I’ve been searching in the forum and documentation, and haven’t been able to conclusively determine that my desire isn’t a feature, so now I’m asking.
Is there any way to have a word count goal for all of the files inside of a directory/structure unit? For example, I divide up my scenes with one ‘file’ per scene. Then I group my scenes into three acts. I’m aiming for a total word count of 75000 words. I want act 1 to be ~ 17500, act 2 ~35k, and act 3 ~17.5k again. I know I can set a goal for the whole manuscript, and I can set a goal for individual “files,” but I can’t find a way to do what I’m imagining or even get a word count for all of the files in a folder.
The easiest way to do this is via the Outline view.
Make sure that the Word Count, Target, Total Word Count, and Total Target columns are all enabled, and that whatever divisions you want are visible in the view. (For what you’re describing, you probably want to load the whole Draft folder into the Outline view.) Then, use the Target column to set targets for whatever divisions you care about.
The one thing to be aware of is that if you set a folder target of 17,500 words, and set targets for 10 scenes of 1500 words each, the Total Target column will add all of them, for a grand total of 32,500 words. You probably want to set scene targets or act targets, but not both in the same folder.
See Section 20.1 in the manual for more information about how Scrivener’s statistics tools interact with each other.