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Going wide

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Last time I wrote about publishing my back catalog on Kobo and making all my older books nonexclusive to Amazon. This is called “going wide” in independent publishing circles. I mentioned I had been meaning to do this for some time, but kept putting it off. If you’re wondering why, it involves a ten-year backstory about my rocky relationship with non-Amazon distributors.

My first push toward independent publishing came from attending the 2014 AWP Conference & Bookfair in Seattle. Amazon was all over the conference, hosting multiple round table talks on Kindle publishing, seminars on how to publish on their platform, and handing out free CreateSpace print-on-demand samples. Although mildly skeptical, I returned home convinced it was worth an experiment or two.

The first book I published on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing was A Concordance of One’s Life. It’s a short story collection—essentially my MFA thesis put into book form. I had zero expectations of big sales or shooting up the bestseller list. If things went pear-shaped, I lost little.

The process was amazingly smooth. I slapped together a passable cover using photos from my phone. I published it on Amazon with ease, and lo, my first book was available. Sales were in the single digits. That’s fine, it was a start. My San Francisco novella Everywhere Man soon followed.

In 2014, it seemed natural that I should publish my books everywhere I could, and I began researching other options. Smashwords was my first stop.

Smashwords is an old-timer in the e-publishing sector, predating even Amazon (I believe). Its founder is an e-publishing evangelist who even e-published his own book to spread the good word. Unlike Amazon, which has quality standards they expect authors to follow, Smashwords accepts anything: Word documents, crappy PDFs, even plain text files. If it could be read, Smashwords wanted to host it.

This meant, of course, that my books were side-by-side with some truly awful options, both in terms of writing quality and reading comfort. The site’s layout was archaic, and had few options for book discovery.

What’s more, Smashwords offered no easy way to read the books or documents you downloaded. Amazon had free Kindle Reader apps and a Kindle standalone handheld device. Both automated buying, downloading, and reading books. With Smashwords, the reader was on their own.

Sales on Smashwords were nearly zero. The only way I was going to get people to find my books there was to spread links to Smashwords myself. If I was going to do that, I would rather send them to Amazon, which made it far easier to load my ebooks on a Kindle reader. For years I offered my first two ebooks for free on Smashwords. It made no difference in downloads.

I also tried Barnes & Noble. Unlike Amazon and Smashwords, B&N was immensely unfriendly in 2014 and reluctant to deal with an independent writer. They went so far as requiring me to file for a B&N vendor ID, which was the same ID used for selling goods in their physical stores, from books to candy to stuffed animals. I managed to get my first two ebooks up on their web site, but like Smashwords, they offered no way to make my books known to their browsing customers. What’s more, their Kindle-like handheld reader (“Nook”) was overly expensive, underpowered, and did not sell well.

Next came Apple Books. Like B&N, they were also reluctant to deal with independent writers. They made establishing a publisher account feel like I was dealing with a bureaucrat who could not stop rolling his eyes as I filled out the form. Worse, they don’t support buying a book on the Web—you had to launch their Books iPhone or iPod app to search the Apple Store. And, like the others, there was almost no way to get my books in front of people who might be searching for a title like my own.

That’s when I got to Kobo’s Writing Life, which is Kobo’s e-publishing system. Kobo was far more welcoming than Apple and B&N. Publishing books was almost easier than Amazon’s KDP. They offered resources for writing and editing their books, and links to print-on-demand publishers if I wanted to offer a paperback on their site.

Like the other non-Amazon platforms, though, discovery was again a problem. Once more, it was upon me to spread links to my Kobo pages far & wide so readers could find my books. And, I don’t believe Kobo at that time offered an ebook reader of their own, leaving readers on their own to load their purchased selections on a reader. (I might be mistaken about this last point, however.)

Ten years on

Reviewing these options over ten years later, it’s remarkable how little has changed.

Kobo remains the best of the non-Amazon bunch. Their publishing system is similar to the 2014 experience, but it was always easy to use and navigate, so I’m fine with that. It still has its publishing resources list, and its book details pages (where a reader can examine the book before buying) look about the same as before.

B&N learned their lesson the hard way and made publishing books on their web site much, much friendlier. Their publishing portal operates much like Kobo’s now, and it appears it’s easier for a new writer to sign up. Smashwords was sold to Draft2Digital, but the web site stands more or less as it was when I first logged in. Apple remains a cold and unfriendly business partner.

The biggest remaining problem with these platforms? Discovery. I’ve used the word a few times already. Let me explain what it means in this context.

If you go to the home page for any of these booksellers, you are presented with bestsellers and new books and old standbys from the Big Four publishers—Penguin Random House, Macmillan, Hachette Book Group, and HarperCollins, and their numerous imprints. While Amazon also gives these big-name (and high-paying) publishers lots of screen real estate, you will also find titles from independent authors mixed in, especially on their Top 100 lists for the various genres: Westerns, science-fiction, biography, and so forth. Not so with the other platforms.

Amazon also offers independent authors the ability to advertise their books. Advertising can be set up a few different ways, but it’s usually a per-click price auction. The author gets to decide what search terms or what kind of content the ad should be placed near. This is an amazing way to let readers know of your work.

Per-click advertising is unavailable on the other platforms. Kobo toyed with the idea, but never followed through.

Likewise, Amazon will advertise your book—for free—through “Others bought these similar books” and “Suggested titles” lists it shows on book detail pages. This is another great way for readers to discover new books—if someone enjoys cyberpunk, it’s likely they’ll at least want to know about my take on the genre.

The other platforms only offer a “More titles by this author” on a book page. That’s it. Worse, this feature is broken, and has been broken for over ten years. Here’s why.

Amazon has a concept of author pages, where a writer can group their titles under their name and biographical blurb. It’s sort of like a bookshelf of all the author’s works. That’s why you can click the link to my name on any of my book pages and go right to my Amazon author page.

None of the above platforms—including Kobo—have such a concept. Their “More titles by this author” lists are nothing more than a lazy search of all books on their site with the same author name. When you have a name as common as “Jim Nelson,” that means books by complete strangers are presented as mine.

This was annoying, but forgivable, in 2014. It’s maddening in 2025.

I wrote Kobo support about this in 2021. As with per-click advertising, they said author pages were something “we are looking into the possibility for the future.” They’ve yet to follow through. Remember, their systems know which books are mine—I uploaded them to their servers through a single account! Yes, things get more complicated when a single author has multiple publishers, but that doesn’t excuse using a simple keyword search to locate an author’s books.

Year after year, Amazon has listened to independent authors and improved their publishing system to accommodate our needs. Is it perfect? Not in the least. But I do see a continuous process of refinement unseen on the other platforms. That demonstrates to me a level of commitment the others are not making.

I’m not here to tell you that Amazon is a wonderful company. You may have real issues with their size, their sales model, their profits, their international scope, their practices, or their founder’s politics. I won’t argue with any of that.

But for ten years now, Amazon has treated me more like a business partner than any other publishing platform out there. Not a peer, perhaps, but at least a partner of sorts.

That’s an awful lot of grumbling on my part. Why move my books to Kobo now?

My Kindle Unlimited page reads have dropped considerably in the past two years. Sales have dropped too. I don’t write the kind of books that move big numbers of copies. That throne is currently held by romance, fantasy, and hard science-fiction multi-volume series, with lots of battles and excitement, and plenty of sex and plunder. I prefer standalone novels centered around one or two characters, and stories with a solid beginning, middle, and end.

On the advertising front, the booming Kindle publishing market has brought with it inflated per-click prices. I’m seeing $2+ per-click(!) auction prices for certain high-value, high-margin book categories, a price I’m unwilling to pay, since a click is no guarantee of a sale.

With my back catalog having a harder time finding an audience, it’s time to expand their availability, especially since I’ve learned that folks in Commonwealth nations seem to prefer Kobo.

I’m happy to oblige.


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Will we finally see Neuromancer on the screen?

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See also “One year later: Will we finally see Neuromancer on the screen?”

Neuromancer (Brazilian edition)

The Illuminerdi (via) reports Apple TV+ is tooling up to produce a streaming adaptation of William Gibson’s cyberpunk masterpiece Neuromancer. The big question Illuminerdi concerns itself with is which actor will play protagonist Case, a drug-abusing hacker hired to pull off a virtual heist in cyberspace.

The story buries the lede. The truly big news is that Neuromancer has a reasonable chance of being adapted to the screen. Apple TV+ may not be the leading force in streaming entertainment today, but it’s established a track record of producing high-quality material and taking some risks along the way. I know I sound like the eternal fanboy when I say this, but, “This time it might be real.”

Neuromancer is a brilliant novel, one of my favorites, and by my lights, the book that rearranged science fiction. Just as Raymond Chandler did not invent the hard-boiled detective novel, William Gibson did not invent cyberpunk. But both authors took earlier bricklaying done by them and other writers, pulled it all together, and buffed the final result to a chrome-like sheen. There’s science fiction before Neuromancer, and there’s science fiction after Neuromancer.

Hence Neuromancer on film has been a hot topic among science fiction fans since the book was first published in 1984. Every few years over the subsequent decades, news would percolate up that a movie adaptation was in the works, only for the organizers to lose interest, fail to find finding, or simply not get the green light. The Wikipedia section on Neuromancer‘s numerous aborted film adaptations doesn’t do justice to its rocky history. Fake movie trailers have been sewn together; fan-made movie posters have been photoshopped. The rumors, anticipation, and disappointments surrounding the film’s production are legion. (My response to hearing of this latest adaptation attempt: “I’ll believe it when I see it.”)

There were several sidelights along the road to this moment, starting with Johnny Mnemonic in 1996. At first glance, it appeared the perfect aperitif for Neuromancer fans: Mnemonic was an adaptation of a Gibson short story set in the same story universe. The film landed flat, though, and is pretty grating to watch. (Some call it a cult classic—I can’t tell if they’re being ironic or not). Keanu Reeves turned in a cold performance (which he claims was intentional) within a confounding and bizarrely campy narrative. Some say Mnemonic was underfunded. Gibson said it was overfunded. Even if the studio execs were clueless in their meddling—not a stretch to imagine—I still think postmodernist director Robert Longo was simply in over his head.

(That said, I’ve not seen the new re-edit Johnny Mnemonic: In Black and White, so I’ll reserve judgment whether the film is irredeemable. I admit: The stills look damn promising.)

Movie still from Johnny Mnemonic: In Black and White
Johnny Mnemonic: In Black and White

It took The Matrix (1999) to give hungry cyberpunks the cinematic meal they were waiting for. There’s so many parallels between it and Neuromancer, you can’t help but think the writing/directing Wachowskis owe Gibson a pitcher of beer (if not a brewery). But Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream) was on to something when, after viewing the film, he claimed “Cyberpunk? Done.” By using up Neuromancer‘s best devices, as well as every philosophical question explored by Philip K. Dick, the Wachowskis came close to shutting the door on the most interesting development in genre fiction since the 1930s. The banality and repetitiousness of the next three Matrix films—including 2021’s Resurrections, which I held a sliver of hope for—only seemed to cement Aronofsky’s point.

(Cyberpunk’s heyday in the 1990s has passed, but neo-cyberpunk lives. The new breed exists where a worldwide computer network is no longer an imagined future, but a concrete element of the story’s past.)

I’m perennially suspicious of Hollywood adapting books to the screen, especially science fiction. Too often screenwriters will ditch the most memorable and gripping parts of the source material to slide in Tinseltown’s tired narrative shorthand. Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle leaps to mind. I’ve not seen the recent adaptation of Foundation, but at least one reviewer thinks Asimov’s classic hasn’t actually been adapted. Still, Illuminerdi reports William Gibson is signed on as an executive producer for Neuromancer. That gives me a touch more confidence in the direction of the project.

But only a touch. In 2015, I wrote how Hollywood has abandoned “‘tight, gapless screenwriting’ to scripts focused on world-building, sequels, expansion, rebooting.” That was written in time when superhero franchises were claiming greater real estate at the cineplexes, and Hollywood had finished converting Tolkien’s charming tale about wee folk into a eight-hour epic-action trilogy. Cinema houses still ruled back then. Like a sneeze coming on, the theater owners knew a violent upheaval was imminent. Today, streaming services are the premier way to deliver movies to eager audiences. And that’s what worries me the most.

MIlla Jovovich as Molly Millions in Neuromancer (fan-made movie poster)

My dread is not that this cyberpunk classic will be adapted to television instead of the silver screen—it’s to see it adapted to a medium that expects seasons and episodes. As with High Castle and Foundation, the streaming services love season-long episodic television: All the better for binge-watching.

Episodic television ushers in the narrative shorthand that Neuromancer absolutely does not need: every hour ending on a contrived cliffhanger; the sexual tension of when-will-they-hook-up; the let-down of the couple separating (complete with the trite break-up language of television: “I need some space” or, “This is going too fast”); and so on.

As Rob Bricken noted in his review of Foundation, which was serialized for Apple TV+:

Even if you’re coming in without having read a page of Asimov, you’ll still notice the drawn-out plots that go nowhere, the padding, and the weird choices the show has the characters make to keep the plot from moving forward. Cheap, nonsensical melodrama fills the series…The show also wants to have pew-pew laser battles and ship fights and spacewalk mishaps and junk, none of which offer anything you haven’t seen before, and are usually used to just run out the clock anyway.

He makes this sharp observation:

Then there’s the show’s terror that people might not make certain connections, so it shows something, has the character comment on it to themself, and then maybe throws in a flashback to someone saying something relevant even if it was said three minutes prior.

This comes from television writing 101: “Tell them what they’re going to see, show it to them, and then tell them what they saw.” If that sounds like how to organize a Powerpoint presentation, you’re right. It’s also why television writing in 2022 remains hard-wired to the narrative structures of I Love Lucy.

Just as Gibson’s console jockeys rewired systems to hijack signal broadcasts and repurposed wet-tech to bore holes through firewalls, let’s hope modern streaming technology is bent to Neuromancer‘s whims, and not vice-versa.

Addendum: One of the criticisms I’ve received, here and elsewhere, is that Neuromancer cannot properly be condensed into a two-hour movie, hence a series is a better fit for its adaptation.

I agree a multi-part show is appropriate for Neuromancer‘s intricate story line. I loathe condensing Neuromancer into a ninety-minute film almost as much as I loathe seeing Neuromancer: Season Two on my TV screen. However, when I originally wrote the above post, I kept fishing around for a good example of a multi-episode streaming series (for illustrative purposes), and failed to locate one.

This morning I recalled The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story (which started life on FX and moved to Netflix). Its miniseries format would work well for Neuromancer. Each segment builds the story and develops characters toward a conclusion, like chapters in a novel. There’s a beginning, a middle, and a door-closing end.

My gripe is that Apple TV+ may attempt to “episodize” Neuromancer, making it more like a soap opera or a recurring show than a single story told a chapter at a time. This is what happened to Man in the High Castle—which was more “inspired by” than a retelling of the source material—and what appears happened to Foundation.

Follow-up: “One year later: Will we finally see Neuromancer on the screen?”


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A quarter-century writing in cafes

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cafe(友光軒) by voo34oov (CC BY 2.0)

I’ve spent twenty-five years writing in cafes. For a quarter of a century, I’ve attempted to produce passable fiction within the thin caffeinated air of Bay Area coffeehouses. I’ve endured countless hours of crummy music blasted overhead by baristas with something to prove—coexisted with hundreds of cafe patrons as neighbors, each with differing notions of privacy and personal space—suffered wobbly cafe tables and seats as hard as steel—and consumed gallons upon gallons of coffee, steamed soy milk, and espresso shots—all in the name of writing books someone might want to read.

My first foray into the writers’ cafe subculture came in the mid-1990s with the purchase of a Fujitsu laptop computer. This machine freed me from writing on a desktop PC-compatible occupying the corner of my bedroom. This freedom gave me a way to find a neutral place to get writing done—a place neither the home nor the office.

Cafes back then were largely for drinking coffee and reading a newspaper or book. Writing, when it was done at a cafe, was performed with pen and paper. The parallel advents of cheap personal notebooks and wireless Internet rewrote the cafe landscape in America, morphing the coffeehouse from a casual light-fare experience to a pseudo-shared office for the creative class.

Any writer will tell you, finding a good writing cafe is a cherished gift. Every change-of-address I’ve made over the last twenty-five years was always followed by long days of stumbling from one neighborhood cafe to another in search of the right one—the mother lode, Nirvana, the comfortable and welcoming writer’s cafe. Even when traveling abroad I make a point of finding a local cafe for writing.

As such, I’ve written in so many bad cafes I cannot begin to categorize them—but I’ll try.

Where to begin? There are the noisy cafes, the cafes where the baristas play Dave Matthews so loud I cannot hear my own music, even when I press my headphones tight against my ears with my palms. There are the cafes I can never find a seat in and must ask to share a table. Most creative types seem to find this burden distasteful and will invent an invisible friend joining them shortly, so, sorry, I’ll need to sit elsewhere.

There are the overpriced cafes. There are the cafes with rock-hard high stools seemingly designed by 1970s McDonald’s interior decorators. There are the cafes that are too hot, even in the winter. Here in San Francisco the opposite is largely the case, the cafes where the owner props the door wide open no matter how cold it is outside, allowing chilly breezes to charge inside at sporadic moments.

Clocking in years of cafe time taught me never to tell to anyone sniffing around me that I’m writing a novel. Doing so only elicits all manner of unproductive responses, from snarky to nosy to rude to inane. More than once I’ve had to pry myself away from a chatty cafe patron who, delighted at my endeavor, felt compelled to describe to me all their book ideas. (Sometimes they offer to let me write their book—”We’ll split the profits fifty-fifty.”) In an otherwise wonderful cafe in Campbell, a regular got his tenterhooks so deep into my work I would startle to find him crouched behind my chair peering over my shoulders to watch me write.

I’ve seen tip jars stuffed full of bills ripped from counters, the thief racing out the door with coins clanging across the floor in their wake. I’ve seen notebook computers swiped off tables while the patron was still typing and likewise rushed out the door. I’ve written in cafes decorated like giant doll houses, cafes decorated like discount clothing stores, and cafes so meticulously decorated I felt I’d entered a movie set. I’ve seen a darkened cafe in San Francisco arranged like a ziggurat with staggered levels of cafe patrons seated facing you as you enter, every one of them typing furiously on their MacBooks. The uniform rows of the backlit Apple logo could only remind me of the 1984 Super Bowl commercial.

There are cafes that cap their electrical outlets to force laptop owners to run on battery power only. There are cafes that employ exotic WiFi systems that only give you so much time online before you must buy another drink or pastry. Some cafes are too-brightly lit, making one snow-blind in the evening hours, and some cafes are so dim you cannot see your hands on the keyboard. There are the cafes that close early, eliminating prime evening-hour writing spurts, and there are the cafes that don’t open weekends for mysterious reasons.

I’ve been in cafes where the owner would assure me I could pay anytime before leaving—and then grouse I never paid for the first coffee when I return to the counter for a refill. I’ve been in cafes where the owner relentlessly pushed a food purchase on me. I’ve been in cafes with owners who grumbled under their breath about people not buying enough coffee or staying too long.

The Slate.com feature “My coffeehouse nightmare” is the Platonic example of this type of owner. He served his coffee “on silver trays with a glass of water and a little chocolate cookie,” hired a Le Bernadin baker to produce specialty croissants, and thought the fast-track to coffeehouse profits was pulling Vienna roast espresso shots instead of Italian. In six months, his cafe was out of business. “The average coffee-to-stay customer nursed his mocha (i.e., his $5 ticket) for upward of 30 minutes. Don’t get me started on people with laptops.” By which, of course, he means people like me.

Cafes hold a unique position in American culture. They straddle commercial and social divides. As a cafe patron, you are engaging in commerce with the owner and her staff. On the other hand, you share a quiet, almost intimate, personal space with other patrons, perfect strangers often seated less than a foot away. Unlike a movie theater, where all are sharing a common experience, cafes are a collection of private moments (reading a book, engaging in conversation, outlining a novel) hosted within a shared public situation. At the risk of romanticizing it, successful cafes are places where both halves—the commerce and the social—are well-balanced. Failure, I’ve always found, is where such balance is missing.

My personal code of cafe ethics? Always buy something. Don’t bring in outside food or drink. Tidy up the table before leaving. Don’t hog the electrical outlet. Voices down and phone calls outside. Please and thank you carry a lot of water in any situation, social or commercial.

What cafe do I recommend for writing? The one I’m sitting in right now. And, no, I’m not telling you its name.


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Make your phone your digital writing notebook

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A smart phone and a writing notepad.
r. nial bradshaw (CC BY 2.0)

Last week, I finished my fourth novel. I used my phone throughout the entire writing process: developing, researching, outlining, plotting, and revision, all the way to my final draft. For all purposes, my phone was my writing notebook for this novel.

I didn’t write the novel on my phone. I’ll probably never do that. When I’m writing I want the full typewriter experience, real keys designed for human hands, the tactile sense physical buttons offer, the whole shebang. And I need a screen display that at least approximates the size of manuscript paper, and not one the size of an index card.

But planning and revising a novel on your phone is certainly possible, and my latest book is proof of that.

In the past I’ve relied on paper-and-ink writing notebooks. A writing notebook is a tool I evangelize to anyone who will listen, mostly because I believe it functions as a kind of “inspiration laboratory” for writers. However, towards the end of my previous novel (Hagar’s Mother) I found myself turning to digital note-taking tools during the editing process.

In the final stretch of editing a novel, a torrent of small details begin erupting. The only way to keep the problems and details organized is with a writing notebook of some manner. When the edits are coming hot and heavy I find removing my hands from the keyboard to be a distraction, so I began using a free note-taking software packaged with my MacBook Air, Apple Notes. Rather than reach for a pen and my trusty notebook, I would ⌘+Tab to Notes and add a bullet point to a little checklist I kept. As I kept working, I would periodically consult my checklist and be sure the appropriate changes were made.

Well, Apple Notes is also available on my iPhone. Thanks to the Internet, at all times my writing notes were synchronized between my computer and my phone. That meant I could review my notes while at work, on the bus, even in bed. It also meant I could add more ideas at any time. Later, when I returned to my computer to resume writing, they were there waiting for me.

That’s the hard reality I faced, one I’m certain other writers face as well: While I sometimes leave the house without my writing notebook, I never leave without my phone. These little devices are simply invaluable to us (which is why I encourage writers to keep them in mind when writing their own fiction).

After Hagar’s Mother, I decided to try an experiment and use Notes as my primary writing notebook for my next novel. I told myself if I had the slightest of problems I would bail out and revert back to my old paper-and-ink notebook. It seemed a risk-free experiment.

Well, I finished my novel and I’m here to tell you: I’m sold. Yes, you can plan, write, and revise your next novel using your phone as a notebook. What’s more, you don’t need to spend an extra dime on additional software so long as you’re using a reasonably up-to-date computer and smart phone. The note-taking software already installed is probably good enough, and if it’s not, there are free alternatives available.

Ways of note-taking

Let me get this out of the way: I’m not a shill for Apple. I’m happy with Apple Notes and how cleanly it intersected with my creative process. That doesn’t mean you should use Notes if you don’t own Apple products, or if you want to try something else. (I list some alternatives below.)

Looking back over my notes, I see three “types” of pages I developed, each representing a period of time in the novel-writing process.

The earliest pages are scrapbooks of ideas, thoughts, and research. Random notions fill these pages alongside bits of dialogue, descriptions, even character names. (With my fiction, I try on character names the way I would try on a pair of pants.) For every novel I will read up on related subject matter to ensure I’m getting basic facts and terminology correct. Using my phone’s Share button I could add any page—Wikipedia, a news article, even a word in my phone’s dictionary—to a note. Although the foundations of the book are laid here, much of this primordial stew didn’t wind up in the final draft.

Later in the writing process, the pages start becoming more organized and less free-form. Here I was thinking about scenes I was developing. Dialogue and descriptions on these pages often reached the final draft. I also began roughing out timelines in these pages, primarily to flesh out the backstory of the main character.

The last note pages are highly organized. The novel was gelling; the big ideas are down on the page and I was more concerned about the small details and tightening up the narrative. In this stage, my note pages are mostly checklists of changes to be made. The pages are broken up into sections: Characters, Details, Terminology, Important, and so on. When I made the edit, I would check off the item.

This stage is where I wrote a final character list (to keep track of names and relationships) and lists of terminology and spelling (useful in a novel with imaginary technology). I also built a final master timeline which incorporated the chronology of the novel into the backstory—useful to avoid the problem of a character is talking about an event as happening the day before when it actually occurred two days before.

A few points here. First, notice the pages are structureless because the process is structureless. Even the later page’s organization is more-or-less free-form. The notebook met whatever need I had at the moment. It never imposed a system on me. Some writing software wants to guide you through steps or categories for organizing your work. I’m not sold on that idea. I could use the digital note pages for anything I wanted to preserve for later. Make your writing notebook a tabula rasa.

Likewise, avoid reminder or to-do style software. Yes, I use checklists in my writing notebook, but I also used it for so much more. Task software imposes organization on your creative output. (“Mark this task High, Medium, or Low?”) That’s not what you’re looking for with a writing notebook.

These notes did not happen in concerted bursts. They represent hundreds of points in time, some slivers of seconds used to type out an idea. At any point in the novel’s progress, I was adding notes on the bus, at work (shh), in my easy chair, even at the gym, sweating and madly tapping a thought that came to me on the treadmill. The phone was always there. Losing even a single story idea to the frailty of human memory and our shortening attention spans is a loss.

Before you start

If you’ve read this far, you might be excited to start using your phone for your next big writing project. There are downsides to keep in mind.

First, be aware you’re entrusting your precious creative output with a third-party corporation. Apple (or Google, or Microsoft, or whomever) could, at any time and with no warning, discontinue the software, discontinue their services, or even go out of business. Whatever software you work with, be sure you can export your data, even if it’s nothing more than printing out your notes or saving them as a PDF. You absolutely do not want to wind up in a situation where a corporation has your precious creative output locked up—or has deleted it.

Just as you protect your word processing files, make periodical backups of your notes in case of disaster. Most modern note-taking software has some method of doing this in such a way that the backups can be restored later if necessary.

Do a little research into your software’s data security practices. While you’re at it, make sure you’re using a strong password. No, I’m not worried about another author “stealing” my ideas, but I do worry about unknown persons accessing my notes without my consent. My writing notebook is a creative and freeing place. Part of that freedom rides on an expectation of privacy.

Recommendations

If you’re curious or excited to start using your phone as a writing notebook, your first step is choosing your software. My checklist for baseline features it should include are:

  • It should run on your phone and your writing computer. While you could turn to your phone while typing on your writing computer, I found it invaluable to be able to read and update my notes without leaving the screen. Being able to Alt+Tab to my notes and Alt+Tab back to my word processor was invaluable when the story was flowing and I couldn’t type fast enough.
  • Your notes should synchronize between every computer you use. In the 1990s synchronizing data between computers required specialized software and arcane cables. These days synchronizing should occur across the Internet, all-but-invisible to you.
  • Your notes should be available on the Web. It’s handy to be able to access your notes from anywhere. In the case of Apple, I can login to icloud.com. Your software should have this feature as well.
  • …but you should be able to access your notes without being connected to the Internet. As I’ll explain in a moment, it’s quite useful if your note-taking tool has it’s own app and doesn’t require using a Web browser.

You’ll notice that the above three points revolve around a single convenience: access. The key to my success with note-taking software was that I could access it at any time. You never know when or where inspiration will strike. Recording inspiration and returning to it later is the entire reason for keeping a writing notebook.

The reason I like accessing my notes outside of a Web browser is simple: I turn off WiFi when writing. Disabling Internet access is a great way to avoid temptation and whittle away the day surfing around. Disabling your WiFi also removes distractions while writing, such as new email, social media alerts, and so on.

(While I’m on the topic, I also recommend looking into how to turn off all notifications on your phone and computer while writing. Disabling WiFi doesn’t disable your phone from receiving text messages, for example.)

Those are my top-tier must-haves for a digital writing notebook. Features I think are desirable include:

  • Checklists. It’s great to be able to add checkboxes next to the edits I need to make. It’s even better to check them off when they’re done.
  • Scrapbooking. Surprisingly, I found myself harvesting ideas from Web pages more often than I expected. Being able to store links, photos, dictionary definitions—even maps—was invaluable.
  • Folders & note organization. Eventually I would fill a page with so much raw material I needed to create a second page to continue, and subsequently a third. Organizing all these pages into distinct folders is invaluable.

Other features to look for:

  • Drawing or sketching. If you like to doodle in your writing notebook, you might seek out software that supports drawing. (Alternately, you could use a separate sketchpad app and add it to your notes.)
  • Audio notes. Some note-taking software can attach voice memos to a note. It’s not how I work, but it might be yours.
  • Searching. It’s surprising how many times I remembered a keyword but could not find the exact note for it.
  • Collaboration. Some software allows you to share your notes with one or more people. If you’re collaborating on a novel with another writer (or illustrator, or editor), this might be a real need for you.

If you’re not an Apple user or seeking alternatives to Apple Notes, there are other options you can investigate. I’ve not had a chance to use any of these but they seem promising:

Good luck!


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