Hi, very new to the forum as well as to Scrivener. I’ve spent about a day going through the tutorial and as a (very) long time Word user I find the non-linear abilities of Scrivener perfect. I don’t think I’ll completely convert, but I see a lot of Scrivener work in my future. I’ve looked over the posts and didn’t see an answer to my question so I wanted to present it to the masses for input.
I have several e-books that I have converted into Scrivener and am curious if it makes sense to put them all into a single project or should it be one project for each book. The reason I ask is that each book is a kind of “how to” on different careers but a lot of info in each book will remain the same (some entire chapters, the final “thank you”, etc). If they are all in the same project it seems like I could simply copy a given chapter from one book to another. I think I can if they are in different projects as well, but it seems easier if they are in the same project.
Will I have problems compiling like this? I see I can pick and choose the chapters to include but not sure if I should expect problems.
Does Scrivener itself scale like this…are there upper limits I’ll eventually reach by doing this?
Also, very curious if anybody else uses it in this way or is it more standard to go with one project per book.
Geez, my first post here and I screwed it up - sorry. Trying to move this to the Questions folder but can’t see how. Please forgive my transgressions! (Moderator, please move this before I get flamed!)
I’ve got a book series on the go and I’d like to manage them in one ‘project’ using Scrivener. So is this a practical thing to do or does it create too many problems?
(Still learning my way around this program.)
I’ve moved it to the Windows tech support section for you.
In answer to your question, I would say it depends more upon the supporting material than the stable stuff around the book that rarely changes. If two or more works are heavily based upon the same research and background information, then they would certainly benefit from being in the same project together. However even in that case they will all be in their own discrete top-level folders beneath the draft. “Book one”, “Book two” etc. They wouldn’t share pieces amongst each other, and trying to do that would be a lot of busy work.
So, if the research is different in each how-to, then what I would suggest is setting yourself up with a custom template. Templates are starter projects. You can build up the structure of them, set up the compiler, and do anything else that you can do in a project and once you get it to a point where it starts to veer into specific material for one work, save it as a template (File menu). Now in the future you can select this custom template to start from, instead of a blank project, and you’ll have the “About the Author”, “Thank You” and all that stuff ready to roll.
But if the research is shared, then you could set up this starting structure somewhere in your binder outside of the draft. Then when you start a new how-to, you can select that starter folder and duplicate it, then move the new duplicate up into the Draft folder.
