I was originally writing my novel solely using MS Word. I was convinced to give scrivener a try. However now that I’m getting to the point of finalizing my novel for print, one of the main functions I use in Microsoft word doesn’t appear to be available in Scrivener (which is to make sure that new chapters start on an odd page, or the right side page of a book each time).
I’m now looking at exporting my work back to MS Word so that I’m able to have the formatting set up correctly for printing, but I’m guessing with so many people using scrivener there must be a better way than this?
I never even considered preparing my books for print in Scrivener. I did that for an e-book, but even then I needed Sigil and Calibre to finish that book.
Thanks Antoni. Maybe I should have just stayed with Microsoft Word then, I think I’ve just created more work for myself by porting it to Scrivener when I’m just going to have to export it again to another program for print.
That’s a pity. I was mistaken when I looked at all the compile options in Scrivener to think that it was capable of compiling for the right output from the one program. Thanks for confirming, and saving me a lot of extra time trying to make it work in Scrivener, if it’s not going to be able to in the end.
Well, compile your novel to DOCX Word format and format final from there? @AntoniDol 's approach is taken by many authors and publishers and is surely the “best” way. But if Word works for you, use it to make your final “print”. Or set the Scrivener compile settings to start each chapter on an odd page.
Consider Scrivener a good investment for producing your next book. It’s got a great, configurable Editor, Full screen composition Mode, Typewriter Scrolling and many other features to help you writing.
Researching and plotting is something Scrivener supports very well and it keeps your material and notes together in one Project.
Write small, granulary sections, instead of a long and unwieldy, hard to navigate tome.
Compile your WIP to many FileTypes using different Formats.
Enjoy automatic saving and backups to make sure ypu don’t lose any work.
@rms has the right idea here. Scrivener is not intended to produce a professional quality print-ready output file. But it can definitely get you most of the way there, ready for final tweaks in whatever your preferred tool might be.
If you think you “should have just stayed with Word,” though, you may have come in with a misunderstanding of Scrivener’s intended role in the writing process. Word does indeed have some formatting capabilities that Scrivener lacks, but Scrivener focuses on all the tasks – research, outlining, writing, revising – that need to take place before you have a manuscript to format.
This is what I was wanting to do, but it appears as though Scrivener doesn’t have this option available for Windows. Is there something that I’ve missed?
You may be right. With the advanced compile options and the ability to output in a variety of different formats, I was expecting scrivener to actually be the solution to outputting the document. For print, as well as e-book.
The sad part is, from what I can tell, scrivener would give me all the ability to output it as I need to a book, if it had the ‘odd page’ thing implemented. I’ve seen it referenced while searching, but I think (best guess) is that it’s a feature only reserved for apple, and not windows.
But at least I know now that scrivener is not designed for compiling into the final form. Thanks for the confirmation.
I think I’ve realised that I was expecting the wrong thing from scrivener. If others more familiar with scrivener are finalising their work in Calibre, or Affinity, etc, they’ve probably saved me countless hours of wasting my time trying to use scrivener for something it’s not supposed to be used for.
I’ll revert back to MS Word for print, and will put my effort into learning Calibre.
I didn’t realise how much manual work is still required after creating the manuscript, etc. I mistakenly thought that templates for different book types would just ‘do the formatting’ for me.