WinterFest 2015 Sale on Writing Tools
The Macintosh developer community has long been highly cooperative, and nowhere is that more evident than in group efforts like the WinterFest sale that has just started. WinterFest focuses on serious tools for Mac writers, offering 20–25 percent discounts on powerful apps for brainstorming, researching, outlining, writing, and editing. It’s not a bundle deal, nor are there any gimmicks — WinterFest is just a straightforward holiday sale on essential apps. We’re participating too, with a 25 percent discount on all Take Control books through the end of December.
The curated collection of 10 apps includes a number that we rely on daily or have covered over the years. Every TidBITS article is written and edited in BBEdit. DEVONthink Pro Office is a superb tool for storing notes and research materials and a key part of Joe Kissell’s paperless office strategy. Eastgate Systems’ Tinderbox helps you organize, plan, and
map your thoughts, and their Storyspace is the latest version of the app in which I wrote my senior honors thesis about Hypertextual Fiction at Cornell University in 1989. You can plot out the chronology of any story with Aeon Timeline. Smile’s TextExpander saves you from typing out frequently used words and phrases, and Tonya and I both use it heavily. Literature & Latte’s Scapple helps you record and connect ideas, and their highly regarded writing studio Scrivener
enables you to turn your research and ideas into a manuscript. For working with editors and polishing your final draft (plus any imaginable text manipulation), Nisus Writer Pro is unparalleled — it’s what we rely on for all Take Control books. If references are essential in your writing, check out Bookends for help with collecting, annotating, curating, and citing published information. And, of course, our Take Control books help you better use several of these apps — with titles about DEVONthink Pro, Scrivener, and TextExpander — and your Mac in general.
The key to the discount is the WINTERFEST2015 coupon code, but the easiest way to take advantage of the discount is to start from the main WinterFest page.
With a few new WinterFest-related apps and books in hand, you’ll have the tools and training to best convey your ideas to the world.
I'm working on a book on investing and would appreciate suggestions on best software choices from TidBITSers who've done such writing. Am using MS Word and Excel so far. My goal is to get a hard-copy book of some 250-300 pages published commercially, with possibly an e-book version. I also plan a companion website and a small web community for readers to workshop investment ideas based on the book.
The book will not be footnoted in the usual academic way, but will have many references, mostly to web sources, but with some to periodicals and books, typically with brief commentary.
Would appreciate any/all suggestions.
Also, if anyone's interested in trying out the workshop experience, email me directly. Current plan is to launch the first workshop next year for people around age 30. The working title is: Exceptional Investing: Turning Smart Saving into Major Money. The approach is simple, DIY, and will be tested for ease of use in the workshops.
Do you have a publisher lined up? They may have requirements, but would likely be using Word. How they would create an ebook is a question. If you had to do it yourself, I'd recommend looking into Leanpub.
We use Nisus Writer Pro because we've written some macros to make integrating with Leanpub particularly clean, but our stuff wouldn't work for a non-Take Control book.
A lot of people really like Scrivener for writing fiction - I don't have a sense of how it would work for a technical book like you're proposing. It might depend a little on how completely you've outlined your book - I get the sense that Scrivener is great if you're moving things around a lot.