Using Scrivener to Handle Big Writing Projects

One of the great things about FINCON11 was that I learned so many neat things. And, as you can probably attest to, some of the best learning experiences took place during candid, casual conversations with other bloggers. One of the tidbits that I picked up at the conference came from Ryan Guina at Cash Money Life. He mentioned that, for big writing projects, he liked using an app called Scrivener.

Scrivener helps you organize your writing projects, notes/research and other information to help you with your large writing projects. I haven’t spent a ton of time checking it out, but I am working on a book that I’m ghostwriting using Scrivener. So far, it’s been great. I’ve enjoyed using it — much easier to organize a large project than using Word.

You can organize your manuscript in sections. I’m using chapters. You can keep your research right where you can see it, making it easy to manage. When you want to work on a chapter, you can go right to it. When you’re done, you can compile your manuscript so that you can email. So far, I haven’t done enough to get the formatting right in Word, so I have to make tweaks to the formatting. But, overall, it’s a great program to help you manage books, scripts, and other projects. A cool feature, the corkboard, helps you visualize your project and easily jump to different segments.

Scrivener does cost $45, but it’s $45 well-spent, I think. If you get it to help you with your freelancing, blogging or writing business, the cost is deductible, reducing the amount of your business income, so you can recoup some of your outlay in the form of a tax advantage.

Has anyone else used Scrivener? What do you think? Or do you have some other writing tool that you prefer to use?