I have a friend who has just finished a draft novel, and I’m lucky enough to be able to do some pre-reading for her.  She emailed it in a Word document, which I received in one email account on several different devices.  First, I opened it on the iPad, which sent it to Pages for iPad to be read.  I did my initial read through there.  Loved the book!  But, of course, I’m supposed to find things a reader will find and wonder about, and there are some of those things.

The next task is to capture my comments on the book in a meaningful way I can give back to my friend.  How can I do that?  There are several ways, but they’re all pretty cumbersome.

Then I realized I have Scrivener 2.0 (which my friend does not use, but that won’t be a problem, I don’t think).  The draft was formatted for submission to her agent, so chapters were clearly delineated.  Scrivener has this wonderful feature called, “Document, Split, With Selection as Title.”  I could import the Word document into Scrivener, so I saved it from my email on the Mac Mini, opened Scrivener, created a blank project called “Manuscript Title” where I put the title of my friend’s work in.  Then, I selected “File, Import” and navigated to the file name.

I broke out the title page and each subsequent chapter into separate files in the draft folder — all thirty-two chapters.

I’m also checking the timeline as I read through it this time, so I created Custom Meta Data (a  wonderful new feature in Scrivener 2.0) for “Date.”

I use a three pane setup with the Binder in the left column, the text of the document in the center, and the Inspector open in the right column.  If I wanted to summarize each chapter, I could do so in the index card in the top of the inspector column.  But for this purpose, I use the Custom Meta Data window to add the date for each chapter and the document notes section in the bottom  of the Inspector pane for my comments as I read through each chapter.

I should be able to export my comments to a separate document, delineated by Chapter to send to my friend when I’m done.  If she were interested, I could send her the entire scrivener file, and she could see all these things and play with that, but I don’t know if it will fit with the way she works.

So far, it’s a smooth, comfortable way to add my comments to the novel without having to shift between multiple programs of worry about whether track changes or comments will work in Word.

If you want to try it, Literature and Latte offers a free 30 day trial. Also, there’s a beta version of what’s essentially Scrivener 1.54 available for Windows users now.  Beta 1.4 has just been released, and I’ll offer it should be a pretty stable beta version (I used beta 1.3 for NaNo and didn’t have any problems).