Vellum-quality output, but it is where you wrote the book.

Vellum's output is the reason it costs $249 and the reason authors pay it. Hand it a finished manuscript and the book that comes back looks like a designer set it: chapter openers with ornaments, drop caps that sit correctly, running heads that behave all the way through a print PDF, and a preview that shows you the same page as a paperback, a Kindle and a phone at once. That reputation is earned, and a comparison that skipped over it would not be worth reading.

It is also close to effortless. Vellum ships 26 typefaces and a small set of book styles, and the small number is the point: there are few enough decisions that you cannot easily make the book ugly. For an author who wants a professional print interior without learning typesetting, that has been the shortest route available for years. Vellum exports EPUB, MOBI, PDF and DOCX, the $249 is one-time with future updates included, and the trial is unlimited; you can format the whole book and pay only when you want the files out.

Vellum formats. It has no Binder, no Outliner, no Corkboard, no scene notes, no snapshots and no world-building, because none of that is what it was built to do. You write the book in Scrivener, Word or Google Docs, export a DOCX, and Vellum takes over from there. That division of labor is clean, and for plenty of authors it works.

It also means two purchases and two programs. Scrivener plus Vellum is $308.99. Word plus Vellum is a subscription plus $249. And every correction found after formatting has to be made in the manuscript and carried across again, or made twice, which is where the version you sent to a proofreader and the version you uploaded to a retailer quietly stop matching.

Calamus does both halves on one file. You draft in the Binder, keep the series straight in the Codex, and press Compile on that same manuscript to get a paginated EPUB and a print PDF at retailer trim sizes, with more than 1,900 Google typefaces embedded properly in the exported file. There is no DOCX in the middle, so there is no correction that has to happen in two places, and the whole thing is $189 once.

In practice Vellum is rarely where your book lives. It imports a DOCX and holds the formatted version; the manuscript itself is almost always still sitting in Scrivener, Word or Docs. So the file you bring to Calamus is the same DOCX you were feeding Vellum, and Calamus imports DOCX, RTF, Markdown and plain text, reading the chapter breaks out of the manuscript rather than asking you to mark each one by hand.

What does not come across is your Vellum styling, and it could not. Styling in Calamus is chosen at Compile, on the same screen as the trim size, and the choices are saved with the book so the next draft and the next in the series come out matching. Expect one evening of setting that up, then no further thought about it.

Before you switch to anything, take a full export of the manuscript out of whatever program holds it now and keep the copy somewhere separate. That is ordinary practice rather than a warning about this particular move.

Vellum runs on macOS and nowhere else. There is no Windows version, no iPad version, no phone version and no browser version, which is why the standing advice to a Windows author who wants Vellum output is to borrow a Mac, rent one by the hour, or pay somebody else to format the book. Vellum also does not sync, because there is nothing to sync to; the book sits on the one machine you installed it on.

Calamus has native Mac and iPad apps, Calamus Ideas on the iPhone, and it runs in a browser on Windows, Linux or a Chromebook. Sync is part of your account rather than something bolted on through Dropbox or iCloud, so the Mac and the iPad each keep a full local copy, keep working with no connection at all, and reconcile on their own once you are back online.

Most of this is the first half of the job, the part Vellum leaves to another program, plus the things that become possible once the manuscript and the finished file are the same file.

If you already write happily in Scrivener or Word and the only thing you ever wanted was the formatting half, Vellum is still the shortest path to a beautiful interior, and the $249 buys a tool you will mostly stop thinking about. Moving to Calamus in that situation means changing where you write, which is a far bigger disruption than changing where you format.

If your paperbacks are recognizable by Vellum's particular ornaments and chapter headings and your readers know them, stay. Calamus produces a clean, retailer-ready interior, and it will not reproduce a Vellum layout element for element.

If you format other people's books and clients ask for Vellum by name, keep it. No feature comparison argues with a client's purchase order.

The author this page is for is the one already paying for a writing app and Vellum on top, or the one on Windows who has been told the good formatter lives on an operating system they do not own.