like E. E. Cummings, what you're maybe getting at, where it's spread all over the page or something like that. You can do it in Vellum, and we can tell you how, if you contact us. That's not its primary purpose, but also going back to, if you want to make that available as an eBook, that's not going to be great because people reading on a phone with their font size pushed up, your text is going to be all jumbled up in that way.
So, Vellum may or may not be the right choice for that kind of book, but we've seen it all and people can definitely do it.
Anna Featherstone: Okay, so part of the production process and also then we'd lead to distribution, so what platforms can Vellum create eBooks for, and what kind of printers can work with Vellum generated print files?
Brad Andalman: Vellum generates eBooks for a few specific online retailers. Obviously, it will generate for Kindle. It will generate for Apple, Nook, Kobo, Google Play, and it also can generate a generic epub that can basically go anywhere else.
We can get into the differences about why we generate specific versions if we want, but at a high level, those are the versions we can do. If you're not sure, if you're not uploading to one of those that I named, just use the generic version Vellum generates.
As far as print, most of our authors use KDP or IngramSpark, but we have a lot of authors who will upload to BookVault or specialty printers. Vellum generates a PDF X1A, which is a nerdy PDF format that basically almost every print on demand retailer and print on demand printer can accept and print.
There are some small offset printers that might need some other additional marks that Vellum doesn't do by default, but that people can bring into sort of Acrobat and add later. So, the PDF can basically go anywhere.
Anna Featherstone: I use my PDF because I print three ways, with Amazon, with Ingram, and also with an offset printer, it seemed to work for me.
Brad Andalman: Did the offset printer require other marks?
Anna Featherstone: Nope.
Brad Andalman: Perfect.
Anna Featherstone: Yeah, it all went well, and the books were beautiful.
So, I think we all stumble a bit. How can we be more efficient when using Vellum?
I ran into problems. I didn't really prepare my Word or my Scrivener pub properly in advance. So, what can we do up front before we import our work?
Brad Andalman: We could talk for hours about that, but I guess two things. There's efficiency on the front end of what you do when you write your book so that it comes into Vellum.
A few things we tell everyone is when you're writing chapter titles, use heading one in Word and just do chapter, the number. So, chapter one, use heading one. Vellum looks for that and it will find that and create a new chapter there.
If you have a chapter title, then you'll do chapter one, colon, then the title, and Vellum will do that. We have a long guide that goes through by example, if you have a lot more other things you want to import correctly, like subheads or subtitles, or even text conversations. We added text conversations and written notes recently. So, there are ways that you can format that in Word so that you don't have to.
Anna Featherstone: Someone was saying to me that their problem was with non-fiction books, that there was no option for those secondary titles, that they had to manually go in and bold them. So, you are saying if you do something in your Word file?
Brad Andalman: Yeah, absolutely. Bold should come in no matter what. But if they're thinking about subheads, you just need to use Word's heading 2, and that will come in as a subhead, for instance.
So, we have a Vellum advanced import guide, don't let that name scare you, it's actually written like an example kind of thing.
Anna Featherstone: Now you're writing horror, Brad.
Brad Andalman: So, that's one way on the import side to be more efficient for sure.
Anna Featherstone: Okay.
Accessibility and Marketing with Vellum
Anna Featherstone: The other day I did a podcast all about making our books more accessible for people with print disability. So, how does Vellum accommodate readability features, accessibility, and what is Ace approved accessible output?
Brad Andalman: Okay, so before we get into Ace approved, there are two accessible styles in Vellum. There's one that uses open dyslexic so that you can create versions that people who are dyslexic might have an easier time reading. There is also one we named Legible, which again is a little bit bigger font size, uses a font design for legibility.
We care deeply about this, so we wanted to make those two things available for print editions. One of the lovely things about eBooks is that they're accessible almost by default, or at least reflowable ones are. That's why we really stress that it's for reflowable books is because on a Kindle or on your iPhone, you can change the font to be whatever you want. You can change the font size to be much larger. So, eBooks in general tend to be very accessible.
But also, there is this consortium, called Daisy, and they put out this tool called Ace by Daisy. When you run an epub through Ace, it will give you an output of where you could improve accessibility. So, that's what Ace approved means, is that we constantly run our epubs through Ace and check and make sure that we're following all of the best practices that are prescribed to make it accessible, so that people with different visual issues can use different devices to read these epubs.
I should say that not all of this can be done by Vellum. So, some of this is done by authors, and so Vellum does give a place where you can add alt text or this sort of description to images. So, if an image is crucial to your book, Vellum will allow you to set a description, and that will get set as the alt text for accessible eReaders. You don't need to do that for some of the ornaments and things that aren't “informative”, but you do want to do that if you're writing non-fiction and you have charts or things that pertain to the content of your book.
Anna Featherstone: And having accessible books is also like a marketing tool because it helps you reach more readers. Tell me also how Vellum can be useful in how authors market our books.
Brad Andalman: So, Vellum is really all about right before the marketing. I do think that one of the things we hear from a lot of authors is that going wide is a huge benefit to them. Not just being tied into Amazon as one platform, being available on all platforms, that's huge for marketing and you can market yourself in a variety of different ways and certain books do different numbers on different platforms.
So, I think Vellum makes it really easy to go wide.
One of the things we talked about a little bit ago was how we generate those platform-specific epubs. If you're going to go wide, Vellum, with one click of a button, will generate those six different epubs, and it's very easy to upload them individually, go wide, and cover your bases there.
Anna Featherstone: I'm also thinking for the marketing, how it's so easy to update those back links. So easy to just go back and add your other books, or as new books come out, you can then go back to your old files and add in newer books.
Can you talk about that?
Brad Andalman: Yeah, updating your backlinks is super important for marketing. We really encourage people to update that ‘also by' page in the back of their book.
If you use Vellum for all of your books, it's really simple to go in, update them all, hit generate and upload them. So, any reader who downloads any of your books can make sure to find all of your other ones from the one that they've downloaded.
One thing we added last, I don't even remember, last year-ish, was this thing called reuse. So, you can point all of your Vellum books to use the same ‘also by' page and then update that once. So, you don't even have to go into books and make the same change. You can go into your template, essentially, your reused file, update that one ‘also by' page, and then just open all your books, hit generate, and you're off to the races. It's so easy. People love that.
So, super simple to keep all your books up to date, which again is going to get those readers to keep reading your next or your first book.
Anna Featherstone: Yeah, and that's part of that whole production process for an author is to think about that efficiency and the marketing and how everything works together.
Also, the authors who are writing multiple books in the same genre, you do box sets.
Brad Andalman: Yes, we do box sets. Super simple, there's a box set creator in Vellum. You can just say, new box set. You can choose your Vellum books. Boom. That's it. It will put all three of them together, or however many of them together, and make a box set for you to upload. So, that is great for revitalizing or reselling, an old series that you have, for instance.
Another thing that we've seen, which is funny, we're not authors, we didn't consider it, but we loved seeing it. When I was talking about, we would occasionally go to the top 10 genre Amazon books, we said, oh, all of these books have the same cover design, they all look like they're from the same world and they are all written in Vellum, but they're all written by different authors.
It turns out that a group of authors had gotten together, they had chosen a particular style, created a saved style in Vellum, you can share these saved styles, tell everyone what to do, and they all wrote their book in this world. Then they all published the book at the same time. That is a great way to market, because there's only so many books we can write in a month or a year, but with a lot of authors working in the same universe or world, the readers just ate it up. So, that's a fun little marketing tip.
Anna Featherstone: Yeah, I love that. That's a great idea, and how fun to be able to collaborate.
You know, when we call ourselves indie authors, really, we're part of this amazing group of people who look at things a bit differently, and to be able to collaborate like that is super cool. Love that.
Advanced Features and User Tips
Anna Featherstone: Okay, let's do another techie thing. How many trim sizes does Vellum accommodate?
Brad Andalman: Oh, you're going to make me look that up.
Anna Featherstone: I know probably you do the standard, the six by nine.
Brad Andalman: We have, I think, more than two dozen at this point. I should know this off the top of my head. So, we recently, within the last year or two, added a bunch more. We added these mass market sizes, which are the four by six-inch size, and around that size. We added newer, much larger workbook sizes all the way up to eight and a half by 11. Then we also added a bunch of international sizes.
Anna Featherstone: Yes, the rest of the world, we're out here. We love that.
Brad Andalman: Exactly, yeah. Actually, in Australia, do you use, inches or a millimetre?
Anna Featherstone: We're metric, often we still go back. it depends what age you are.
Brad Andalman: Yeah, I think we have something like 28 now. I don't know, I'd have to count.
Anna Featherstone: So, what are some features that you can use in an eBook versus a print version?
Brad Andalman: Links is the main thing. In eBooks it's really when you add your social media profiles to your ‘about the author’ page. Vellum will make it really easy for readers to click on all of those icons that go directly to your TikTok or Instagram page and follow you there. That's a little bit harder in print. Vellum still creates a nice-looking thing, but there's a little bit of a barrier for someone to type in your handle to go to Instagram. So, that's really great.
We encourage people to always fill out their social media profiles.
Again, that's one of the things why when we create specific eBook versions for different platforms, we have something called a store link, which lets authors fill in where their book is on Apple Books or Kobo or Amazon, and when they use the particular Apple epub or Kobo epub or Amazon Kindle epub, they will be taken directly to that store, so that they stay in the store that they prefer to use, they're taken directly back there.
So, that's really good for marketing as well. There's no barrier to going to some landing page or anything like that, they go right to the store, they can buy the next book in series. A little harder to do in print.
Anna Featherstone: Yeah, though I suppose more people are adding their QR codes to the print versions, aren't they, to make it easier for people?
Brad Andalman: Still requires you getting out your phone, but who doesn't have their phone these days?
Anna Featherstone: True that. So, what are some common mistakes authors are making when they format their books, either with or without Vellum?
Brad Andalman: That's a good question.
Anna Featherstone: Or I suppose you take away some of those?
Brad Andalman: We really try. One of the things that we do is Vellum enforces good hygiene. It's always possible to defeat Vellum, but Vellum does try to enforce good hygiene. So, everything from standard indentation techniques to aligning text across a spread or making sure that the bottom of the page spread is balanced. All of these high-level things in book design, which I think a lot of people may not know about, or they just notice, but they don't really know the rules; Vellum makes it really easy. So, I see a lot of these mistakes in non-Vellum books.
We try to make it hard to mess it up in Vellum books.
Anna Featherstone: We appreciate that. Do you have any pro tips or underused features that authors should know about?
Brad Andalman: The reuse that I mentioned in the past? People are constantly surprised, but when we show them how easy it is to update one file and have that percolate to the others, so that's a good one.
I would've said every time we go to a conference; people look at the books that we have out that use Heading Backgrounds, and that's an example of a print only feature.
You asked about eBooks only. Print only feature is, it's common to see these images that appear behind the text of the first page of a chapter, and that's a really fun print only feature. eBooks can't really do that well and it's not really supported, so we don't offer it. But doing that in print is really a fun way to do it, and so every time we show these books, people are like, oh my God, I didn't know that we could do that in Vellum.
So, that might be an underused feature, although a lot of people have been really excited about it lately. So much so that we've grown those options recently.
Anna Featherstone: Yeah. So, you have recently launched new background images and sidebar decoration. Can you tell us about that?
Brad Andalman: Sure. So, two weeks ago, not even, we released, Vellum 3.9, and that expands the notion of backgrounds. I previously talked about heading backgrounds and that's a background you could put behind the first page of a chapter to really make it stand out and pop. But people really loved it, and so we added this thing called page background, which can now go behind every page in your book.
So, if you want a crinkly paper texture, that might be fun, you could have it across every page in your book. You can also do it behind just a single chapter. One thing is a lot of authors put, oh, read on for a teaser of my next book, and maybe you want that to really stand out from the rest of your book.
So, you can put a page background behind those to make it clear that, oh, this isn't part of this book, this is the teaser for the next one.
The other thing you mentioned is page borders, and that is something that can go in the margins on the top and bottom and outside edges of your page.
Similarly, that might be another fun way to call attention to a teaser that you have at the end of your book or just some nice frame that you want around the pages, or maybe you have a chapter and, I don't even know, it's some interstitial and you want that to be offset from the rest of your book, you could use the new border feature for that.
Anna Featherstone: I was seeing there was a lot of chatter in the Vellum user group. Everyone was very excited about the new feature and how to use it, and I just noticed the creativity of the people and also how collegial they were trying to educate others on how they were using it.
Are you ever surprised by what your users get up to?
Brad Andalman: Yes, all the time surprised by what they get up to. The Vellum users’ group is great. For a while we were not sure we should show up there and get in there, but at one point a couple years ago we did and I'm really happy we did because it's just a great group of people in there. Everyone's super helpful. But yeah, there was a recent thread of show us your fun interiors using the new features, and people have just made some gorgeous books. I love seeing it, and we try not to be too heavy handed in there, but it's been great.
Anna Featherstone: Yeah.
Current Trends and Future Features
Anna Featherstone: Is there anything else you'd like to say about current publishing trends or new features you've got coming up, or some final tips for authors thinking about how they can get their manuscript into reader's hand?
Brad Andalman: I don't know offhand, because I can say that we have another announcement with fun ways to use our page border and page background features that we just added. So, I can't say too much about it, but to check in on our website and sign up for our email to get the latest little bonus for some new ways to use borders coming a little bit later this month.
Anna Featherstone: How do you decide what features to work on? There's obviously so many, how do you prioritize?
Brad Andalman: We read every email and keep track of how many people request how many things and that enters into it, but there are just some things that we also think would be fun.
So, text conversations, very few people did that, but when we added the way to put text messages in bubbles, people loved it. They just really loved it.
So, I think it's a combination of doing the things that people ask for because we want to make our users happy but also keeping our eye on trends in book publishing, or even just trends in our world.
Like, it was just clear that everyone's using text messages to communicate, and I would read this in all sorts of books. Everyone had a different way to do it, and we were just like, you know what, it's so much easier to see it in a bubble than say, she took out her phone and read the text message, every time.
Anna Featherstone: Yeah, that was good. I was helping an author use that feature actually recently, and I was like, oh yeah, that looks good in the book as well. So, it makes that production part a bit fun.
Brad, thank you so much. This is making me want to finish my manuscript faster so I can put it through Vellum and see it in book form.
Thank you so much for joining us and for creating a tool that is used by so many authors.
Brad Andalman: Our pleasure. Thanks for having me, it's been great. I've loved talking with you.
Anna Featherstone: It's just great and thank you also to our fellow writers out there, all you creators and dreamers and doers making up words and worlds and making our world better through your words.
Until next time, I'm Anna Featherstone. I'm with Brad Andalman from Vellum, and thanks for being a part of the Alliance of Independent Authors podcast family. See you next time.
