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.
Shameless plug: go to The-IT-Director.com and get on my mailing list if you have any interest in this topic.
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.
Aside from Dabble, did you have any tools to help you format the books for the various platforms?
