I am a hobby genealogist. I am writing a book about the results of my research. The plan is to self-publish it in paper, PDF and e-book form. As things stand now I am thinking I’ll be the only person involved in all the writing, production and pre-pubiication steps. This is not a project that is going to produce any kind of revenue so I can’t really hire any experts to take over any of these steps.
I use Bookends for my bibliography, and I’ve started the writing process using Scrivener. I settled on Scrivener because it seems to be an elegant and powerful writing environmant. I will be using footnotes and I want to provide the book with a few indexes: for example topics, people, maybe places.
My understanding is that Scrivener by itself will not be able to provide me with what I need to create several indexes. Thus my plan is to transfer what I produce in Scrivener to Mellel for the indexes and for the final production phases.
My background in IT, programming, and as a Linux systems administratorgives me the skills I believe I will need to tweak Scrivener in case what I want to do requires tweaking. I’m expecting this will be somewhat time-consuming but that is probably just how it’s just going to have to be.
My workflow in summary:
family file, Bookends > Scrivener > Mellel > paper, PDF, e-book
I’m wondering if this sounds feasible to the seasoned experts of this forum? Does anybody have any advice or suggestions, or can anybody point me to resources that will be helpful for this project?
I’m not that familiar with Mellel, but yes, Scrivener → preferred word processor is our recommended flow for final formatting tweaks.
You might check to see how Mellel tags items to be indexed. It is probably possible to use a Style or similar mechanism in Scrivener to make those items easier to find in the output document.
The best advice I have is to start small. That is, start figuring out how the transfer from Scrivener to Mellel will work when you have a few dozen pages, not a few hundred.