My Love For Scrivener Continues...

I mentioned awhile ago, I'm sure I did, that I had moved over to using Scrivener for my writing. At first it was just because Word does its weird auto-formatting thing that makes e-books unpredictable. As you have to use Word to upload to Smashwords (though, I think they do now take epub, but you still need to get your word document to epub somehow), I wanted a more reliable way than writing the whole thing and then spending hours removing all the formatting and redoing the whole thing. 

I had heard a bit about Scrivener, and one friend had tried to tell me that if I was serious about writing I should really test it out. So I finally took the plunge and signed up for their 30 day trial (which, by the way is awesome because it counts the number of days you use it for, not 30 calendar days from when you sign up.) 

I'm in love. I don't think I've taken up a new piece of software as quickly as I've accepted Scrivener. I can't imagine working on any of my drafts not using it now. It does take some getting used to, but its benefits are so useful straight away that it's worth it.

I highly recommend watching at least the 10 minute video tutorial, because it is so packed with features that it is hard to work out everything it can do. I must admit, there is a 30 minute walk through tutorial which I've never done, but maybe one day I will. 

I'm still discovering a lot of the features, and there are a few things which I find annoying and am sure there must be a way around, I just haven't worked them out yet. However, I just wanted to highlight one way that it has totally changed my writing. 

Scrivener works in scenes and chapters, and when you are finished you 'compile' it altogether into whatever document type you need. So I've been going through importing the previous stories I've written in Word, and breaking them up into scenes so I can see how it is all fitting together. This has highlighted a serious problem in my previous writing: my chapter and scene lengths were all over the place!

Scrivener automatically displays the word count for that section down the bottom. So as I've been dividing these long documents into their scenes, I've suddenly realised that my chapters vary between 1,000 and 4,000+ words! This might be okay if I were doing it on purpose to make certain points. But I wasn't, I just wasn't writing very well.

I'm currently going through my 50,000 word draft of After The Winter. It is really illuminating to see it all broken up into scenes, because I can see where I need to expand, and other areas that are too long. Using Scrivener's outline form (which looks like cue cards on a corkboard, see below) I can type up short summaries of each scene and what I need to add to make the story work. It is giving me a clear path on what needs to be done and taken away a lot of the fear I had about it last night (to the point where I didn't start editing at all, because I was just overwhelmed with what needed to be done). 

It also helps that I can easily jump around the entire document, because the scenes outlined on the left hand side. When you are editing and/or planning, this is invaluable because I keep getting ideas like 'oh, I need to explain that when they first meet', and can skip back, put a note on the card, and be back to where I was in less than 20 seconds. Much easier than scrolling to where you think that scene was, trying to find somewhere you can leave a note, then scrolling back to where you were. 

So hopefully I will have a much more evenly written book by the time I'm finished, and more fun while I'm doing the actual writing (which is not to be underestimated).

Anyone else have great tips or features they have found with Scrivener?

Busy Little Self-Employed Bee

So, have now been self-employed for three whole days!

What have I achieved in that time?

1. Continued with the creation of my awesome business plan and procedure manual. (Much harder than one might think, and involves complicated planning like how am I actually going to go from where I am now to running a multi-million dollar business helping people publish their works. Great in theory, just working out the practical steps to get there slightly harder). 

2. Have signed up for a number of writing conferences, to keep my skills sharp (and the all important networking). 

3. Wrote to one of the writing conferences I was planning to attend anyway, and asked if they needed another presenter to talk about creating an online platform. They came back and said they didn't need another presenter, but could I be on the panel talking about marketing and social media. Yah! Buffy Empire Building begins. 

4. Encouraged by that success I then wrote to different community centres and training organisations with proposals to run a short course in self-publishing. Am still waiting for responses, but the only way to build my experience and reputation is by actually doing it!

5. Using YouTube, I have taught myself to do basic covers in Gimp, and have created two covers for my brother's short stories. Pretty, no? (Hey, for half a day of learning, I think they are pretty good. Think what I will be able to do after an entire week!)

I'm still going to use my graphic designers for proper novels, but for free/cheap short stories, it is easier to do it myself. (Graphic designer has so far been mucking around for a month with Dave's other cover. I did these in an hour each.)

6. Following on from doing the covers, I edited both of Dave's short stories and uploaded Tom Grafton Vs. The Sambar Spiker onto Smashwords yesterday, and Tom Grafton Vs. The Wild Dog Pack on Smashwords and Amazon today.

The first one is completely free and available at Smashwords. If you had a spare 20 minutes and liked hunting/adventure stories, a review would be hugely appreciated. 

The other one is available for just 99c, less than a can of coke and much better for you! Reviews of that would also be great on Smashwords, Amazon or Good Reads. (Am getting Dave's author page up on Good Reads, but might take a day or two...).

Search for "David Alexander Greentree books" in google turns up both Smashwords and Amazon. 

7. Got annoyed with trying to publish on Smashwords from Word, which was being stupid, so downloaded Scrivener (finally!) and taught myself how to use that today. Had to reload Tom Grafton Vs The Sambar Spiker to Smashwords as it was coming up with an error, but after I had played with it in Scrivener for a while, it came good. From now on, all writing to be published is going to be in Scrivener. Long live a word processing program that actually prints like it looks!

8.  Have spent a few hours teaching my father how to set up a Facebook Page (not his personal one), how to do some keyword research, and what article marketing is. It's a slow process, but at least they are paying me. (My parents figured it was that or have me evicted for not paying my rent and sleeping on their floor anyway. It's a fair point). 

So, I think that for just 3 days' work, that's pretty good, if I do say so myself. Though haven't done any blogging this week, as it was meant to be my 'week off'. But still, can't do everything, and can't have it all right now.

Any good tips on cover creation?