I’m new to the forum, so I thought I’d dive in with my recent success in the use of Scrivener…
I belong to another online forum that is predominantly teenagers and young adults from the Bebo social networking site. The group, called the Literary Den, decided they wanted to put together an anthology of their work, and publish it using lulu.com in aid of charity. I was volunteered as the editor-in-chief of this project; being one of only three adults on the forum at the time, and having worked in education in a busy high school English and Special Needs department, they thought I’d be perfect for the role. I started sprouting grey hairs in my beard around about this time.
The stories poured in, fourteen of us contributing all together. Myself, the two other adults (one of whom, Samantha Priestley, had just had her debut novel published) and eleven youngsters all put forward short stories for the piece. I then had the mammoth task of editing it all together to make one cohesive anthology. I did so using Scrivener.
I’d already purchased Scrivener for my own personal writing use, but hadn’t really been able to put it to good use. Finally, I could. I imported all the Word documents that I was emailed, spliced and diced, edited and annotated, exported to Pages, and within a few months (it took a while to then get to grips with the wonderful lulu system) we had an anthology.
I’m glad to say the book has achieved moderate success, raising so far nearly £200 in aid of the Laura Crane Trust (a UK based teenage cancer charity) and still selling the odd copies now and then. We never wanted to make it big, just to make it, as they say.
Without Scrivener, I’d most probably still be struggling to edit the book with hard copies and Pages. Though I’ve not yet achieved any more successes in getting my own work published, I can look at that book with pride, and know that Scrivener is most definitely the tool to use when writing on the Mac.
Hope that wasn’t too much of a ramble?