"writing books" vs. "publishing" ? Is that a sharp distinction?

It's usually done by different people with different job descriptions.

A writer's output are manuscripts, works of art.

A publisher's output is a commercial offering of books, a business.

[1] https://askanydifference.com/difference-between-author-and-p...

I agree, but the latter can also be a work of art. Typesetting is definitely something that can be done right or wrong, and sometimes to a breathtakingly high standard.

The publisher engages or hires typesetters, as part of the publishing process.

Scriveners tools are designed to help a person write like keeping track of timelines, character sheets, and the like.

It sounds like the other product has tools for typesetting and layout, which are tools for publishing your finished work.

I recently wasted three days trying to get Scrivener to do something very basic - autonumber sections in a book without including part numbers.

It should have been easy, but the autonumbering features didn't work as advertised and I ended up with something that is probably a hack that relies on some bugs.

It's good VFM, but considering its audience it's also one of the most user-hostile pieces of software I've ever used. [1]

There's far too much "Yes it does that but it's not designed for it so keep your expectations low" for comfort.

Either include features and make them professional, or don't include them at all. I'd happily pay two or three times as much for something that does all the things it sorta kinda implies it does but you know actually not really.

Vellum does almost nothing in comparison except produce a limited range of beautiful books. But perhaps that may be of some interest to writers?

[1] TBF it's far better than Calibre. But that has the excuse of being free.

Kinda my feeling. But I won't trash Scrivener.

> Vellum does almost nothing in comparison except produce a limited range of beautiful books.

Exactly. That's all I want. Hopefully a higher price means they can live on that alone.

And they have fonts which not everyone in the world is using. Maybe Scrivener does too; haven't checked.

But maybe this will start a flame war: Guy Kawasaki recommends Adobe InDesign. To hell with monthly fees, so no.

InDesign is great, if you want to precisely layout print books. It does not support ebooks at all.

Doing both at once is Vellum's sweet spot.

If you don't want to pay subscriptions, I've heard Affinity Publisher is a good option.

Yeah, I gave up on Scrivener for anything to do with formatting. If you are going to use Scrivener, use it for an editor/organizer, and export the result as a word doc, and then process that in Vellum. Then you get good tools doing what they are good at.