If you use Vellum to lay out your books, and have more than a few books under your belt, you will find one of the new features particularly helpful.
I have just been updating the front and back matter for my series, following the release of the latest instalment, and the new ‘reuse elements’ feature has saved me a couple of hours and the potential for making mistakes. Read on to find out more!
What is Vellum?
For those of you who are publishing without using Vellum, you might want to give it a try. Vellum lets you create beautifully crafted files for ebooks and paper editions, from a single source file, with a huge array of useful features. You can specify whether content will be visible in ebooks, paper, or both, automatically insert referral links for various online stores, package up novels into a boxed set, and lots more.
It’s pricey when compared to other similar software, but it does a far better job in every way. If you publish often it’s well worth the money just for the time it will save you.
The Reuse Elements Feature
The latest free update to Vellum (3.6.1) made a few improvements to the software. For me, the most notable was “reuse elements”.
Reuse elements lets you select a section from an older book and link it into the book you’re currently working on. This means that if the content is updated in that other book you can just refresh the linked content in the current book, and then generate new output files.
In other words, if your back matter or front matter changes (for example because you released a new book in a series), you only have to type out the changes once, not seventeen times.
I have used this feature to copy the “Also By…”, “About the Author”, and links sections of my books. Since there are now five novels, two novellas, and two collected editions, that meant I saved myself the time I would otherwise have needed for updating twenty-four book sections.
This is particularly helpful if you create anthology editions or collections. Vellum already lets you create a boxed set quickly, and now you can link in chapters from individual volumes. Any edits or changes will be made in the linked book, as well as the book being edited — you just need to accept the changes and generate a new output file!
If you haven’t checked out the reuse feature yet, it’s well worth your time! It’s yet one more way Vellum gets tedious, time-consuming obstacles out of your path to publication.
Please note that I have no affiliation with Vellum, and will not benefit in any way if you choose to use the software. It’s a product I swear by, and so I recommend it heartily and sincerely.
It is, after all, a part of the golden workflow:
The Outdoors Author 