Whether or not I’m a good editor is subjective, but at 30 years and counting, I’m at least experienced.
I use Scrivener for every aspect of the magazine I edit, from reading manuscript submissions and sending the authors edited copy for review, to the final transmission to Production where it’s converted to InDesign. But because, like it or not, Word’s .doc format (and increasingly .docx) is the lingua franca of publishing, all those things happen as Word files exported from Scrivener. I’ve never had an author mention using Scrivener, though I know several of them do. As our (and practically everyone else’s) submissions guidelines say, “we accept digital files only as .doc, .docx, .rtf, or .txt.”
I’ve never liked Word’s track changes feature–to me, it creates more problems than it solves–so I have authors work on a .doc file I send them (created from Scrivener), with instructions to highlight and bold-face all new text, and highlight and underscore all text they want cut. Then I transfer their changes, or the ones that work, at least, to the working document in Scrivener.
But this is just me. I’m the boss, I’m only publishing 50 freelance essays/short stories a year plus 49 columns from seven columnists, and I can do what I like. But in a more corporate environment, you would need to be a very powerful writer indeed to get an editor to shift to a different platform merely to accommodate one of what will be, in an average year, maybe 20-30 books edited. To buy, install, and learn a whole new program for each writer? That would take a remarkable editor indeed.
It’s worth a shot, of course. All they can say is No. And some, who’re lucky enough to make their own calls, may well take Scrivener for a test drive. Except for the revision marks conundrum (which, when I work with other editors and my own writing, I deal with by using Apple Pages), some editors in a non-rigid publishing environment will find Scrivener a much better way of managing everything from the slush pile to author back-and-forths than a less mission-specific tool like Word.
