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Comment by KingOfCoders | Hacker News Reader

My wife and I are writing with Scrivener (she on OSX, me on W11), I use Leanpub/MD to publish. We used Affinity Publisher to create a version for print and Affinity Designer for the cover and all artwork.

Leanpub is easy and works.

I would consider Obsidian for my next venture as Scrivener has too many features for me that I don't need.

For my poem book I wrote some code that generated mazes for the cover [0]

We do go with Amazon for ebooks but not for printing, their quality is way below what we find acceptable (we're in Germany and found a printer in Poland after being let down by our German printer).

[0] https://www.amazon.de/Olavsweg-Gedichte-Gedanken-lyrische-In...

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I wrote a book back in 2011 in Scrivener, and loved the software for this. I didn’t use about 90% of it but still, it was hugely helpful for structuring a long and complex document of 60k+ words. You need to be able to shuffle chapters around, see an overview of progress and so on - Scrivener does all of this and much more.

I’m dabbling now with writing using Obsidian. I think (but not 100% fully researched / sure yet) that it’ll do all I need: portable, open, easy workflows for shuffling stuff around, exports using pandoc and so on. There are also a fair few plugins and tutorials - Googling “long form writing with Obsidian” will find you lots of useful stuff.

Yes I thin the shuffling around of chapters is the most useful thing about Scrivener.

I'd wish for an Obsidian plugin that stores the chapter order in a file and displays chapter in that order instead of alphabetically.

I'll follow your tip to Googling “long form writing with Obsidian”

>> the shuffling around of chapters is the most useful thing about Scrivener.

Is it better than doing the same in Word using navigation pane to drag and drop entire sections to rearrange? Thanks.

I think so, personally. I wanted the means to see the whole hierarchy (ie book or chapter or both) and be able to move between that view and the editing view easily. Scrivener's tools do this really nicely.

I've used Scrivener off and on over the years, typically for the earlier stages of getting a book organized and material pulled together. But at some point--and especially if I'm collaborating at all--I end up pulling things into a word processor to start crafting things into a final form.

Scrivener was, I believe, originally designed for screenplays and there's a lot about it that's focus on working in a very specific format.

Scrivener was designed by a would-be novelist for prose, not a screenwriter.

> found a printer in Poland

Would you mind sharing the company name?

It was

https://www.totem.com.pl/

and (some years back) were very happy with the professional service, the price and the result (book had a complicated cover with maps inside and a larger cover that folded in).

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