Holy maloley! What the dickens are you talking about? Have you been smoking the drapes or something? Did I advocate ripping off your kindle text? Did I ‘tear’ anyone down. Hey, for goodness sake I just posted a technical response to the limitations of the kindle. There is a world outside Amazon. It seems to me that I was suggesting that if people got the kindle version and needed to convert it then it could be done in Calibre. You are trying to do a King Canute urging people not to convert it to the format they need for their e-reader. I have a Sony e-reader and an iPad and I will convert whatever I want to those formats if I think the material is worth the effort. Don’t worry, I won’t download your book.
As for making an effort on behalf of Scrivener for free - where the hell have you been since 2006?
I take Keith’s point and his plausible argument. But we are just in two different places on the issue. I was just coming from another place with another equally valid way of seeing the product - at least respect the altruism at the heart of my observation. I have a different point of view, no need for the Queen of Hearts to be yelling, “Off with his head.”
What the hell am I doing here? It is like a frontal lobotomy.
As to your worthy statement about earning money from your efforts. Fine. No problems. However, dozens of people who have adopted the Scrivener karma (the Zen of Scrivener) have donated hundreds of hours in total, contributing their time and talent to making it such a useful and beautiful writing tool and they are not doing a workup of their posts to turn into a book - and many, if not most, are professional writers. Nothing wrong with making a quid or a buck off the back of such a wonderful tool other than it saddens me a little to see it. My grief, my voice, my opinion. When I make a declarative statement it applies to ME. Not to everyone.
If you have an iPad you don’t need to convert it. You can read it on there already with Kindle. If you look at the date I joined this forum you can see where I’ve been since 2007.
Given the amount of piracy around these days you shouldn’t be surprised if people read a line like…
[quote]
It would help if the manuscript for the ebook was in plain old pdf [\quote]
Brilliant philosophical reasoning - arguing from effect to cause. Whew! Why pdf and why epub? It would help people who wanted the pdf version to buy the pdf version. Just as an epub version would help people who wanted an epub version to buy an epub version.
There isn’t a pdf version to buy and there never will be. Mobi and epub are much better formats for ebooks. They have flexible formatting and are easy to use. They also have publishing delivery mechanisms - Kindle, iBooks etc - set up to handle them and deliver books straight to the device which is what most people want.
So, put it up as an epub as well as a mobi file. It is EXACTLY what I suggested in my post above. Enlarge your market and don’t dump on someone who makes a suggestion you then agree with. The simple and irrefutable truth is that DRM does not prevent piracy. DRM is not only pointless and harmful to buyers of e-books but also a waste of money (estimated to cost $9B by 2012). search.atomz.com/search/?sp-adva … x=0&I2.y=0
Oh! To anyone reading this thread - I have read the full text of this e-book, in spite of this whacko exchange with the author, and it is worth every cent. If you like the Kindle solution, or decide to run it on your computer using the free Kindle app, then it is one of the best “how to” books on using Scrivener - period. It is easy to read. It is truly authoritative. It will enable mastery of Scrivener in a very short time. It beats the pants off trolling through several thousand posts on the Lit & Latte site. The author, David Hewson, writes in a way that engages your thinking and creative minds at the same time - and yes, you do feel the urge to stop reading it and start writing, and that is called ‘inspiring’.
I was so inspired that I deleted all of my Scrivener Templates and more useful posts and have decided to collect them to put in a Kindle book of my own - as Keith suggests (And if you choose to write a screenwriting book for authors, I will not complain either, and will happily endorse it).
Recommendation - BUY David Hewson’s e-book.
Having said that I strongly recommend that you read this if you are an author. It explains DRM on one page. drmfree.calibre-ebook.com/about#drm
As I’ve already explained… I would love to be able to release this book as an epub title. Sadly, since I’m not based in the US, this just isn’t practical. DRM has got nothing to do with it. The current options are simply unfeasible from a practical point of view as I tried to explain below.
They absolutely require a mac, and mac only? Sheesh, between that and the ISBN, I can see why you don’t do iBooks. (And I say this as one who isn’t a fan of DRM.)
Kindle can be read on a Kindle reader, a PC, a Mac, an iPhone, an iPad, any Android device and Blackberries too. The software’s free. It’s just about the most universal ereader format there is - and the best in my opinion. You can make notes, bookmarks, and if you use a Mac or PC keep a Kindle file open while you work on something else. Any Kindle book you buy can be read on ANY of the devices in your account.
I don’t know how TakeControl do things but really - if anyone wants to get the book it’s readily available already. I don’t have time for a small project like this to set up a publishing house - nor is it needed.
David,
I recently read your book and I loved it. I came across your idea of a “Story Diary” in one of the chapters and became intrigued by the idea. I went to your site and found this post you made in your blog regarding your book diary:
In your blog entry you write, “Some of those folders are used for research, character and location notes and anything else associated with the project.” You also have a chapter in the book called “Useful Folders” and you have many folders where I would assume you’d have these notes too.
I’m curious to know a little more on your workflow, when it comes to your book diary and your Scrivener project document. Do you export notes from your diary and place/file them in your Scrivener project? You mention a few times about keeping it simple, so is your diary where you can keep it messy?
I really do like the idea of having another document, used in another application, that can be a mental dumping ground. I would just be concern that amongst the mess there is a hidden gem that wouldn’t make it out…
Thanks again for the advice, the book, the blog, and all the work you do.
Glad you found the book useful. I don’t do anything as complex as you suggest. I keep research and notes in one window, in MacJournal, Evernote or whatever. And I keep the book in Scrivener. I’m not a fan of cutting and pasting stuff or making things complex. If you get the hang of tags in something like MacJournal, Evernote or OneNote, you can simply tag things as you go and guarantee you will pick them up later.
I hope to expand on these ideas in a longer, broader book about writing at some stage. Hope to have news on that shortly. But really - dump ideas, diary everything down into a journal with tags and that’s it. You could probably do it in Scrivener too but I haven’t tried because i like to keep right brain and left brain work separate.
This is how tagging works in OneNote. The idea’s the same in MacJournal and other similar apps.
In your OneNote entry, the link is broken in the sentence, “You can read more about it here, and even more if you search for ‘MacJournal’ in the sidebar.” Thanks for pointing to these resources, however.
The Wikipedia article on brain lateralisation comments:
“Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about certain functions (e.g. logic, creativity) being lateralized, that is, located in the right or left side of the brain. These ideas need to be treated carefully because the popular lateralizations are often distributed across both sides.”
This is a polite and restrained way of saying that popular ideas about left/right brain are a load of rubbish ;-). Having spent the last five years retraining in psychology I have to say that I find the idea that creativity could be confined to one hemisphere completely unconvincing, and I’ve yet to come across any solid scientific evidence for it, though I must add that it is not my field of psychology. There may well be some, though I’d be surprised if it were not hotly contested.
You are to be congratulated for blazing a trail by showing us all that one can publish direct from Scrivener. I don’t write novels, so I confess I haven’t read the book yet, but the mere fact of its production has given me all sorts of ideas. Thank you.
I was using it as a form of speech not a medical diagnosis. A way of saying I like to keep the shapeless, creative writing separate from the factual, hard research. Research gets in the way when I’m writing. I only want to see it when I need it. Others will feel differently.
Mentioned this earlier. If you missed it and want to read David’s book and don’t have a Kindle and can’t be bothered converting the book’s Kindle format to a PDF (which takes all of thirty seconds) - then here is a useful site to help decide which e-reader might suit you best: the-ebook-reader.com/free-ebook-reader.html
Ah, My Lord Lightning, we meet at last. Or is it…‘again’?
I was wondering Sire, whether it’s worthwhile pointing out, that, his Lordship vic-k has a Kindle, as well as Kindle for PC, on his wife’s Wintel jobby, and whenever he downloads something on one, it automatically appears on the other as well!! He’s quite tickled with the arrangement. He thinks he’s getting two for the price of one unbeknownst to Amazon!! If he finds out I’ve put it out on the forum, he’ll have a seizure. Probably think Amazon will start taking liberties with his Amazon account.
My dear Lord Fluff - you iridescent old rascal. Is it possible that you have both Kindles using the same name? Books in the Kindle store typically come with 6 simultaneous device licenses.