Going mad here... title pages

When I started my NaNoWriMo novel I set up thirty chapters, each with a target, and both full and minimal title pages.

Now I have got to the end and finished my novel I cannot find the Title page I prepared anywhere. What’s more, if I go to the page in the Binder marked Title Page, I just get a standard blank page, where I am pretty certain there was once a template with suggested fields to fill in.

I am sure that I filled in something quite elaborate when I started. But not only can I not find the title page I created, I can’t find the instructions on how to create it, nor any references here or in Google to the Scrivener ‘title page’ function.

Did I dream it…?

You could try using project search to find some text from your title page–if you filled it out, presumably it has your name, address, and manuscript title, so those would be words to search for. (The template will probably say “Your name, your address” and so on.) If you have the word count variable in there you could search for that, “<$w100>”. Otherwise it’s not hard to just make your own; it’s just based off a standard manuscript title page, so your name, address, phone number, and email (and agent’s name and address if you have one) in the upper left, with the word count rounded to the nearest hundred in the upper right (using that variable, which will be filled in automatically when you compile). Then, centered, about halfway down the page, your title in all caps and under that your by line, title case.

If you create a new project off the Novel template, you can just drag the Title Page from there to your current project’s binder to copy it over and then fill it out.

I found the old data in an early version of the project, done as an experiment before NaNoWriMo started properly.

The ‘template’ I remembered appeared as ‘Full Title Page’ in the binder after I went to File/New project/Fiction/Novel and created a new test project. It had all the suggestions you outline for important data to include, plus that code for total page count.

Thanks for your advice.

(I found a weird glitch with the minimal title page when I complied, but I’ve made a separate posting about it under ‘Bugs.’)

Great, glad you’ve got the title page set up now the way you want it.

I’ll check out the bugs and see what’s up with that. The issue with the page width in RTF might be a carryover from a bug in the pre-1.0 version; the template hasn’t been updated since the start of NaNoWriMo so the code may have been corrected and the template’s now compensating for something that doesn’t exist. You should be able to make your own minimal version if you want by duplicating the full title page and then just stripping out the portions of text you don’t need.