8 Reasons to use Scrivener Spring to mind when people sometimes ask me why I like using it for my writing. I want to run on my Mac, my iPad and even my iPhone. It also runs on my Windows 10 laptop and I'll allow I rarely use that these days, but there it is if I need it. Writing is all about the words, keeping on track as you write by knowing where everything you need is. It's about organisation. Yes, writing is about putting down the words in an organised way. With Scrivener, no experience is necessary. When you first open it, it may look difficult, but it's not. Oh yes, everything. Like everything, it has a learning curve. What doesn't? But there are endless books and YouTube videos about using Scrivener. If you really want to get confused, start by doing that. Your book will never get published. Using Mac or Windows, there are only minor differences. It's much the same on both platforms. Don't read the manual to start with. I didn't. Still haven't. That's how easy it is to get writing. You'll learn what you need to know as you go along. Scrivener is infinitely adjustable and modifiable. So what are the eight good reasons? Let's get right down to it. Okay, starting this starting Scrivener, the first thing that pops up is the previous document or project that was working on, but we need a new project. And as I said before, we can select the blank from all options or a blank from the project templates on its own. And we'll choose that one. It hasn't got a title yet, but let's give it a title. Let's call it something like My Story or My New Manuscript. There we go. No mistaking it with the other ones that are in the list there. And it will automatically save it to the Scrivener folder where I put it originally. There we go. A new document. Untitled document, draft, that's what you get a blank screen. Now you can fill this in just like this, chapter 1. How easy a start is that. Now, let's write a little bit in chapter 1. Let's have a look at the corkboard. No corkboard showing yet because we're just getting started. If I was to select draft, you would see the corkboard for chapter 1. I'll show you that later. Once upon a time in a land, what am I typing next? Far away. There grew a big tree. Okay. There we go. Very slow. But it's the first sentence. That's all there is to it. How many words? 14 words. You can see them at the bottom there. And of course, still no sub documents. That's chapter 1. Nope, no sub documents. So you don't need to get confused. Chapter 1 contains no sub documents. Let's hang about here while I wait for the next thing to do. Create a new document. Create new folder document. You can put things in folders and you can put things in documents. There's our new document. I clicked on the plus sign. Chapter 2. You see you're building your table of contents as you go right along. Let's have a look at the menus available. You can add, duplicate, move it to trash and so on. We don't want to do any of that. Now, did you see that? I just stuck in a new folder. We don't really need a new folder. There's nothing in it. Allow you could put something in it and you could call it something. But we don't want to do that. Move it to trash. And it'll be in that trash folder just below it there. Now, if you click on draft, you can see in the corkboard, we've got chapter 1 and chapter 2. And on chapter 1, you've got the first bit of text from chapter 1. You can put your own text in there that won't interfere with chapter 1. But if you don't put anything in, it will automatically take the first few sentences from each document. 14 words, 7 words, too easy. And there we go. And you can see in that corkboard, what did Ruby see when she climbed the tree? Well, you'll have to wait till chapter 3. Let's call it a manuscript. Let's not call it a draft document. Let's sound a little more important. In fact, put the name of your book in there if you like. The tree in the faraway land. What am I calling it? The faraway tree. Okay, that's easy. The faraway tree. Reason 2. Setting up a table of contents is just built right into the program. You build it as you go along with headings, subheadings and references. In fact, whatever you want in your book. Reason 3. Did I just mention references? Yep, you can import references directly in Descrivener from external sources, like Scrapple, for instance. Reason 4. You can move blocks of content around easily, whole chapters, whole paragraphs and even, one word, just drag and drop or cut and paste. Reason 5 brings us to the publishing part. You can format your book as you work for ebook format or indeed paperback or PDF, nearly anything. Whatever you like, it's built right in. Backing up, very important. It's built right into Scravener, again, automatic and highly configurable. But here's the good bit. Even if you don't configure it, it backs up automatically every few minutes, right to disc. Really, you don't even have to touch it. Reason 7 is the one I love. You don't have to pagemark bookmark or make notes when you're finished for the day. When you come back to your document, it opens up right where you left off, last time you opened it. Reason 8. The last reason. Everybody's favourite question. How many words have I typed? Well, Scravener keeps track of that right on the bottom of the page. You know how to glance what your word count is and you can instantly see the count by chapter, documents or manuscript. And there we end my little expo on the 8 good reasons, good and true. Well, I can use Scravener to write, format and publish my books.