MadCap Flare vs. Vellum Publishing App

MadCap Flare has its problems, but it serves our team well as an authoring software. This would not be the case if we needed to regularly collaborate on articles, as Flare is prone to conflict issues when another person dares to breathe near an open topic. When working individually, though, it's fine. I'd love to see improvements to design, performance, and stability, but Flare remains one of the best softwares on the market for our needs as an authoring team. MadCap Central is well-suited to internal reviewing when every member is comfortable with Flare (the errors it tends to introduce set aside). SMEs, though, tend to find it hard to use. It's cluttered, some styles don't render, and it just seems like a failed attempt to reproduce Google Docs. I'd love to see improvements there, to help get our SMEs to want to use Central.

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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.

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• Single-sourcing
• Branching (GIT)
• Publishing and hosting

• 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

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• I use it on a mac with windows parallel and it can be so buggy and laggy.
• I would love it if the software was entirely cloud-based, like Google Docs.
• Reviewing in Central is not a good experience, need better review functionality.

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• 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.

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MadCap Flare is in desperate need of an overall redesign. It relies heavily on dozens and dozens of tiny buttons that contain dozens of nested features. Clicking the wrong button can cause your software to freeze and crash. Building targets can be an absolute mystery, as far as all the files involved. It also has a tendency to freeze and crash. There's typically a huge learning curve for new hires who've never used it--nothing is intuitive.

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MadCap software does offer quite a few more technical features than Google Drive, but the user experience is far inferior. Google Drive is much less buggy to work with, and it's much more accessible. MadCap only being available on Windows operating systems makes it difficult to work with teammates who may not have such a device available.

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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.

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• We haven't measured this specifically

• 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

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A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info