Working with Scrivener

I’m working on publishing my first Kindle book and it’s a learning curve alright. A while back I discovered Scrivener and am getting to love it although the relationship is taking a while to mature. It takes time to get to know Scrivener as she has so many facets but it’s worth it for the time and effort she saves downstream when you want to publish in this format and then that format.

Scrivener allows you to concentrate on the content and then output your work in the format you choose without changing everything in the content. That’s worth a lot to me as I’m climbing this learning curve of ebook publishing.

There are tons of resources on the net if you want to start using Scrivener, although many of them just miss the very, very simple things that a newbie needs to get started. Jeremy Lee James has a nice tutorial Scrivener – how to compile with style which I like as he’s quite definite about what works best so it carries you along towards what might be best practices for the most efficient use of this software.

Scrivener allows me to compile my ebook in a standardised way, so when all the parameters are set the way I want I can compile again and again without having to do extra work. This allows me to concentrate on the look and feel  of the ebook.

I’ve written my first ebook which has been sitting around on my various hard drives for many years. I know many people do this, procrastinating about getting something done, but finally I’ve done it.

It’s called “Pacing for Pain” and addresses the difficulties people have with activity when they have chronic pain.

I’ve compiled the ebook 57 times so far. I’m not sure if that’s more times than normal! There’s the lists, the white space, the indents, the headings and many other things to get right. So I compiled each time and emailed it to my Kindle or checked it in Kindle Previewer. But it’s almost done now so hopefully it’s not another form of (hidden) procrastination!

But I’m not looking forward to the level of detail I’ll need to master to publish the book on CreateSpace so I can have a publish-on-demand real, paper book for sale on Amazon.