Sunday, April 28, 2013

Flying along with Scrivener...


Scrivener (software)
Scrivener (software) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The month of April has all but disappeared, and I thought it had only just begun. Where has the time gone? It really hasn’t been because I have been spending an inordinate amount of time keeping up to date with my blog posting. On the contrary, I have probably spent way too much time reading all of the useful information about the many ways to use Scrivener, posted on Everything Scrivener, by a vast array of writers and other contributors.

And having taken Gwen Hernandez’s Scrivener for Mac online class in February thru March, I was hooked, and I have grown as a writer thanks to all of that.  Without a doubt, during this period, I have been having massive amounts of fun, while at the same time learning new things about Scrivener and the process of formatting stories and books every day!

Though I feel that I’ve pretty much neglected my regular and consistent posting during this time, and that I should, perhaps, be doing more actual writing instead of reading about writing, what I’ve gleaned from the articles and other tutorials found on YouTube have proven quite worthwhile. What I have enjoyed this past month in reading through the very helpful articles posted at Everything Scrivener, is that one tip seems to lead to another that is equally as informative and useful.

During this time, perhaps the most beneficial tutorial I found was a wonderful video posted by writer Julie Kenner titled How to format .mobi and ePub in ScrivenerAfter I watched this several times, I actually applied her step-by-step, clear-cut instructions to a couple of my short stories (“Hobo Willie” “Pinewood Farm”) and compiled them perfectly to publish as Kindle Edition books. That was the first step toward actually realizing that I could do this after all!

Of course, after I’d successfully compiled my stories into the correct .mobi format required by Amazon, I needed to know how to get them into the Amazon store. As it turned out, that was one of the easiest steps—thanks to having done all of the formatting in Scrivener—and the very helpful YouTube tutorial Publishing your eBook on Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) Platform from Paul Salvette of BB eBooks.

As with the Julie Kenner tutorial, I watched Mr. Salvette’s presentation a few times and proceeded to go through the steps to upload “Hobo Willie” and “Pinewood Farm.” In less than an hour’s time, I had two short stories on Amazon! And in checking not so very long ago, I’ve actually sold a few and had a nice review for each.

So what’s next as I work up this learning curve? I’m putting the finishing touches on my novel titled The Bet, and I cannot wait to compile it into a format for Smashwords and/or CreateSpace as well as eBooks. There’s still a way to go, however, but at least I now have a grasp on how it’s done. And regardless of the format, it still all comes down to having a story that is well written, full of characters who have something to share, and a problem or two that needs to be resolved satisfactorily....MLA
Scrivener 2.0
Scrivener 2.0 (Photo credit: mortsan)

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