Vellum vs InDesign: When a Book Needs Professional Layout Software

The Short Answer

Use Vellum for text-led books such as novels, memoirs and most nonfiction, where you want a beautiful interior quickly and you work on a Mac. Use InDesign for books where every page is designed, such as cookbooks, illustrated nonfiction, textbooks, workbooks and children's picture books, or when you need complete control over typography and layout.

Vellum makes good decisions for you. InDesign lets you make every decision yourself, which is powerful when you need it and slow when you do not.

Two Different Kinds of Tool

Vellum is a book formatter. You import a finished manuscript, choose a style and Vellum builds the ebook and print interior automatically. It handles chapter openings, headers, page numbers and margins for you, and produces store-ready files with very little effort.

InDesign is page layout software. It is used by publishers, magazine designers and studios to build pages from scratch. You set up grids, master pages, paragraph styles and image frames, then place and adjust every element. Nothing happens automatically unless you build it to.

Comparing them is a little like comparing a well-designed template with a blank canvas. The right one depends on how much of your book needs custom design, and how much time you are willing to spend getting it.

Side by Side

Cost Over Time

Vellum is a one-time purchase. Pay $249.99 for Vellum Press and you can format unlimited ebooks and paperbacks with no further fees.

InDesign is sold by subscription. In the US it costs about $22.99 a month on an annual plan billed monthly, with a higher price if you pay month to month without a commitment. Over time, the difference adds up:

If you only need InDesign for one complex book, some authors subscribe for the months they need it and cancel afterward, though annual plans can carry an early cancellation fee, so read Adobe's terms first. Check current prices for your country before you buy, since they vary by region.

The Learning Curve

Vellum is designed for authors. A first-timer can import a manuscript, pick a style and export a finished ebook the same day. The choices are limited on purpose, which is what makes it fast.

InDesign is designed for professionals. To format a book well, you need to understand master pages, paragraph and character styles, baseline grids, text threading, image linking and print export settings. Many people take a course before attempting a full book.

What Laying Out a Book in InDesign Involves

To see why the learning curve matters, here is the usual sequence for a print book in InDesign:

1. Create a document at your trim size, with margins, bleed and facing pages set up for your printer.
2. Build master pages for chapter openers, regular pages and any special layouts.
3. Define paragraph and character styles for headings, body text, captions and quotes.
4. Place the manuscript and thread the text through the pages.
5. Place and size images, set text wrap and add captions.
6. Fix awkward breaks, stray lines and spacing page by page.
7. Build the table of contents and check running headers and page numbers.
8. Export a print PDF to your printer's specifications, then build or export the ebook separately.

In Vellum, most of these steps happen automatically when you choose a style and a trim size. That is the trade: InDesign gives you control over every step, and Vellum takes the steps away.

Design Control and Images

Vellum's styles produce consistent, attractive pages, with drop caps, ornaments and embedded fonts handled automatically. You can add images, but you cannot freely position elements on a page, wrap text around an irregular shape or build a multi-column spread.

InDesign has no such limits. You can place images anywhere, wrap text around them, build sidebars and pull quotes, create tables with full styling and control kerning, tracking and hyphenation down to the letter. That is exactly what illustrated and practical books need, and exactly what a novel rarely does.

If your book sits somewhere in between, a cross-platform formatter such as Atticus offers more customization than Vellum without InDesign's complexity. Our comparison of Atticus and Vellum covers that middle ground.

Ebook and Print Output

For text-led books, Vellum's output is excellent. It creates ebooks tailored to Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books and other stores, and Vellum Press produces a print PDF with margins, headers and page numbers set automatically for your trim size.

InDesign exports professional print PDFs with complete control over color, bleed and print settings, which printers and print-on-demand services expect for complex books. It can also export reflowable EPUBs and fixed-layout EPUBs, which keep the page design intact for picture books and cookbooks on tablets. Getting a clean reflowable ebook from InDesign takes more setup than in Vellum, so many designers build the print edition in InDesign and the reflowable ebook separately.

Which Books Need Which Tool

For workbooks and journals in particular, our guide to formatting workbooks, journals and planners covers trim sizes, margins and writing space.

A Third Option: Hire It Out

If your book needs InDesign but you do not want to learn it, hiring a designer who already uses it is often the most economical route. You avoid the subscription and the learning time, and you get files built to print specifications from someone who has done it many times. Ask for the source files so later editions can be updated without starting over, and agree upfront on how many rounds of corrections are included in the price.

Mistakes to Avoid

• Learning InDesign for a plain novel that Vellum or a similar formatter would handle in an hour.
• Forcing an image-heavy cookbook into a text formatter and fighting its limits.
• Forgetting that Vellum requires a Mac before planning a workflow around it.
• Building a reflowable ebook from a complex print layout without testing it on devices.
• Skipping a printed proof, whichever tool you use.

Frequently Asked Questions