Barry Lyga's Blog: The BLog, page 42

BLOOD OF MY BLOOD: The Trailer

Here you go:

Blood of My Blood Attacks Your Ears

I know that a lot of you discovered and enjoyed the I Hunt Killers series on audio, so here’s a little clip of Charlie Thurston reading from Blood of My Blood. His Billy is just flat-out excellent.

As Billy might say, “Go on, click. Give ‘er a listen.”

http://barrylyga.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/9781478955658_Blood-of-My-Blood-Web-Clip.mp3

Two Things About Amazon vs. Hachette

In general, I’ve been happy to say very little about the ongoing Amazon vs. Hachette (publishers of I Hunt Killers) battle royale, instead pointing to others’ statements. It’s a big, thorny, ugly complicated issue and I don’t have the patience to do it justice, especially when others are writing so often and so well about it. Plus, quite frankly, I just don’t need to spike my blood pressure by thinking about it.

But reading a recent piece by Christopher Wright made me realize that there are two bits I do want to discuss, mainly because I don’t see anyone talking about them.

Wright’s article is well-thought-out and cogently presented, examining the kinds of nuance I enjoy. I don’t agree with everything he says, but he lays out a series of logical inferences in a manner that leaves little quibble room. I encourage you to go read it before you continue here.

So, here are my two problems with the Amazon vs. Hachette discussion, as thrown into stark relief by Wright’s piece:

1) Ebook pricing. Everyone has agreed that this fight is all about how expensive or not ebooks will/should be, but no one is digging below the surface of this discussion. Using Wright to summarize the argument:

There’s no legitimate reason an ebook should cost the same as a paperback. “Well we really want to” is not a legitimate reason. “Because we can get away with it” is only legitimate from a business perspective if you can actually get away with it, and the current fight between Amazon and Hachette suggests that they can’t.1

Now, I can’t speak for everyone, but…

I fully realize that two books do not a trend make, and that one author’s experience is not universal. But clearly some ebooks are less expensive than a paperback. Even from the evil, greedy, reader-haters at Hachette.

The problem isn’t “less expensive than.” The problem that no one seems to be discussing is “how much less expensive?”

Logic dictates that an ebook should be less expensive than a paperback because there are no printing, storing, or shipping costs involved. Far be it from me to argue with logic — that’s all true.

But the problem is that everyone (including Amazon) stops the argument there. As you can see, my Hachette ebooks are less expensive than my Hachette paperbacks. What’s the problem, then?

The problem is that no one is saying, “Ebooks should be less expensive than paperbacks by X amount.” Everyone just takes it as an article of faith that they should be less expensive, hurls insults at the publisher, sides with Amazon, and goes home.

Well, great – how much less expensive?

I have a sneaking suspicion that when people say less expensive, they’re thinking a huge amount. Like, say, half-off. But none of these people know if that’s actually viable.

Because, yes, printing, storage, and shipping costs should be deducted, but you and I don’t know what percentage of a publisher’s costs those things add up to!

Digital fans like to imagine that the electronic format is so wondrous that it compensates for the analog flaws to an almost infinite degree. But I’ve worked in publishing (as an author and in marketing) for my entire adult life, and I can tell you based on what I’ve seen and heard, this most likely isn’t true. In fact, given that physical production of books was — for a long time — the book industry’s only option, it makes sense to me to imagine that publishers long ago worked out the efficiencies and economies of scale of that particular piece of the puzzle, such that it is a much smaller percentage of the overall cost of producing a book than you would like to believe.

We don’t know, of course, because no publisher has opened up its P&Ls to public consumption. (I should state here that I’ve told at least one of my publishers that it should publicly explain exactly how expensive it is to produce a book, regardless of analog costs. I know such a disclosure could be risky, but I also think it would be illuminating.)

The rallying cry of the Amazon side is “$9.99 is too much!” Others have shown that Amazon’s math, well, isn’t really kosher, but let’s play the game anyway. Okay then. What about $9.49? What if it turns out that’s how the math works out? Or $8.99? Or $7.99?

They’re all less than a paperback and under $9.99, right? And hey, look — I have Kindle editions at both $8.99 and $7.99.

What are we fighting about, again?

In short: You don’t know what a publisher is spending and on what…so telling that publisher how to price its products is sort of like telling a restaurant how much the steak tartare should cost even though you have only the vaguest idea of what the ingredients cost…and absolutely no idea what it costs to run the kitchen.

And guess what — it’s like that with almost everything you buy! Almost every single product you purchase, you have no idea if you’re getting screwed or not. You decide based on its value to you and how much you want it.

So: Ebooks should be cheaper than paperbacks? As best I can tell, they often are, by a buck or so.2 If you want them even cheaper than that, you’re gonna have to show your math instead of just crying out, “Digital is cheaper!”

And last but not least: If this whole thing is about ebooks, then why is Amazon making it more difficult and more expensive to buy print books? I mean, I get it — they don’t want to kill their cash cow. But isn’t it just plain weird that Amazon’s logic goes like this: “Hachette is making ebooks too expensive! Therefore, we will cut discounts on print books and take longer to send them to you! But we’ll leave ebooks alone.”

I could sort of respect Amazon’s consistency and integrity if they decided to stop selling Hachette’s ebooks, standing on principle to their own detriment. But print books? That’s sort of like your local grocer saying, “My produce wholesaler charges too much for lemons, so I’m raising the price of limes.”

Again: What are we fighting about?

2) Wright’s second point with which I quibble is this:

Amazon can articulate a solution to a problem, and Hachette can’t articulate anything other than “Amazon is bad.” …. They have no vision on how to create a market that effectively competes with Amazon that answers any of the claims Amazon has made about how their vision is better for consumers, or about how their vision is better for other publishers, like me.3

Well, guess what? That’s because the last time Hachette tried to “create a market that effectively competes with Amazon,” they got slapped in the face with a bullshit anti-trust lawsuit that everyone in the world except for Amazon and the DOJ know was a counterintuitive exercise in idiocy. The result of this lawsuit, according to the Wall Street Journal:

Some publishers said the government’s action could harm consumers by giving Amazon excessive control of the industry.

And here we are, in the post-lawsuit world, and readers of Hachette books can’t preorder them from Amazon. The books cost more from Amazon. And they take longer to arrive.

Amazon has control and consumers are harmed. Go figure. Who could have guessed…other than everyone in the world except for the Department of Justice?

Wright says Hachette has offered no vision of the future, no competing idea. Well, yeah, that’s because they can’t. The most obvious solution is to back a competitor to Amazon, to team up with other publishers and sell direct to consumers, maybe. But when publishers back an Amazon competitor, they get sued. And when they dare talk to each other…they get sued.

Hachette’s only option is to resist Amazon. Every other avenue has been cut off by the misguided actions of some clueless federal prosecutors, to Amazon’s advantage.

Pick whichever side you like. But I ask you to think about both of these points. When someone cries “Lower prices!” but doesn’t say how much lower and/or how it’s possible to get there, maybe there’s more to it. And when one side has its arms tied behind its back in the fight, but still refuses to give in…maybe there’s more to that, too.

 

Emphasis in original.Sometimes retailers — including Amazon — discount paperbacks to less than the price of an ebook. But you can’t expect a publisher to compensate for discount decisions made at the retail level. If Amazon discounts a print book below its equivalent ebook cost, that’s on Amazon, not on the publisher.Emphasis in original.

Get 30% Off on Stephen King…and Me…

And Valerie Plame. And Joe Hill. And Douglas Preston. And Nora Roberts. And…

What am I going on about? Well, the fine folks at Murder by the Book (a most excellent crime and mystery bookstore in Texas) have decided to support the group Authors United, which has taken a public stance against Amazon’s recent behavior. The group includes authors directly effected (like yours truly), but also authors from publishers who are not impacted by Amazon’s decisions (like Mr. King).

Murder by the Book is showing its support by discounting our books by 30%, including preorders! So even though Amazon has stopped taking preorders on my books and is no longer discounting them, you can still order in advance and get discounts thanks to Murder by the Book.

Here’s their page explaining what they’re doing and why.

Here’s the page to order my books.

And here’s the preorder page for Blood of My Blood.

Make sure you use the promo code “AuthorsUnited” when you place your order! And BTW: The sale is only for print books, not ebooks!

Thanks, Murder by the Book!

For the Tech of It: Software (Mobile)

After stepping through the hardware I use at home and while out, as well as the software I use at home, it’s time to wrap things up with a look at mobile software.

For the most part, the apps I use while traveling are designed to extend or mimic my desktop experience as much as possible. So, for example, I use the Pages app on my iPad for the same reasons I use it on my desktop. No need to get into that.1

One thing about mobile writing, of course, is that you want to easily and almost unthinkingly sync what you’ve done on the iPad with what you have on your computer. This used to involve a lot of manual shuttling around of different files using various cables, but with the use of services like Dropbox2 and Box, it’s become much, much easier. As long as you remember to save the file in the right place on your computer — and as long as you have Internet access on your iPad — you should have access to the latest version everywhere. Imagine your file as a field you can look at through many windows in your house. The computer is one window, the iPad another. Same field, different ways to see it.

On my iMac, my main writing is done in Scrivener. Sadly, there is no Scrivener for the iPad…yet. And there is no app on the iPad that can read Scrivener’s native file format.

Fortunately, there’s a workaround, and it’s not a bad one.

Scrivener can export your manuscript as a series of documents, with each chapter or scene as its own file. You stash these files in your Dropbox or Box and point an iOS app to it. Now you can open each chapter or scene separately or create new ones. Then, when you return to Scrivener, you just have it re-absorb those files into its structure once more, and you’re up-to-date. So, all you need on the iOS device is an app that can read the exported format.

You can export from Scrivener as plain text, Word, or RTF (rich text format). Word is useless to me because I’m not about to buy rent Office from Microsoft just to work on my iPad. Pages can open and save to Word, but doesn’t (currently) interface with Dropbox or Box.

There are a slew of iOS apps that read and save plain text, but I’m not interested in plain text. I like to see my formatting as I write, so I need something that can read and save RTF and work with my chosen cloud storage system.

For a long time, there was nothing, and I had to make do with plain text (and then do the formatting later — ugh), but then I discovered Textilus.3

Textilus is, as best I can tell, the only iOS app that supports opening and creating RTF documents, as well as opening from and saving to a cloud service like Dropbox. It can connect to your cloud service so that you can dip into that folder of Scrivener exports, allowing you to edit or create new Scrivener subdocuments on-the-go, which are then later synced back in. (Luckily, Scrivener allows you to automatically sync your documents on open and close, so as long as you remember to close your document on your Mac before you work on your iPad, you’re always in sync.)

Textilus has a bunch of other features — graphics importing, HTML compliance, etc. — but as with Scrivener, I use it for the basics.

In truth, the app is pretty darn great except that its syncing to the cloud is a little less clear than it could be. You have to really study the documentation for a couple of minutes and then take a tiny leap of faith…but it does work. If I had one request for the Textilus folks, it would be to fix the way you connect to Dropbox and Box…but I believe iOS 8 — due in a month or so — has system-wide support for such things, so the work would be moot. We’ll see in the fall.

Of course, at some point there’ll be Scrivener for iOS. And I’ll most likely use it. But for the past couple of years, Textilus has been an excellent workaround. The app is updated regularly, with new features added on a frequent basis. And tech support has been generally helpful when I’ve needed it.

The combination of a cloud service and Textilus makes up about 90% of what I do on my iPad, writing-wise. But there are a few other apps I couldn’t live without:

NoteSuite: As I mentioned before, NoteSuite is an imperfect solution to my note-taking, note-keeping, note-storing needs, but it’s the only one — at present — that comes close to meeting those needs. I use the iPad version to sync with my iMac so that all of my notes can be in two places at once. The iPad app can do pretty much everything the Mac one can, including importing entire web pages of research.

Keynote: I probably should have mentioned this in the BLog on desktop software, but I neglected to. Mea culpa. I use Keynote to create presentations for my school visits. I don’t do horribly complicated presentations, but Keynote is certainly capable of doing so, if I were to decide to. I can make and edit presentations on my iMac or on my iPad or across the two of them. When I’m at a venue, I just plug in my iPad to the projector, and we’re off! (I always travel with my own Lightning-to-VGA adapter, as well as a VGA cable. You can never assume a venue will have the right cabling and adapters.)

A slideshow in Keynote for iPad.

If the projector is close at hand (or if the A/V set up allows), I can run the presentation right off my iPad. Which is great because I can look down and use the presenter display to see the next slide or my notes. But if the iPad has to be at a distance from me, I can still control the presentation by using Keynote on my iPhone. It’s the same app, so I can still see the next slide or my notes while also controlling the presentation. Pretty cool!

Controlling a Keynote presentation with Keynote for iPhone

The last little bit of mobile software I use is called Pomodoro Timer. Which, you may know, is Italian for tomato. I use Pomodoro on my iPhone, which is why it’s listed under mobile software, but I use it wherever and whenever I’m working.

Quite simply, Pomodoro is designed to time your work sessions for maximum efficiency. It relates to something called the Pomodoro Technique. I won’t go into the details — you can click the link for ‘em — but basically, the Pomodoro Technique has you work for 25 minutes, then take a 5 minute break, repeating this cycle for a couple of hours until you take a longer break…and then starting over again. For me, it’s terrifically productive, whether I’m writing, editing, revising, or proofing, and I use it constantly.

So, that’s a look at the mobile software I use to write. Anything cool I’m missing? Anything amazing you guys out there are using that I should try out?

There’s also Pages for iPhone, which works just like the iPad and desktop version, but on a screen that — frankly — is too small for me. Still, it’s helpful when you’re on the run and need to check something or make a small edit quickly.That’s a referral link, BTW.There’s also a free tryout version of Textilus here.

I Hunt Killers Prequels Now on iBooks!

The I Hunt Killers prequel short stories are now available on iBooks! Check ‘em out:

Career Day
Neutral Mask

I Hunt Killers Prequels Now Available!

If you’ve read the I Hunt Killers novels, you only have part of the story!

As some of you know, I’ve written prequel short stories for I Hunt Killers. These were typically available in places like Facebook, but as time has gone on, some folks have complained that the prequels are tough to find, that they don’t like Facebook, that they want to be able to read them on their ereader, not in a browser, etc.

So…problem solved! Now, as with the prequel novella Lucky Day, you can get “Career Day” and “Neutral Mask” for your ereader!1

Set one year before I Hunt Killers…

Jasper has a problem, and everyone knows it: His father is Billy Dent, world-famous serial killer. Even though Dear Old Dad is in jail, Jasper still feels like everyone is watching him, like everyone thinks he’s dangerous.

Even he thinks he’s dangerous. Sometimes.

His best — and only — friend Howie is always ready with a joke or a goofy nickname, but Jasper needs more. Maybe that new girl in town, Connie, is what he’s been looking for…

Amazon (Kindle)
Barnes & Noble (Nook)
Kobo

 

Set one year before I Hunt Killers, shortly after “Career Day”…

Connie is the new girl in town, but she already has friends…and maybe even a boyfriend. Her father isn’t happy that Connie is dating a white boy like Jasper Dent, and things get even worse when she realizes that Jasper is the son of Billy Dent, one of the world’s most notorious serial killers! This is the story of how Connie and Jazz overcame their early troubles and fell in love.

Amazon (Kindle)
Barnes & Noble (Nook)
Kobo

And…there will be a third prequel short story coming soon. Prepare yourself for…”Blood Boy.”

iBooks is coming soon for both! For some reason, iBooks takes a long time!

Blood of My Blood: A Plea

We’re pretty close to the release date for Blood of My Blood now, and it appears that some early reviewers have gotten their hands on copies. Good for you! I hope you enjoy it.

But…

Look, the whole book is basically a spoiler from page one on. So I’m begging you, down on my knees and everything, please, please don’t talk about specifics until September 9 or thereabouts. Some people have waited a really long time for this book, and I’d hate to have anything ruined for them by an errant glimpse of something online.

Even something innocuous like “I love so-and-so’s hilarious comment halfway through” would reveal that so-and-so survived the events of the end of the second book. So, y’know…

Of course, feel free to share your opinion. If you like it, tell people. If you don’t, tell them that, too. (Just don’t @ mention me on Twitter when you do it. What’s that all about???)

Just be…circumspect. I’m not demanding or commanding or ordering. I’m asking. As a favor to me. Please.

Thanks!

For the Tech of It: Hardware (Mobile)

So we have discussed the desktop side of writing tech, both hard and soft, with a brief detour into backing up. Now, we turn to mobile.

Let’s face it — when most people think of authors these days, they think of laptops. And probably coffee shops.

I’m no stranger to the coffee shop grind1, but I haven’t used a laptop since 2010, when Sir Steven of Jobs bequeathed unto us the iPad.

As I watched the unveiling of the iPad (on a pirate video stream, natch), I was waiting for two bits of information. The first one came relatively quickly, when Jobs revealed that the iPad would run a version of Apple’s iWork suite, including the Pages word processor.

Okay, so that was one down — I would be able to compose on the iPad.

A little while later, the second domino fell: The iPad would support hardware keyboards over Bluetooth.

Yes!

I sold my ancient, heavy iBook as soon as I got my greedy little hands on my iPad. No longer would I have to lug that thing around. I could now tote a light, slender tablet and a tiny, skinny keyboard. Perfect.

Here’s what I carry when I force myself to leave my writing cave and interact with the humans of the world:

iPad — Duh. My model is the iPad Air ’cause the screen-size-to-weight ratio is great. An iPad mini would be lighter still, but the screen real estate just isn’t there for serious writing sessions. I went with the 32 GB model, which was a miscalculation on my part. I should have sprung for 64 GB. I routinely run out of space and have to delete music or videos. Fortunately, Apple’s iCloud storage allows me to keep my music at the ready, even if it’s not on my device.

I spent the extra bucks to upgrade to the T-mobile cellular version of the iPad Air. T-mobile has a great program whereby they give you 250 MB per month of cellular data…free. As in no dinero. That’s MB, not GB, you’ll note, so we’re not talking a huge amount of data. Still, it’s free. And what I do is this: I leave the cell data off most of the time. If I find myself stuck somewhere without wifi and a desperate need to go online, I switch on the data, grab what I need, then turn it off again. For an emergency rescue feature, it can’t be beat, as long as you can swallow the initial upcharge for the cellular model.

I also use the iPad at school visits, where I hook it up to a projector (via an adapter) and run the presentation from my…

iPhone — Other than controlling presentations (about which more next time), I don’t really use my phone for writing-type tasks. When I’m out and about, I will sometimes be struck by something, in which case I usually email a thought or idea to myself for safe-keeping. I have the iPhone 5S, at 32 GB, like my iPad. Unlike my iPad, 32 GB is plenty on my phone. (Smaller apps, less data.)

When I’m home, I have a standard, boring Apple Smart Cover on my iPad. But when I go out, I want a little more protection and flexibility. So, I slap the Air into a Versacover by Moshi. As you can see from these photos, the Versacover is, indeed, versatile. It can fold into several configurations, allowing you to prop up the iPad in landscape or portrait mode.

 

It does a good job setting up the iPad for typing, too. I use Apple’s Bluetooth keyboard. Bought it the day I bought my first iPad in 2010 and I’ve kept it ever since. (You think maybe I have a thing for keyboards?) I’m not hugely in love with the Apple keyboard, but that has nothing to do with the quality of the keyboard or the quality of typing into an iPad and has everything to do with my neurotic fixation on my original MacAlly iKey. In short: It’s impossible to make a portable keyboard that I’m going to fall in love with (and that goes for laptop keyboards, too), so I don’t even judge them on that basis. The Apple keyboard is good enough, which is as good as it gets for me in this category. And it seems to be gentle on batteries, too. (It takes two AAs, and they seem to last quite a while.)

Speaking of batteries… When you’re mobile, you’re always looking for your next hit of juice, right? After having my phone die at the end of a long day one too many times, I picked up a Phonesuit. It has enough power to recharge my phone from the dead, or to give me a good jolt on the iPad. It’s about the width of an iPhone, maybe twice as thick. Under the cap lurks a Lightning plug, so you don’t even need a cable — you can plug the Phonesuit right into your gadget. The little dimple you see in the picture is touch-sensitive: Touch it to light up the blue power meter and see how much charge your Phonesuit still has. Cool, eh? It has a micro-USB plug that you use to recharge it, and it comes with the appropriate cable for doing so.

There’s only one problem with the Phonesuit: When plugged in to your phone, it’s wide enough to block the audio port. So, if you want to eke out some more iPhone time to listen to your jams, that’s not gonna happen. You’ll have to wait until you power up, then rock out.

When not actually in motion, but still away from my home base, I like to carry the XtremeMac InCharge Home charger. It sports two USB ports, so it charges up my phone and iPad at the same time, taking up only a single outlet. In a hotel room, that can be a godsend — there are still hotels out there that hide their outlets, hardwire their electronics right into the wall, or dole out plugs so parsimoniously that you’re forced to choose between charging your phone or watching TV. Needing only a single outlet helps. Also, when out in public, you can find that person hogging an outlet and say, “Hey, you let me plug in instead, you can plug into my second port and we can both drink in that sweet, sweet electricity.” Works a treat in airports especially.

That’s what I take with me when I leave the house for some writin’ time! What I wish I had: After losing my iPad on a flight a few years ago, I wish I had a Bluetooth fob that would sound the alarm when I leave my iPad behind somewhere. I tried one out a few months ago, but it was finicky. Anyone have any luck with such a gizmo? If so, tell me the brand and model in the comments!

I’ll be here all week, folks! Don’t forget to tip your waitress!

For the Tech of it: Software (Desktop)

I use a lot of software, but very little of it is specifically aimed at my writing. I use Photoshop Elements and iMovie and Hype and Numbers on a semi-regular basis, for example, but not to create fiction. So I’m going to limit myself to those apps that I use specifically for writing when on my iMac. There are surprisingly few.

Scrivener: This is the big one, the app where most of my work gets done. If you’ve spent more than two or three minutes chatting with an author about “process” in the past few years, you’ve probably already heard about Scrivener. Originally developed as a Mac-only app by a guy who wanted an program to help him with his own novel, Scrivener now boasts a Windows version as well and has grown into a must-have for most authors’ toolkits.

Truthfully, I use probably 10% of Scrivener’s capabilities, and the same is, I suspect, true of most other authors. The thing is, we’re probably all using a different 10%. The program has a near infinity of features, including character sheets, multiple methods of organization, an index card board, linking within documents, inline annotation, a bewildering number of compiling/exporting options, templates for different kinds of publications, and probably — somewhere in a submenu — a feature that deletes porn from your hard drive before the NSA can find it.

All that said, I basically use Scrivener as a word processor, with a few crucial differences. For one thing, its compiling options made it incredibly simple for me to produce the files needed for my ebook, Unsoul’d.

But I don’t publish ebooks on my own all that often. Scrivener is most useful to me for its excellent “Compose mode,” which you can see to the right. (Click for a bigger version.) It’s sort of an amped-up full-screen mode, with controls to let you widen or narrow the “page” and blow up the text to whatever size you like. (You can also have a floating note pad on the screen at the same time, which is helpful, since you can’t see anything else while in Compose.)

Also useful is Scrivener’s organizational capacities. Take a look at the image to the left. That’s the document for Game, and Scrivener was helpful in a couple of ways. In the main pane, you can see that there are two documents open, with the screen bisected horizontally. This makes it easy to, say, refer to one chapter while working on another, without needing to flip back and forth or swap windows.

At the same time, look to the left of the screen. Unlike in a word processor, Scrivener lets you assign each chapter and scene to its own subdocument, organized as you please. Want to move a scene from later in the book to earlier? Cool — no need to cut-and-paste. Just drag it to the proper place in the hierarchy.

Best of all, you can color-code chapters and scenes, which I did for Game. Each POV character got his/her own color, so that as I worked, I could glance over and think, “Oh, it’s been a long time since we checked in with Connie. I should fix that.” Or “While this scene is happening, what’s going on with Billy? Let me find his latest scene…” For a novel of even modest organizational complexity, Scrivener is a godsend. For something like The Book That Will Kill Me, it forestalled my frustrated suicide attempts on a daily basis.

Scrivener also has the Snapshot feature, which lets you freeze all or part(s) of your document so that you can keep working and then — if you realize you’ve gone off the rails — easily roll back to where you were before. Nice.

Pages: Scrivener is great for writing and revising, but at some point, you have to hand the file over, and publishers don’t accept Scrivener documents. They want Word files because that’s what they’re set up to handle. Fortunately, Scrivener can compile your document and export it in Word format, so that’s fine.

But editors tend to send your Word file back to you, with comments and ideas embedded via Word’s Track Changes feature. And when the time comes for copyediting, your copyeditor will send a Word doc that is positively bleeding with Track Changes. You’ll need to go through and offer your own comments and accept or reject changes as is appropriate. Aha! So, you need Word after all, eh?

Nope! Pages, Apple’s word processor, offers compatibility with Track Changes and can both open and save Word files. Plus, it’s a lot cheaper than Word, less buggy, and not nearly as bloated with features you’ll never us.1

I’ve been running a Microsoft-free computer for more than ten years. So, basically for my entire writing career. I’ve never used Word and I can’t imagine why I’d have to.

I also use Pages for shorter works — like short stories and essays — that don’t need the firepower Scrivener brings to the table.

NoteSuite: One of the biggest problems I face is organizing notes, ideas, and research. Ideally, I need a system that allows me to enter my own notes as well as to quickly grab information from the web. It needs a hierarchical system of organization, good search, and support for rich text (since I often take notes with bold or italics and need to be able to paste them into Scrivener or Pages). Last but not least, to be truly indispensable, it needs to sync between my iMac, my iPad, and my iPhone.

NoteSuite comes closer than anything else I’ve tried. In fact, it’s so close that it’s frustrating. It has clients for the Mac and iPad. While there’s no iPhone client, it does have a feature whereby you can email notes to its database, so that’s a decent workaround. It supports RTF, has folders and a great search function.

Unfortunately, it feels only partly complete. Things that are bog-standard on other apps just don’t work properly. You can’t drag-and-drop notes into folders, for example — you have to use a clumsy assignment dialog box. No drag-and-drop for text, either. Selection of text is wonky, too.

And that great email-a-note-to-your-database feature? Well, it’s glitchy as all hell, and despite repeated attempts to get NoteSuite’s tech support to look into it, I’m no closer to a solution.

Still, it’s at least close to what I need, and moving all of my notes into another program seems daunting right now. So I’m sticking with NoteSuite for now, hoping that iOS 8 in the fall will encourage some developer to add a couple of the functions I need to a pre-existing app.

And if you know of an app that meets my requirements, let me know in the comments! I’ve spent a lot of time looking, but I can’t look everywhere.

Next time: Mobile hardware. Being an author in a coffee shop no longer requires a laptop.

To be sure, Pages is also missing some features you might want, but Apple is pretty good about adding stuff in as time goes by…and I can’t think of a single missing feature that rises above the level of annoyance to the level of mission-killer.