I work in series. What I want to be able to do is have all of the books in a single series in one Scrivener file, so I only have to include the research once and can reference it, and previous books, in one place, while I write new books in the series, but then only compile the book I’m working on, without having ALL my books compiled in a single file. Is this possible? Is there a way to create separate manuscripts within a single file?
I’m new to Scrivener, so please forgive my ignorance on the subject. I’m hoping this system/program will help streamline my writing, so I can get more done.
Search the forums, there is a thread on the topic that was, as it so happens, active a few days ago.
You should there find most, if not all, of the answers/info you need to achieve so.
It’s great when you are writing a series, then at some point you publish a set. Compile each book separately as you release them, and when you want to do the box set, publish them all.
I did the multiple books in a single project approach for 6 months. At the end of the day I split the novels into separate projects again, including a commonalities between projects project as i have lots of information on characters and a few other things.
I use links within projects and to other projects (specifically my commonalities project), as well as standard and customised metadata, which differs for some projects.
So all this management became a bit much, creating sub-bookmarks (my name, not found in any user manual) per book or links to links, which is a bit of a yawn.
The main challenge was project bloat. Keeping a project under 10 MB is important to me. I have since adopted techniques to avoid including pictures directly into Scrivener, so I’m not irritated by the odd need to wait on unreasonably long backups to sync to the cloud.
There’s no real value of having all your books in a series in one project, especially if you’re going to reuse about 20 characters and invent 100 per book along the way. Then again you can create documents of links of who’s in which book, group team links in dedicated documents. All this can be managed via Bookmarks—which is probably Scrivener’s greatest management asset.
Also the other way is to create a world building hub, timeline, character profile to support multiple books and have a central source to bookmark. I have a three monitor set up at home and my vacation place so it is easy to open different projects on different monitors to refer too. This would be harder with a single monitor setup.
This is one advantage of multiple projects that I hadn’t considered. Each Scrivener project gets an independent window, with all the navigation and layout tools that implies. So there’s no need to worry about narrowing your search to just Book 1, just worldbuilding documents, or whatever; no need to figure out how to navigate through manuscript and research simultaneously.
