I have a new toy! It’s Scrivener, and I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing. Mostly I’m poking about with it and seeing what it can do (and what it can’t do). Actually, it’s good timing: I’ve just finished and have been prepping PLAYING HEARTS for publication, so I’m free to experiment now that I have some unobstructed time. And by unobstructed I mean free from grueling line and content edits, and trying to decide on which interior graphic works best for the scene breaks.
Now I have a shiny new word count bar that grows with each day I write! I’m actually more excited about that than about the rest of it. It makes it easy to get back to work on the next SHARDS OF A BROKEN SWORD novella, which should be ready for publication by late April! And in the most stylish way imaginable, thanks to Scrivener.
The experiment begins…
What about you guys? Have you used Scrivener? What do you think? What’s your favourite feature?
AHHHHHHH!!!!!!
*deep breathing*
Sorry, Scrivener-holic over here. 😉 So, the timing for playing with Scrivener may be far more fantastic than you realize. Because once you are all done with those line edits and have cleaned up your novel in Word? Copy and paste it into Scrivener, chapter by chapter. Insert your graphics and link ’em up to your table of contents (in Scrivener). And then… hit “Compile,” pick what you want (a mobi, you say? or an epub? or just a lowly pdf?) and PRESTO! It’s done.
Really. I kid you not. I spent a week learning how to code e-books so I could use my interior graphics and make Sunbolt beautiful. Then I realized Scrivener could do it. Takes me about a night for the initial set up (if I can’t remember what I’m doing), and then about 3 minutes whenever I want to make new files after whatever edits I might have needed.
Obviously, Scrivner has lots of other awesome features, but as an indie author, the ability to make beautiful e-books just like that? Priceless.
(Okay, now I’m going to stop gushing and sounding like some kind of ethically-unsound, obsolete Mastercard ad.)
Oh my goodness!! THANK YOU!! I was so worried about how I was going to make it all work and still come up perfectly in Amazon’s previewer! I’m totally going to do that tonight! (I have to have the final file uploaded on Monday, so your comment came just in time 😀 )
Awesome! If I can help at all over the weekend, just shoot me an e-mail. I love using Scrivener for this. I have absolutely no problem uploading Scrivener’s mobi to KDP, so here’s hoping it works wonderfully for you!
Thank you 🙂 That’s so lovely of you! I’ll come screaming to you if I make a booboo 😀
I’m a huge Scrivener fan.
I found I couldn’t come up with a good way in Word to manage stories once they exceeded about 70,000 words. Scrivener seriously liberated me on that.
When you write in it, Command-K makes a new text file, so you can make each scene its own element. Then you can re-arrange scenes to try out different plot beats. Select more than one scene (like say a few scenes across different chapters, but that all follow the same character) and presto, you have one flowing narrative* that you can manage without having to jump around.
* if instead you have a cluster of cards on a corkboard, then go to View and select Document.