I am in the middle of trying to prepare a manuscript for
self-publication right now, and I want to preserve some of my learning for
myself so that I won’t have to relearn it in the future.
Learning
the compile function on Scrivener has been a stop-and-go process for me. When I first looked into it, I was very
excited about its potential, but as I read through books on it and tried
things, I got overwhelmed at all the different choices. I also was worried
about how it would deal with my footnotes, tables, and bullets. I couldn’t find clear answers online to
address my concerns, so I got frustrated and gave up for a while.
Happily,
I recently went back to it recently and suddenly it seemed perfectly clear, to
the point that I wondered what had bothered me before. I wish I could have told
my past self to take a chill pill and just try it out.
Now for the learning:
1) If
you’ve already prepared a print-ready Word doc, putting it in Scrivener will be
a step backward. Scrivener does
content creation really well, but when it comes to preparing formatting, they
don’t give too much flexibility. If you're doing this for the first time, don’t even try to use more than one font
through out your project. To get
the final formatting you need, you’re much better off compiling it to a doc and
then messing around with the formatting there instead. However, you can get all your front matter and back matter ready for that and
export that too. It will save time.
2) You
will not find out how many pages your project will be until you compile it for,
say, a Word doc. Number of pages
is important info to give your cover designer if you are doing a paperback
book. Once you have set the number
of pages, try really hard not to change that. (For instance, don’t do what I did and have your paperback cover
design done before editing. Editing will probably shave some pages off your
count.)
3) Importing
tables from Word into Scrivener will give you really wonky results. Yes, you will get your tables, but they
will have strange phantom empty cells in weird places. You may also find text
outside the tables has a weird box around sections of it as if it were part of
a table. The way to
get around this is A) Make all your tables into images and import them into
Scrivener, or B) use Scrivener’s table-creation tool and redo all your tables
inside Scrivener. Both are extra
work. Pick your poison. I do know that Tables generated in
Scrivener turn out looking okay on the Kindle.
4) When
bulleted text is imported into Scrivener from Word and then compiled for
Kindle, for some reason the bullets are doubled, which looks wrong. This is
fixed by recreating the bulleted lists in Scrivener (much like with tables, as
described in 2 above).
5) Scrivener’s
compile feature can make it very quick to make .epubs and .mobis and a number
of different formats. IF you know
what you’re doing. I look forward
to that day.
An
ideal work flow would be:
1) Create
document in Scrivener.
2) For
print: Compile document for print into Word doc. Tweak formatting and upload to
POD vendor of choice.
3) For
e-book: Compile document for print into .epub and .mobi. Test on previewing software.
Obviously,
I haven’t done the ideal on my current project. But, eh, live and learn, right?
