Vellum vs. Venngage

Vellum is perfect for novels, novellas, short fiction anthologies, and any lightly illustrated fiction. It’s excellent for most non-fiction. It’s great for e-Books and Paperbacks. I haven’t tried using the file for hardcover but it is likely good for that as well. Vellum wouldn’t be the right tool for coffee-table art books, picture books or children’s illustrated books.

Incentivized

Venngage works really well for basically creating any type of standard infographic that you can see when you browse the templates. We have used it successfully to communicate retention data, strategic plan information, workflows and more. It doesn't work as well though when you try to get too fancy with it. Meaning, you want a Word Cloud taking on a specific shape or reusing certain words a specific number of times. For those things, we found that it was best to use another application and then import the work as a graphic.

Incentivized

• Professional, Tasteful Formatting
• Table of Contents management
• File Management
• Ease of switching elements (i.e. Chapter, Acknowledgement, About the Author etc.)
• Beautiful Style Sheets
• Generating uploadable files quickly and painlessly
• Previewing for a variety of formats and devices

Incentivized

• Access to pictures and upload of own materials.
• Create multiple projects at the same time.
• Organizing designs by project and campaign.

Incentivized

• Could improve ability to change the look of a design element like Ornamental Break.
• Doesn’t currently output in Smashwords .doc format (but does EPUB).
• Spell Check is rudimentary but accurate - still, it’s much better to use Word or Grammarly.
• If style uses initial drop cap, it doesn’t handle one-letter words well (I, A, O) - repeats letter in sentence. This may be standard practice, not sure.
• There are a couple dozen styles. I would gladly pay for a “Style Pack” to add on additional styles.

Incentivized

• They have an AI generator, but it can only generate the design once. Any modifications should be manually done. It would be great if the AI could make specific changes instead of having it regenerate everything.
• You can't use it on a mobile phone or tablet, it would be helpful if I could use it on my tablet for work done outside my office.
• It would be great if I could delete multiple designs at once. Currently, I can only delete them one by one.

I use Venngage for a new project 1-2 times per week... I could not see using another program at this point.

Incentivized

I find it very user friendly, straight to the point, and the minor issues I found wasn't really impacting on my role. So I think it would depend? but personally I find it perfect for me. There were lots of templates I could use, and they were very open to feedback and customer service was very accommodating.

I think that the attention that I get as a small business owner from Venngage is excellent. They quickly respond to questions and provide information that helps to resolve the issue that I am having.

Incentivized

Up until purchasing Vellum, I’ve used Smashwords Meat Grinder template and Kindle’s PC-Only software. I had to buy a PC just to publish to Kindle - very expensive investment with modest return. Vellum is only for Mac. In fact, it would have been cool if it worked with a PC. But Mac is my ecosystem for writing, and the PC is a pain. I ultimately chose Vellum because it works with my MacBook.

Incentivized

Canva had a lot of features, which is great, but I got overwhelmed and I didn't know where to start. Adobe PhotoShop is great too, but I think it's better for more experienced editors/designers? I'm not an editor, I don't know a lot of stuff with editing, so it was difficult. I rely on my common sense mostly.

• Less time publishing means more time writing
• Beautiful books sell better than Times New Roman dreck
• I’ve stayed away from Google Books but will move into that market now

Incentivized

• It was frustrating to be required to purchase a full month, not be able to download into PowerPoint and edit, and not be given a refund.