What are a few of the Writer’s Café tools that you find most indispensible as a writer? You can use it to plan an essay or I have even heard of it being used to plan a marketing report (with a fantasy novel being planned at the same time!) In fact, you don’t have to use it for fiction. You can use it for a whole novel or for a section you might be having problems with. It doesn’t tell you what to do or try and impose any theory of story. What do you think makes it different than other writing programs currently available? There is something very relaxing and yet focused about using it that just makes the ideas come easily. The result was StoryLines and rather magically worked far better than we expected. I was using index cards and bits of papers, but it was driving me crazy so I asked Julian if he could knock something up to help me out. We started with Storylines, which came about because I had a practical problem to solve – that of trying to plot a three strand tv drama for a course I was taking on scriptwriting. It took us some time to realise that what was required was a toolkit for writers, rather than a complicated model of what a story should be. There was one very rainy holiday on the Scottish island of Colonsay when we talked about it for hours! I had tried a few of the early attempts at fiction writing software, like Dramatica but found it less than useful, so we were looking for a sort of Holy Grail of fiction writing software. Julian and I are a husband and wife business team so we had been kicking around ideas for some time, thinking how useful software for writers might work as we wanted to combine our different talents on a joint project. The Merry Marquis is now available for pre-order at Amazon, and Kobo and soon Barnes & Noble through Smashwords.Today, I am really excited to talk with Harriet Smart, half of the team responsible for my favorite writing program software, Writer’s Cafe.Ĭan you tell us how the idea for Writer’s Café came into being? Oh, and in my class prep for the self-publishing class, I wanted to show exactly how to upload a book to the different vendors and put it up for pre-sale, so I’ve done this (the easiest way to teach something is to do, right?). Yes, there are great tutorials out there on Youtube (this is a link to a very good one) and a book produced by the creator of Jutoh, Julian Smart (who is fantastic, by the way and will answer even the stupidest questions from users-I know, I’ve emailed him a number of times), but perhaps a class devoted just to using that program wouldn’t go amiss. I’m currently teaching my on-line self-publishing class the beauty of Jutoh and how to get it to do all the lovely things we’d like to see in our e-books, but I’m thinking that I need to offer a class just in how to use Jutoh. The thing is, with Jutoh, you can create beautiful ebooks with a minimum of fuss and even have it create different versions for the different vendors just by jumping through two additional hoops (it’s not difficult, truly). J (That includes cleaning your document, standardizing your punctuation, converting it into HTML and then finishing the formatting in Jutoh.) What I hate to admit is that now, with Jutoh, you don’t even need to convert your document into HTML if you don’t want to (although, I still do because I can put in pictures and links much more easily there than I can in Jutoh itself). Yes, it costs money, but $40 isn’t a lot to pay considering that I charge $50 to do it for you. Well, finally, after trying nearly a dozen programs to convert my HTML files, I’ve found one that really does the trick well- Jutoh. I then found Paul Salvette who has fantastic instructions on how to format in HTML and then convert your book use KindleGen to create an mobi file and I’m not sure what he uses to convert it to epub, but you can be sure it’s something very techy because he believes in doing things “the right way”. I learned by following a fantastic tutorial by an author (whose name I can’t now recall-ack!), but he taught how to format your book into HTML and then convert it into a mobi (for Kindle) and epub using Calibre. Two and a half years! When I first started out there weren’t many ways to format an ebook. I’ve been formatting books since January of 2012.
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