Scrivener: How do you use projects?

Software
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So, I’m looking to use Scrivener more (primarily iOS, but Mac, too) and want to see how other people are organizing and using projects. I’ve considered doing a “one project to rule them all” approach for my writing similar to Michael Hyatt, but wonder if that will get too unwieldy or affect compile settings.

I like the idea of having everything quickly accessible without having to jump between projects or constantly open and close them, but I know the more traditional approach is a separate project for each writing initiative.

What do y’all think? I have a couple of different writing tasks that will be completed in there, including:

  • Blog posts
  • Freelance articles
  • Non-fiction books
  • Fiction/Picture book manuscripts

Should I be using one project and multiple folders or different projects for each thing?

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Maybe have 1 project for all the smaller things - blog posts and articles - but distinct projects for each book. That’d be a lot easier.

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One project per end product. Scrivener is a means to an end and you will almost invariably end up doing your final edits in some other program. You don’t want your penultimate draft of something you’ve finished sitting around with your active writing (at least I wouldn’t!).

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Yeah, I’m thinking one project for blog posts/articles/miscellaneous stuff and then individual projects for books is probably a good idea. It would help keep research in the right spots.

I’m not too worried about collaborating outside of Scrivener, as my books are self-published and I plan on compiling from Scrivener and manipulating PDFs outside of it.

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Always one Scrivener project per document (whatever the document is). For repeated writing tasks with a single set of reference material I don’t use Scrivener. I used to use Circus Ponies Notebook for reference material and Pages for writing. Now I use Growly Notes for reference material.

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I’ve got several Scrivener projects and am adding a few more.

I’m just starting up one for my blog posts that will include an editorical calendar for the main farm blog and for LambTracker and have both ideas and finished articles folders within it for each of those blogs. I’m trying to get some structure so that I actually write those blog posts.

Another project is something similar but for the sheep association web site blogs (Black Welsh, Chocolate Welsh and White Welsh) and includes my Inspector Notes for the Association newsletter. I’m the registrar and only approved North American inspector for Black Welsh Mountain sheep and I write an article for every newsletter on the breed or on general sheep management. Again I’m trying to get more structure and a well defined place to put blog ideas and the actual writing.

I have one for the big photo scanning project because I keep track of resource groups, progress and workflows for each media type. I keep updating as I figure out new VueScan settings for various media types or finsih one resource group scanning.

Every NaNoWriMo novel gets its own project. My latest one actually migrated into a real project because it’s my first NaNo novel I think might actually make it to be worth trying to get published.

Sheep Tails, the collaborative non-fiction book I am working on with 2 other authors also has its own separate project for each of our sections. Each other person works on their own subset of stuff and when we are all done we’ll combine them into one project for editing and final publication.

I have a farm management document that is included as part of our estate trust that is kept in Scrivener because it gets updated at least quarterly.

A business I was involved in has its own separate project where I kept board of directors meeting agendas and minutes, notes, procedures and plans. That has been handed off to the purchaser of the business and proved a useful way to corral all the stuff related to it in one place.

I’m also rewriting my own farm business plan that was in LibreOffice into Scrivener so I can more easily edit and update sections of it.

For me the one project system is just too massive and I want separation so that I can provide access or hand off individual items as required. Obviously my NaNo novels are completely different from everything else, research for Sheep Tails isn’t applicable to the farm and so on.

You could always try one one way tothe other and see how it works for you. It’s fairly easy to drag stuff from one Scrivener project into another if you decide later to split out from teh single project or combine into one.

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Good luck with your books, Oogle!

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Thanks, it’s a long term project (almost an area of focus :slight_smile: ) sheep work and LambTracker debugging is getting in the way of just writing.

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