Chandler McGrew

Okay, so I broke down and bought Scrivener.  At $40 it didn’t break the bank and people I trusted online kept raving about it. As most of you probably know for a couple of years now I’ve been writing using YWriter which is free (unless you like it as much as I do and register it for $25) and have been pretty happy with it. But I’m a geek, and any time someone holds out the carrot of better software I’m all over it.

First of all I have to say that out of the box Scrivener loses for immediate usability. It is simply too all-encompassing a program to allow for an author to open it up and start writing without some study. The online video tutorials are, however, quite well done and I would say that the average writer with average computer skills can be up and running at least on a basic level in under thirty minutes. Then, depending upon how involved one wants to get with all the bells and whistles of the program the author could probably have it operating in exactly the way he or she sees fit in a day or days at most of experimentation.

YWriter, on the other hand, just sort of falls into place, at least for organic writers like me who don’t outline and don’t need all the flexibility in that area that some writers want or need. Opening a new writing file and going through a fifteen second ‘wizard’ has you ready to write your opus and the writing screen and everything you need are there in front of you in tabs. Unlike Scrivener there is no need to figure out how to add folders for chapters and scenes. Chapter and Scene tabs are right there.

I also like the way YWriter intuitively handles the nexus between the writing side and the database side where all the info is kept on characters, locations, items etc. by tab. And the fact that I can create one of the above by simply selecting the text and double clicking. Then select add character, add location, etc and I’m taken to a database file for THAT particular character, location, or item where I can give second names, add backstory, ad infinitum. AND whenever I click on that highlighted character or location or item in the writing side I’m taken directly back to the correct database file. No more wondering who a character is or what the description of a location is.

I also love the fact that YWriter automatically follows each of the points above and keeps track of who, where, and what is in each scene. Naming a scene creates a summary of scenes and writing a longer summary in the notes box below that compiles a scene by scene synopsis which can be printed as a report. I HATE writing synopses, but YWriter makes it reasonably painless.

On the other hand Scrivener is infinitely customizable whereas YWriter is to a much lesser extent and I’m reasonably certain that if you spend the time you can learn how to tweak Scrivener to make it do something similar to pretty much everything I’ve detailed above for YWriter. Also if you are writing and want to add photos (you can have character photos etc in YWriter but only for your own info not publication in the text) you want Scrivener. If you are writing a much more complicated format such as magazine articles you definitely want Scrivener, and if you do a LOT of outlining and playing with your story BEFORE it gets written you DEFINITELY want Scrivener.

Let me add one caveat. There are YWriter authors who LOVE to outline and still love the program. For a brief (three minute) explanation of outlining in YWriter watch this.

I’ll close by saying that these are both excellent programs. I like YWriter because it almost seems like it was designed for me. But other writers might not feel the same connection and need a program that is much more customizeable to THEM. Since YWriter is free and Scrivener offers a Demo (wish I’d slowed down to see that) I suggest trying both to see what works best for you.

Today a Twitter follower asked me how I felt about my four publishing experiences with Bantam vs my ebook publishing. I had to give it a lot of thought. Here’s my reply (obviously not on Twitter).

Okay. Sit back for the long version.

I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of the Million Word Rule, but over time I became a firm believer. There are exceptions, and everyone who ever reads the rule believes that THEY are it, but experience has shown me that 999 out of 1000 are wrong in thinking so. The Million Word Rule states that any writer has to write at least 1,000,000 words before they ever produce anything salable. King and Koontz will back me up on this from their own experience. The Rule works more often than most any other rule of the sort out there. And writers used to discover it all the time the same way I did. The hard way. Because by the time you have written one million words, 10-15 full length novels let’s say, you have either given up and quit or you have discovered 99% of what was wrong with the first ones and fixed it. Plus you have quit copying other people’s writing and fallen naturally into your own voice which does not come with 100k words.

But I digress. Sometime around 2001 I had had two events rummaging around in my subconscious. One was a shootout in a street outside a bank in LA in which the two perps were clad head to toe in body armor and armed with machine guns with armor piercing shells. The battle went on for almost an hour, several cops were killed and it was horrific. The other occurred when I lived in Alaska when a guy went crazy in a remote village and murdered 20+ people even going so far as to take potshots at the mail plane. I started writing without thinking of either, and 30 days later had completed Cold Heart. Within a week 5 agents contacted me and I chose the one I wanted. Two weeks later she had us a two book, $105k deal. And that began my first experience with professional editing. I won’t go into that here except to say that everything I had taught myself over nearly ten years of writing paled before what I was about to learn. If you are interested in knowing more about that I wrote a blog post on it which has been published around the net.  Three years later my agent got us another 2 book $120k deal.

Now, all that being said, how do I feel about Bantam vs Self Publishing? I’m incredibly thankful that epublishing was not an option for me during the 90s. Had it been I would have published a lot of stuff that was not outright garbage, but which in no way could even touch the stuff that Bantam and I produced later. Writing is an incredibly difficult art to truly master, and I am not by nature a patient man although I have perforce grown a lot more patient through my time in the industry. And that is true for 999 out of 1000 of the people who are self publishing today including to a degree myself. Most authors today no longer even attempt a query to the big houses much less 300 and they then self-publish their first novel, most often eschewing any editing whatsoever except their own. This is about to do to epublishing what Publish On Demand managed to do to self publishing in the 90s only even more so, since Publish On Demand for the most part never was completely free. I read recently that published enovels had gone from something like 50k a year to one and half million in four years. Imagine that YOU are the exception to the Million Word Rule, that you have written the next Hunger Games. How do you differentiate yourself from the ten thousand other authors claiming to have done so? On Twitter where hundreds of thousands of authors tweet optimistically all day back and forth to Themselves? By getting hundreds of Amazon reviews? How do readers know you didn’t buy them?

My theory is that this will all shake itself out over the next 2-5 years. It has to or readers will be hard pressed to decide if they even want to buy ebooks any longer. Amazon is stumbling toward some sort of review of reviews to make them more trustworthy while publishing houses like Astor+Blue are cropping up which will only publish works they consider quality and which will provide professional editing and distribution for their ebook authors at no charge. Readers will begin to gravitate toward them the way they did to professional houses before over Vanity Presses (and I firmly believe that this will grow the midlist again, as these smaller houses will make money there). Caveat- my agent is about to sign a multi-book deal for me with A+B, but I would not give them good press if I didn’t believe in them or the new paradigm they represent.

So, where does that leave us? Somewhere in the middle I think. I am having a blast rewriting some of my old unpublished thrillers (I should have mentioned that along with my earlier works and my Bantam books I also managed to write another twenty or so thrillers and about 500k words in a Steampunk universe. The Steampunk may see print as my agent is touting it now) and epubbing them. I enjoy hearing from new readers and interacting with them in ways I never did with my hard published works. But I still want to see my books in print from major publishers. Luckily, though, in this new world I don’t have to be torn. Publishers are learning that they cannot hold writers down to contracts that tie them into years with the same house when they have so much writing they want to get out. This will help everyone since ebook readers also read regular books! I hope I answered your question. If not let me know what I missed. I also think I’m going to use this as a blog post!

You can’t afford NOT to have one.

The first time I experienced professional editing was a traumatic moment in my career. I had been writing for years, had over three hundred (that’s 300) rejection letters and been through five agents when I finally got my first two book deal from Bantam. I was ecstatic. Then I received my editorial letter. Wham. I started throwing things (I never throw things). But eventually after revising I knew it was better. Imagine my surprise when I learned that now it needed copy-editing and line-editing. And BOTH produced problems neither my editor nor I had caught in the laborious process leading up to those edits.

I recently took the time to re-read Cold Heart after eleven years and realized it had a typo.

So you think YOU can produce a readable manuscript simply by meticulous re-reads? Good luck. I just finished an incredibly funny indie book by a new author and sent him a note to let him know that I would be happy to post a five star review of it as soon as he got some line editing. I have a hunch he’s trying to do it himself and I wish him the best of luck as well, but I know what the result will be because I have been there and done that as recently as my first indie book, Crossroads. With that novel I went so far as to not only publish it in all e-formats but paperback as well. I ordered forty copies only to learn that it needed editing and discovering that I had inadvertently not only left in typos but had copied one paragraph from the end of one scene onto the start of another later in the book.

And I READ that ms meticulously before publishing. My brain just saw what it wanted to see.

Now I have heard for years (and it does work) that you can catch more problems by reading the book aloud to yourself because in doing so your mind will not let you skip over typos. I have never been able to do this because I simply feel too silly. I know. That’s stupid, but there it is. And this will still not solve the problem of pole rather than poll etc.

I am not here to tout any particular editor, and in many cases writers may be able to avail themselves at little or no cost of local English teachers, for example. But for god’s sake don’t skip the process. You worked your ass off writing that masterpiece. Do you really want it to go out into the world with its fly unzipped?