I've been faffing around with Scrivener 2 on the Mac a bit and, as always with this piece of software, uncovering amazing capabilities underneath the bonnet. Here's one I never expected to find since I'd assumed Scrivener wasn't built for collaboration.

But how about using it as a way of managing a two, or three or four author project... even with people who don't use Scrivener or even the Mac?

Yes, it's not just possible but actually rather easily. All you need is Scrivener 2 and a <a class="zem_slink" title="Dropbox" rel="homepage" href="http://www.dropbox.com">Dropbox</a> account, after which you can manage a multiple author project through Scrivener with ease. Here's how it goes...<!--more-->

The key is Dropbox. You need to set up a folder there through which you will sync your master document and share our the scenes and chapters to your collaborators. This is detailed in the video here: <a href="http://www.literatureandlatte.com/videos/FolderSync.mov">Sync with Scrivener</a>

How it works in a nutshell is pretty simply. Let's imagine we want to share out our chapters with people using standard word processors such as Word. Got to File, Sync and you get this...

<img class="size-full wp-image-6546 alignnone" title="Scrivener sync" src="http://vir.liquidweb.com/~davidhe4/davidhewson.com//wp-content/uploads/2010/12/screen-shot-2010-12-23-at-14-07-561.png" alt="" width="490" height="455" />

In its basic form -- which is probably good enough for most of us -- this will simply export the basic files of your draft folder to a Dropbox folder. Just text, in this case rich text, not any photos or pdfs you may be saving as research.

You then give your collaborator access to your shared Dropbox folder. They edit the scenes and chapters and make comments on them. When you next run Scrivener it alerts you to the fact that synced files have changed. It will then (using the defaults above) back up your current scene version and import the new one so you have both to refer to. And those Word comments will magically be converted into Scrivener comments too.

This is easier than trying the same trick with Word (and I speak here from experience).

The other trick you can perform with this is to export your scenes as plain text. Once you've done that you can read and edit them on an iPad using any one of a number of text editors (the video lists a few). Pretty neat.

Drawbacks? You need to maintain the file names of those bits of book when you export and sync them. No renaming them or the whole thing might go belly up. And your collaborators will only see individual scenes, not the whole book. But it's still a great way to work remotely it seems to me.

Scrivener 2 is quite something all round. With this and Dropbox I could edit my Scrivener book with anything from Windows to Linux or an iPad and not lose a thing (though you won't have any formatting with those plain text files of course).