When you've done something once, you can fly through it the second time. Unless that second time is ages later, in which case you spend all your waking hours re-learning something you'd already sweated through. So entirely for you and not at all, not in the teeniest way for us the next time we write a book, here's what you need. It's what we recommend after
a summer of working on this, followed up by one or two cases where your mileage may vary and anyway the alternatives are fun. Plus a few quick notes of lessons we learned, mistakes, and evidence -- actual evidence -- that all this works.
One thing to get out of the way first. When you write your book, it's not just you and the keyboard. It's you and editors if you are published traditionally and it's you plus endless people if you're self-published. Maybe you can write and do graphic design and figure out libel issues and understand printing perfectly brilliantly, but you'd still need someone else to read over your work. Do look for writing groups, do look for editorial services companies, you will need them.
However, none of them are any use to you until you've got some words written so first we're going to do that and then from sheer momentum we're going on to publish in e-books and paperback.
OmniOutliner (or maybe Word if you must)
We spent the summer writing a non-fiction book and much more so than with fiction, these need a plan. You need an outline. Hand on heart, we prefer starting with page 1 and seeing where we go but to do that we have to be willing to throw away a lot of writing. A lot. Many people prepare outlines for fiction and we can't stop them, but with non-fiction it's definitely essential because you are thinking both of what you will cover and what you won't.
Plus, if you are commissioned by a publisher then the odds are that you will have had to show them an outline to get the gig or that they will demand one before you get the contract.
You can outline in Word and we used to: it is one key reason why we came to loathe outlines. However, we also tried OmniOutliner a couple of years ago and have secretly come to love outlines because of it. Consequently,
we recommend OmniOutliner with gusto and fully accept your pain if you have to stick with Word.
Evernote (or OneNote, or FileMaker Pro)
Again, this is most useful for non-fiction. We'll stop saying that now. Almost everything here is true and recommended for both fiction and non-fiction books: the job is to create and manage all those thousands of words. It's just that with non-fiction the need for these specific tools is easier to quantify.
Any book requires either research or some serious noodling late at night when you have a great idea for the ending and nowhere to put it. Now you have somewhere to put it:
Evernote. Microsoft's
OneNote is a perfectly fine alternative to Evernote and if you're already using that for anything else, stick with it.
Previously we've created entire
FileMaker Pro databases for our book research and it has many advantages. Yet, the ability to chuck any idea, any stray thought or any completed chapter into Evernote and have it available to you wherever you go is hugely more convenient.
Transcriptions
Unless you dictate whole chunks of your novel, this is the one recommendation that is really just for non-fiction. With fiction, you're making everything up with whereas with any non-fiction of any type at all, you are talking to other people and you're writing down what they say. Most often that will be interviewing people to directly quote in the book; quite often you'll be recording interviews off the record that are just there to inform you as you research a topic.
Either way, you need to get their words off your iPhone's voice recorder and onto your Mac. That means transcription and if you have never done this, picture something horrible and then pity us. It takes at least three times as long to write down every word someone says on a tape as it does for them to say it. Hours of interviews equal centuries of transcribing and it's back breaking enough that there are companies who will do it for you, for a fee.
Part way through writing one particularly massive book -- in fact 20 interviews or more into it -- we discovered the freeware tool
Transcriptions. It is not a magic bullet but it makes writing while listening to your recording easier, it makes starting and stopping the recording much easier. Best of all, it has a keystroke that skips the recording back a few seconds for when you need to catch that hard-to-hear word.
Scrivener (or Ulysses)
Once upon a time, everything was written in Microsoft Word and if you like that, go for it. However, a book of 60,000 to 120,000 words or more is a lot of heavy lifting and what something like
Scrivener does is make that manageable. Get it to show you just the chapter you're writing now or the entire book so far. Copy your OmniOutliner plan into a series of chapters in Scrivener and then go through labelling this one as done, that one as needing editing. Write notes about what should be going on in chapter 2 but isn't.
You can drag in research documents too. We're a little torn on this because we like and recommend Evernote for storing your research. What we really like, though, is not Evernote
per se, it is having one place to store it all in. That way you always know you're sending something to a place you'll read later and you also always know when you've read everything. So for our Summer Project book we did a lot of saving of websites but we did do all that in Evernote.
What we did in Scrivener, though, was compile a separate section just for interviews we'd done and transcribed. We kept that in a pot underneath the book -- or so it feels when you're working in Scrivener -- so that we could nip down to check details or nip back up with entire passages to quote.
Scrivener isn't the only game in town, though. There is also
Ulysses which is less powerful but more modern and easy to use – plus it has an iPad version. That's a killer advantage and we long for an iPad version of Scrivener. Yet you know when you long for something, you realise how much you like it: despite enjoying playing with Ulysses, we did turn to Scrivener for the heavy lifting work. We can't underline enough that this one is a personal choice, except that right now Scrivener does have more features.
The one thing we have against Scrivener is that it's murder trying to get a book PDF out of it at the end. Whatever you do to produce your book, if you're doing it yourself in any way you are going to need a PDF copy first. Scrivener can do this with ease, it can do it with verve, but it can't do it without an awful lot of fiddling. There are myriad options and you will slog through all of them. During the Summer Project, we mentioned having done 17 different PDFs from Scrivener but after we wrote that, we found another problem. In the end, the total number of times we changed options in Scrivener and tried again was 31.
That was specifically for getting a paperback version ready from within Scrivener, the e-book version was much easier. Yet very late one night we realised the solution to a problem we were having and you must let us tell you because we were so cocky when we'd thought of this. We thought of PDFpen.
PDFpen Pro (or get it right the first time with Scrivener)
Maybe none of these tools are essential, maybe you could do without them and write with a pen like an animal, but if there is one that is especially not essential, it's
PDFpen or PDFpen Pro. This tool for altering, changing, adding to PDF documents is completely unnecessary but extremely, just extremely handy. We used it to add in entire pages to the book PDF that Scrivener had produced, we used it to edit the PDF to remove a mistake we'd made.
When you see the book we did, you'll see there's a dedication page: for all the hundreds of hours we spent in Scrivener, we wrote that page in PDFpen just before we sent the book to
Amazon Createspace to make the paperback.
Createspace and the like are quick enough to use but none of them will ever be as fast as creating the e-book version.
Vellum (or iBooks Author but really Vellum)
Do have a
read of the entire Summer Project for specific examples of what we used these many tools for plus ones that we rejected but which might be right for you. If you read the lot, though, you will also discover that our entire summer was taken over by writing this book of ours and that it was all Vellum's fault.
Vellum is an app for producing e-books for Kindle, iBooks and (for some reason) Nooks. We didn't bother making a Nook version but we told the Vellum developers that we were going to stress-test their app by creating a real book in it. From our very first look at the Vellum software, we knew it solved a problem and that it seemed to be a pretty fine application.
Now we've stressed it and bloodied it, we like it even more. There are things we'd twiddle with but really it's sole issue is that it's an application that uses templates. They're gorgeous, actually rather beautiful templates, but they are templates and so doubtlessly there will be many, many books published that look just the same as yours. There's little way around it unless you want to do book work in
Adobe InDesign or
QuarkXPress – both of which we
covered in our very thorough book series – and we lived with it fairly happy. We like the templates, let's focus on that rather than whether every Vellum user picks the same things as us.
You could use Apple's own iBooks Author: it's another template app and if anything is more flexible than Vellum while producing remarkable-looking iBooks. However, that's the thing: it produces iBooks, it won't do Kindle or paperback. Or even Nook.
It does feel as if e-books are falling in to place alongside paperbacks now rather than being this inexorable march that would see physical books gone forever. Whatever happens next, though, right now you need your book to be in e-book and paperback, both. You need it to be on Kindle. That's true to such an extent that if you could only produce one version of the e-book, it should be the Amazon Kindle one. That is not as pleasant a reading experience as you get from iBooks but it is the one with the biggest market for potential buyers.
Speaking of potential buyers
Hello. You're looking rather good today. How are you? That's great. Glad to hear it. Listen, just while we've got you, we did spend the entire summer writing you a book. For you. We're saying it's for all sorts of writers but really it's for you.
The Blank Screen: Blogging is an author's guide to how to blog and also why. Despite
one awful disastrous period of terror about seven weeks into the Summer Project, we are now very pleased and proud of the book. We'd love you to take a look.
We'd also love you to take many looks and to
buy many copies, preferably while telling your friends and family all about it. Just about the only thing we'd love even more is if you now wrote a book using these tools and told us all about it.
-William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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