Your Book Pro vs Vellum
They do different jobs. Vellum The best-looking book formatting on the market, and it is not close. Your Book Pro is the editorial process — planning, structural feedback, a simulated beta read, editing, proofreading, a cover and a print-ready file. Most authors who ask this question should use both, and the export here is built so they can.
Side by side, honestly
Vellum's own published pricing, September 2026. We have not tried to make this flattering — a comparison you cannot trust is worth nothing to either of us.
| Vellum | Your Book Pro | |
|---|---|---|
| Best for | Mac owners who want beautiful formatted output and are happy to pay once for it. | Getting a book from idea or draft to finished, with the editorial work done properly |
| Price | Vellum Press $249.99 one-time | Plus: free to start with 1,000 non-expiring credits; credit packs are there when you need more |
| Approach to AI | No core AI | Editorial guidance and feedback. Your words stored as Exact Text and never overwritten. |
| Planning | Limited | Book Coach (free, no account) and Plan Feedback |
| Structural feedback | No | Detailed Editorial Feedback across the whole manuscript |
| Beta reading | No | Beta Reader — three reader types across the whole book |
| Proofreading | No | Proofread, checked against your own style sheet |
| Formatting / export | Excellent | Clean manuscript export, with presets for the main formatting tools |
| Works with the other | Yes | Yes — upload from anywhere, export again, free forever |
A separate free preview: A free outside view of your own pages
Whatever you decide here, an outside read shows where your effort will count most. Send up to 5,000 words. You get back what the draft appears to be doing to somebody who wasn't there when you wrote it, the strongest thing in it named, the exact place a reader starts to drift, and three revision priorities in order.
It reads one extract, not the whole book. An AI-assisted read of your own pages. Not a human edit, not a line edit, and not a scored report.
What Vellum is genuinely good at
The best-looking book formatting on the market, and it is not close. Vellum produces ebook and print files that look professionally typeset in minutes, and authors who use it are rightly evangelical.
What these tools do instead
Vellum is a formatting tool. It makes a finished manuscript beautiful; it has no opinion about whether the manuscript works. Your Book Pro is the editorial part — the structural feedback, the beta read, the proofread, the legal screen — that happens before formatting.
They are not really competitors. They sit at different ends of the same process, and a great many authors should use both.
The part people miss
The one practical caveat worth knowing: Vellum is Mac-only. If you are on Windows, Atticus is the usual comparison, and the export here works with either.
How to use both
Edit here, format there. Export a clean manuscript and take it into Vellum for typesetting — that is the intended path, and the export preserves heading hierarchy and chapter order so Vellum picks it up correctly.
Plus lets you upload a manuscript you wrote anywhere, run whichever tool you actually need, and export it again. That is what makes keeping both tools a real option rather than a polite fiction: your book does not have to move house to get edited. A plain export of your own words is free forever.
About Your Book Pro
Your Book Pro is a book-writing platform built in Britain. Start with an idea, notes, half a draft, a podcast, or a finished manuscript, and use our purpose-built AI tools for planning, feedback, editing, proofreading, cover designs, and to create print-ready files. Writing is totally free: you can type, upload or speak your book as much as you like, and use only the editing tools you need with Plus, or go unlimited with Pro.
Produce world-class drafts at the fraction of the cost of hiring a human editorial team.
Every account starts with 1,000 welcome credits, and a plain export of your own words is free.
Every account starts with 1,000 welcome credits that never expire, so a whole-book structural review — normally 900 credits for a 60,000-word book — costs nothing the first time. credit packs are there when you need more.
And the honest limits are on every tool page, not hidden: real beta readers in your actual audience tell you things no simulated reader can; a cover designer who knows your shelf will outsell a generated cover; a publishing solicitor is the answer when a book names living people. We would rather say so here.
Upload a manuscript written anywhere
Run a whole-book review
Email me my free review linkQuestions people ask
- Is Vellum better than Your Book Pro?
- For what it does, Vellum is good at it — that is why the answer is usually both rather than either. They sit at different points in making a book.
- How much does Vellum cost?
- Vellum Press $249.99 one-time, as published on their site in September 2026. Check the current price before deciding — these move.
- When should the book move into Vellum?
- When the words are final. Typesetting is the last step and changes after layout are slower, so finish editing and proofreading here, then export a clean manuscript.
- Will Vellum pick up my chapters from the export?
- The export keeps heading hierarchy and chapter order so the chapter structure comes across. Check the chapters once they are in Vellum before you start styling.
- I use Windows. Is Vellum an option?
- Vellum runs on Mac only. On Windows, export the manuscript and use another formatting tool; the export has presets for the main ones.