Sent from my iPhone

What the hell? That was a real email I received. A “professional” email. And it’s not even a rare occurrence any more. The race to acquire the new shiny is peaking, as Apple define new markets and competitors scramble to catch up, but if this is the kind of content that’s generated as a side effect of the move to smaller and smaller devices, the bubble has to burst soon.

When I look at hardware/software, whether it’s a phone, a computer, an audio plugin, a microphone, I have to ask myself “what will it enable me to do, that I currently can’t?”. The answer may be that it won’t bring me new capabilities, but it may let me do an existing thing better, which is fine if the price is right.

But what’s the point of chasing the bleeding edge of consumer electronics if the end result is a degraded experience? Smartphones are supposed to aid communication by making your email and social networks available anywhere, but if the form factor makes rendering a coherent response a chore, is it really worth it?

Maybe the thoughts you have to share while commuting/eating/defecating really aren’t worth communicating to the wider world, and the exchange would be best left until you’re sat at your computer screen, with a full-size keyboard, considering both the content of your communication, and the tone.

Sent from my computer, after some considered thought, and a dash of Morgan’s Spiced.

Smashwords – Mark Coker’s open-to-all eBook publishing and distribution portal – is, in my opinion, the biggest thing to happen to books and publishing in a long time. Create an account, upload a Word document of your manuscript, and your book is converted to all eBook formats and distributed to all of the major eBook retailers. Smashwords collect revenues from the retailers and pass the money onto you minus a 15% commission. They even give you a free ISBN.

How freaking awesome is that?

Yes, Smashwords is inundated with books of questionable merit (every day you’ll see new books with word counts optimistically in the “novella” range, with misspelled blurbs, priced for $9.95) , but Mark and his team have opened the market to ALL writers. Curation is just a view – a subset – of the book list, and any and all critics can step in to fulfil that function. I’m happy with the weaker books being out there, as I know there are some real gems – original, if uncommercial works – just waiting to be found. Smashwords, in my eyes, can do no wrong.

But…

Even though my book is being distributed to Sony, Kobo Books, Apple iBooks and was on Barnes and Noble before I opted out of that distribution option, it’s not on Amazon Kindle, and that’s the biggest retailer of eBooks by a long, long way, no matter who’s publishing their optimistic, massaged sales figures this week. If I’m going to achieve anything like notable sales, that’s where I need to be.

Mark explained the Amazon position from the start – that they wanted extended formatting options, which the Meatgrinder (Smashword’s automated conversion system) didn’t support – and I was fine with that as it was his priority to rectify the situation and get the books over to Amazon. But that was the message from when I uploaded Make a Move in April, and it’s now August. When the UK release of the Kindle was announced (the real release, not the mid-Atlantic hack that’s been in place until now) I knew I had to have my book on the Kindle store, and I couldn’t wait any longer. I downloaded the Kindle formatting guidelines, and conversion and testing tools, and I started converting my Word manuscript to HTML.

OCD

I was never happy with the automated book conversion Smashwords produced; the main problem was that my first-line non-indents were ignored, and I hate how it looks. Unfortunately, I followed the formatting guide to the letter, so I don’t know how I can fix that. I left it as it was, which is fine (the words are the important part) but it still bothers me. Now, with my Kindle Preview app which replicates how the text will display on the Kindle hardware, I can test and test and test, and fix anything that isn’t working. I’m a technical writer by trade, and a Virgo, so you can imagine how satisfying this is for me. Even though I’m hand-coding the HTML, the level of control I have is worth it.

An Uncomfortable Situation

So Smashwords aren’t shipping to Kindle, and now I am, so no harm, no foul. Except that Mark announced this week that they will be shipping to Amazon soon, and that the Meatgrinder upgrades are close to finished. So now I’m in the position of bypassing the distributor – a position with which I’m not 100% comfortable. It would be easy just to select the “opt-in to Amazon distribution” option on Smashwords and sit back, and I have been tempted, but I’ve tasted the level of formatting control Amazon’s DIY tools afford me, and I’m loathe to let it go. Not to mention the week of very late nights I’ve spent working on the conversion.

I guess it comes down to timing; I’m too far along now to quit. And I know I’m denying Smashwords their 15% commission on any Amazon sales, but time is money – my time is money – and after the effort I’ve put into this conversion, I think I deserve that 15%. I’m planning to have the book on the store in the next week or so – definitely before the August 27th UK Kindle release – so if you’re buying a Kindle, you’ll be able to see if my work was worth it.

One area I thought Apple might explore, given their history of placing pro-level creative tools into the hands of amateurs, is publishing. Maybe adding an iPublish app to the iLife suite that would allow you to upload magazine layouts or text from their Pages app to create online magazines or eBooks for sale from their online store. Maybe iPublish would let you take the podcast you could already create in Garageband and upload it to the iTunes Music Store. I’m just thinking out loud here, like I was back then, but that’s the kind of market shift I was hoping for. There’s still time for them to do this – the iLife suite is overdue for an update, and could be released soon after the iPad with a new twist to offer, but it’s not looking likely.

Then, two days ago, I realised that Apple had actually delivered that market shift; they signed a distribution deal with Smashwords. I know that Amazon have allowed writers to publish directly on the Kindle store for a while, but you need a US bank account to do it, which shuts out a lot of people. Apple have removed the last obstacles to any writer reaching their readers. By signing a deal with an independent distributor of independently published books, Apple have removed all need for publishers and agents. Notice that I said need, not want; there’s every chance the iBook store will devolve into the same morasse as the App Store, so there’s still a strong argument for the consistent “quality” that the traditional publishing machine can deliver, but as long as I can buy a title of the quality of Doom Resurrection in the App Store, there’s hope for its literary neighbour.

This isn’t “the death of traditional publishing”, but something big did just happen. Where we all go from here is anyone’s guess; I’m sure that Apple like to think they know, but they can’t predict what readers are going to choose any more than I can. And Smashwords aren’t predicting anything; they’re just enabling the rest of us.

So why promote it?

Because it’s that good. Writing with Scrivener is the one piece of advice I’d give any writer looking to be more productive, experimental and successful. I wrote the first draft of Make a Move in Microsoft Word, which was fine, but Episode 6 came out all wrong and needed a thorough rewrite.  I’d seen Scrivener, and decided to try it out to see if it would make the rewrite easier. I imported my Word doc, sliced the scenes up into separate files, then moved them around to fix the structure, making notes on each scene that needed fixing in more detail. I was impressed with how easy editing was in the application, so I bought a license. As I used it more, the further the application faded into the background, just letting me research, plot, write and edit as I wanted without any intrusive, misjudged design decisions interrupting my flow.

There’s one problem with Scrivener: it’s Mac-only, which means I need to write the following section to clear a couple of things up.

MacTruths

Disclaimer number 2: I like Macs, and I’m writing this on one, but I don’t hate Windows, and only mildly dislike Linux. I installed Windows 7 on my Mac for some gaming, and I like it a lot. This part isn’t about why you should switch to Mac, it’s about the realities of switching to Mac for Scrivener.

Apple computers are expensive. If you don’t have the best part of a grand (sterling) to spend on a computer, you’re not going to be buying a new Mac. But this is the buy-in price, not the total cost of ownership (TCO), and that’s what matters to me. If you buy a £500 Windows laptop, after four years it will be completely outdated and be worth nothing on the second-hand market. If you buy a base-spec Macbook (just over £800 at time of writing) after four years it will be worth around £200-300 and will sell very easily, so at a push, the TCO of the Mac is £100 more than the Windows laptop, or the same if it’s in great condition and you have a keen buyer. I’m not going to talk about bundled software, pre-installed adware, viruses, build quality or image as, like Scrivener, this is just about writing.

Regardless of TCO, that buy-in price – even on the entry-level machines – is a lot of money, but that second-hand Mac market I mentioned works both ways. You could pick up an Intel-based Macbook for a couple of hundred pounds and it would run Scrivener, as well as Office for Mac, iTunes, an email client and a web browser with speed to spare. Go back further, and as Scrivener still runs on the old PowerPC-based systems (PowerBook/iBook), you can get even more of a bargain. As long as you can install Mac OS 10.4 Tiger on it, it’ll run Scrivener.

Back to the App

So what is it that makes Scrivener so good? In short, it’s everything you need to write.

• Any research/bookmarking applications you use can go, as Scrivener lets you drag almost any digital content into the interface to file away for reference; videos, web pages, text snippets, images, music files – they’re all supported and can be viewed/played right in the application. And it doesn’t matter how much information you drag into the application, as Scrivener uses Mac OS’s Spotlight search to let you find anything within a couple of seconds. Imagine taking your cork board and filing systems with you wherever you go, but actually being able to find things too! This is actually my favourite thing about Scrivener: as all of your research is portable, you’re not tied to that restrictive concept of your “writing space”, so you’re free to write when and where the mood takes you.
• Scrivener lets you outline in a number of ways, but regardless of your method, nothing you write is lost. Add notes to a scene in the inspector, separate from the body text of the scene file, and it can be used later to generate the skeleton of a synopsis, to mark up editing ideas, or to keep a to-do list for that section. And again, this meta-text is searchable.
• Scrivener supports experimentation. If you want to rewrite a scene but don’t know exactly how to do it, just take a snapshot and go for it, knowing you can roll it back if it goes wrong. And if you’re not sure where a scene should sit in the narrative, just switch to the virtual cork board and play around. Drag scenes into whatever order your feel like trying. Go nuts.
• Scrivener doesn’t dictate style or structure in any way. They’re your ideas and words, and Scrivener respects that.
• Scrivener is tidy. Everything is stored in a single database file, so there are no folders full of drafts and ideas to keep track of. Okay, so I still have folders elsewhere, but it’s a habit I’m determined to kill off. That single database file is so easy to backup too – either copy it manually, or zip it up and backup to another location from within the application. I have a local backup running under Time Machine and I also backup a zip every couple of days to an online directory. Scrivener makes it easy to keep my work safe.
• It’s cheap. Not as in rushed or basic, but as in around $40 (at time of writing).

So what else does it do?

• Fullscreen Mode – black out the rest of your desktop, and the application, and just write in plain text without distractions
• Google search within the editor, and Dictionary/Thesaurus and Spelling/Proofreading tools provided by Mac OS – with an internet connection, you have almost all of the research tools you need.
• Cross-file linking – allows you to link to other scenes or research information using a hyperlink, building navigation into your manuscript to aid in cross-checking. All the links are removed when you export the final draft, of course.
• Spotlight search EVERYWHERE – if you want to see every occurrence of a character’s name, or you know someone said something, but not when, you can search for it and see the results almost instantly. There’s no need to step through a document again and again using Find Next.
• Scriptwriting support – full auto-formatting support for scriptwriters. I never thought I’d use it when I bought it, but it was in there for when I found I needed it. Like I said above, Scrivener just replaces the need for other applications.

Of course there are some weaknesses in the application. I understand that Final Draft is more full-featured as a scriptwriting tool, and Scrivener lacks the formatting options of a standalone word-processor such as Microsoft Word or even Apple’s Pages, but this is about writing and story and ideas and pure, uninhibited creativity, not about industry standards and anchored frames. It’s easy to get caught up in the hunt for new software that will make you write better/faster/stronger – I’ve seen it happen and felt the pull of new software demos, but there really is only one 30-day trial I’d recommend, and it’s at www.literatureandlatte.com, along with an active forum and lots of tips, tricks and tutorials.

So, in summary, if you want writing advice, get Scrivener.