After a swift glance around at some other writing software, I feel a deep, deep need to thank you for giving your software such an awesome name. Telling people “I use Scrivener to write my novels” just feels so many worlds above some of the other options out there: “I use My Great Novel Writer to write my books.” (I made that one up, but it’s not far off the mark.) So thank you. “Scrivener” just feels so suave.
Not to mention Literature & Latte.
Also, you have cooler images to sell your product. (I have seriously just spent the last ten minutes procrastinating by laughing myself silly over some hilarious pictures I’ve found on boxed novel software, including “type happily at your couch while your teen heart-throb boyfriend pours milk in the kitchen.”)
So. The other software may be great, I really have no idea (undoubtedly it cannot compare to Scrivener, of course), but I just can’t get over some of the names. Thank you for not being one of them.
Ha, the “type happily at your couch” images sound very much like iStockPhoto pictures that can be found on a popular Windows novel-writing software site, so I think I know the one you mean!
I’m quite pleased with the name “Scrivener”, too. Okay, some wise-Alecs, when they first hear of it, make the hilarious joke, “I’d prefer not to,” but the thing I like about it is that the term can be used in a quite self-deprecating manner (“What do you like doing?” “Uh, well, I’m a bit of a scrivener in my spare time…”). Also the fact that it doesn’t contain the word “story” means that it’s not limited by its very name to appeal only to fiction writers, which was a bit of a lucky accident during the naming process.
I have wondered whether the name “Scrivener” for a piece of writing software was planted in my head subliminally though. A couple of years ago, I learned that Richard Dawkins - the great British evolutionary scientist (and a bit of a hero of mine) wrote himself a word processor on one of the very early Apple computers, and called it… Scrivener. (I learned this after someone sent me a picture of Richard Dawkins giving a lecture with the Scrivener icon in his Dock on the large screen behind him - presumably he’d checked it out because of the name, as he’s not a customer - dammit.) His “Scrivener” was never released or anything, but it was mentioned, apparently, in one of his books that I might have read years ago. It certainly wasn’t a conscious or intentional borrow though.