My experience using Dabble for a published non-fiction book.
There hasn’t been much added to this thread in a while and I would guess others have published works written on Dabble. I’ll write about mine, but please add yours. (note, it doesn’t need to be as long as mine, I tend to get wordy…smile). NOTE: these are my opinions and there are lots of other successful ways to use Dabble. Don’t take how I did it as a criticism of your way of using Dabble.
Short Summary
My book, The I.T. Leaders’ Handbook (PLUG! available in many countries on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc. for any IT people reading this) was written entirely on Dabble. I used InDesign to layout the book (Vellum is the best for fiction, but sucks for non-fiction). I wrote exclusively on a Chromebook and did the InDesign on my wife’s PC. More details after the cover photos.
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More Details
Very boring, but carry on if you like.
I want to make a point early on here: I use Dabble as a WRITING tool, not a FORMATTING tool. You will see some comments below about what Dabble is lacking for non-fiction, but I don’t care about formatting. I want bullet lists, but I don’t care what they look like. I want images, but I don’t care about anchoring, text wrapping or anything else. Page counts don’t matter to me as this is a paperback and ebook. I’ll take care of all that in layout.
I really like this because when I write, I don’t want to think about formatting. Formatting is a shiny distraction that keeps me from putting words down. I don’t want to care about margins and fonts and drop caps, etc. All that keeps me from finishing the content,
Process
With non-fiction, I didn’t use Dabble’s plotting tools. I used Story Notes a lot for temporary holds, reorganizing, etc. I created a “Boneyard” note where I pasted all the stuff I deleted, but maybe it will be useful in the next book. I created a MetaData note where I kept my ever changing title, description, etc.
I rearranged the book several times and dragging chapters around was really slick.
I used the focus feature all the time, usually turning it on explicitly instead of waiting for it to fade.
I kept the grammar/spell check on which was annoying at the beginning but that annoyance got me to stop using passive voice and other things it complained about. I became a better writer because I let Dabble be a scold.
After each writing session, I exported a word copy to Google Drive as my backup. Never needed it, but you know, belt and suspenders.
When I finished (or at least I thought I was finished…ha!..little did I know), I exported a final copy to Word and imported it into InDesign for formatting. Dabble handled the word styles nicely, and it wasn’t too hard to create matching styles in InDesign.
Edits: I had several people as early readers and an editor, and I got lots of feedback. I did all those updates in InDesign. I REALLY want the collaboration feature in Dabble so those that work online can work there. However, 3 out of 5 of my readers wanted PDF or printed so that wouldn’t help them.
I will do all the editing in Dabble for future books. Probably just use export to word and print/pdf as needed. InDesign is a great formatting tool and a lousy editing tool.
In Dabble’s feature request list, there are several non-fiction requests so I won’t list them all here. The biggest pain for my book was the lack of bullet/numbered lists. I had to manually mark them and then manually fix them in InDesign. A simple list implementation with no formatting options (just use the standard Word list styles on export) would be fine. As I said before, Dabble is a writing tool, not a formatting tool.
Inserting images would be useful. I used mockups for my illustrations and needed something as a place holder. Since Dabble doesn’t support images in manuscripts, I had to put text in marking where the images went. Again, I don’t want iage formatting, just let me put a low resolution image in and I will replace it with the real one in formatting.
I hope others share their finished works, even if they don’t share the story like this.