Leaving aside any of the associated technology involved in publishing and marketing a book, there is an initial decision which is critical, and which will have many consequences once made.

What medium shall I use to write the book?

For me, the first part of the decision was fairly easy as I can’t really read my own handwriting and have been happily wedded to writing (and editing) on a screen for a long, long time. Not for me the romance of matching leather notebooks with notes scrawled in the margin. They would end up being illegible, scratched out scrawls with ugly, time-wasting graffiti obscuring anything half-decent.

So, it would be written on a computer, but on what software? Word would be fine, but I didn’t have Microsoft Office on my laptop and had recently moved all of my files to Google Drive. Google Docs would allow me to ensure that everything was backed up and I could write from anywhere.

And so, I started in Google Docs.

After about ten chapters (of what would be forty-five), I realised that I needed a method to navigate between chapters as the story evolved and I realised that I needed to go back and forth to make changes.

Not a problem, I downloaded an index plug in which allowed me to jump between chapters. Problem solved. I carried on.

After a while, I wasn’t able to remember which chapter was which and so I added a brief description underneath each chapter heading to make that clear. That issue resolved, I carried on.

I wrote the whole first draft that way without too many traumas and, right to the end, felt that this was probably a good way to work.

But it wasn’t really the end. The first draft was only a beginning and I started to learn how many hundreds of times I would need to make changes and re-export the file in Word, ePub or Kindle formats. The technology to export or Save As was there, but I hadn’t thought the whole process through. Every time I wanted to send it out, I needed to go through every chapter and delete the notes from the title. All forty-five chapters.

It didn’t take long for me to realise that this was never going to work and I looked again at the alternatives. The answer was a piece of software called Scrivener which saves all of the scenes and chapters as separate files which are easy to find, describe, edit and create. It is only when you want to send it out that you bring them all together using a flexible Compile function which allows you to build your own preferred preset styles for each format type.

It was a bit of a pain to learn (and a big pain to import and reformat my existing draft), but completely worth it. Scrivener is designed for writers and it does exactly what it needs to do.