Another Use for Scrivener

I know we all (don’t we?) use Scrivener for our own personal writing. I also use it when I’m writing and researching a T.M.A. with the Open University, great for keeping all my notes together and for putting footnotes in a place to keep them out of the way.

My latest discovery (probably not the first to do so though) is that it is great for reviewing submissions to Wicked Words Quarterly.

The first task was to set up three folders in the Draft area; Submissions, Accepted and Rejected. Every time a new submission comes in it is placed as a text document in the Submissions folder. I then format the document to the same standard as all the others and as I want to final document to be compiled, this makes all the stories easier to read. With the Inspector panel open I start making notes, such as; name, address and contact details of the author.

Then I use the Comments & Footnotes tools to make notes on the story itself, these help me with the winnowing of stories, they also help with possible edit suggestions to the author. The other thing they help with is to make the rejection letter more personal, with concrete reasons for the rejection.

Once I’ve made suitable notes and comments on a story it can be moved to either the Accepted or Rejected folder.

The next step will be to compile all the accepted submissions into a document for exporting to Kindle, and as I’ve been formatting the stories as I’ve received them this should come out as a connected document with all the stories looking as though they work together as a whole.

I was going to use a spreadsheet to keep all this information in but using Scrivener instead means that the workflow is in place for making the actual book as I do the review of submissions, cutting out a couple of steps in the process of making the Quarterly, making my life easier 🙂