Vela, out of curiosity (and not to be argumentative), since a single Scrivener project can contain a series (including a book series), why not just do that? There must be at least one reason I’m just not thinking of.
That’s a great question, and I’m sure that would work really well for a lot of authors! It’s definitely worth considering, but I didn’t find it a good fit for me for a few reasons.
I write epic fantasy, so my series are long (10 or so books), and each book is roughly 200,000 words. It gets pretty unwieldy to store that many manuscripts in one big Scrivener project. I admittedly haven’t tested it on Scrivener 3, which would surely handle things faster, but I had performance issues on Scrivener 2 loading just 2 books in one project.
I think it would pose some challenges with compiling because it’s less convenient to enable/disable which documents you need to export for each book, plus juggling multiple front and back matters.
And unfortunately, storing each series in the same Scrivener project still wouldn’t help with time-lining events across interconnected series.
But this is just my experience, and I can see storing an entire series in one Scrivener project being very convenient for other authors. 
Thank you for the suggestion though!
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Makes perfect sense, Vela.
I’m on my first novel of a four-novel fantasy series. I’m only on my first novel in terms of writing (about a fourth of the way through the first draft), though I’ve outlined the series in AT3. So far, my approach of having a single Scrivener project seems to be working, but time will tell! Thanks for your perspective on this – you definitely have way more experience than I do.
I kn ow this is an old topic, but I’m now really starting to work with AT and I’d love to sync it with Scrivener.
I too am writing a fantasy series (possibly 5 books as the main series + several standalones that might also turn into series in the same world, but that’s for the far future).
In my one Scrivener project I planned to have all the books, including all the (developmental and line-editing) drafts of each book.
What are your experiences so far a year later?
Is it even possible to work with multiple drafts of the same book for which the timeline might change from draft to draft?
Thank you for sharing your experiences! @SCN @velarothauthor
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Only curious: Why don’t you just stick with your established workflow and keep Aeon Timeline 2?
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At the risk of beating a dead horse … I would really like some way to link up the novels in my series. I use Scrivener on Mac and as my series grows I keep coming back to this. Is there a way to reference another timeline and hence its narrative as a sub-document in a master timeline? Or could this be added to it? That way the sub-document would be the one that syncs to any particular Scrivener document, rather than have Aeon Timeline sync to multiple Narratives across multiple Scrivener documents. I don’t write monster-of-the-week type of series, or problem-of-the-week type of series, but story arcs that extend over several book (usually, three, or trilogies) with shared characters and timelines that need to stay organized.
Bumping this request. I think there are plenty of reasons why you would need to have multiple projects sync to a single timeline, for example my series has multiple narratives and does not follow a single story.
I wonder as a work around can you import parts of scrivener as entries, or change which entyh is the one that is currently in sync? It wouldn’t keep it synced, but you could at least have older entries, ones that will not changed imported into the timeline, then bounce between syncing projects as needed. Not ideal…but possible? Never tried and because one time I lost some material playing with sync options in the timeline, a little hesitant to try!
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Since a Scrivener project can gracefully contain a book series, and since AT can gracefully sync to it while taking advantage of a single timeline for all the books, why not do that? I say this because this would accomplish your goal of multiple narratives written against a single timeline.
Here is a thought to consider. Keep the seperate books each in a scrivener collection, though using compile collections it is easy to compile one book in a project that holds several. But putting this aside why not start a new project and bring in novel 1 and its metadat, keywords, labels etc. Now strip out the text leaving the title. Now do this for all the book in the series. This requires using one set of custom metadata across the epic.
Now with text stripped out the project is small and can be placed on one aeon timeline.
You can create a document with bookmark links to each novel in the series and place this in Project bookmarks so can open the link file from anywhere to open the needed book in the series.
Downside would need to update any substanial info changes, but create a collection of scenes that had changes and periodically go thru the collection and delete items as you update data in the original.
A thought
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Not sure what you’re saying here. The text of the scenes is not in AT at all.
“You can create a document with bookmark links to each novel in the series and place this in Project bookmarks so can open the link file from anywhere to open the needed book in the series.”
Don’t get that either.
Sometimes it seems like you’re talking Scrivener features and other times Aeon ones, but I’m truly not understanding.
One of the issues I’m thinking this will cause is a problem with data integrity, i.e. multiple existing versions. As it is, it’s a huge pain to have a Scrivener file, a Vellum file, and an AT file and making sure that each change is applied across all three. For example, in book 5 I may create an event that took place within the time period covered by book 1 and I’d have to add that to AT but not necessarily to the Scrivener or Vellum files. OTOH, a typo would be changed in the Scrivener file and then pushed to Vellum and eventually to publication. Everyone’s workflow would be different, of course, but I think one of the reasons that people are asking for actual multi-sync is because the work-arounds are so cumbersome or prone to error.
Why remove text is to reduce project size given the size of your novels . You can have a relationship category for books which can be used to filter to view the timeline, narrative, subway views, etc and as mentioned aeon doesn’t sync the text.
You could as mentioned have a custom metadata text field called story notes and if make changes can add to a static collection making easy to know what to update. As fix delete from the collection .
Please invite me to stop if I’m beating a dead horse. It’s just that I’m writing a three-novel series with Scrivener and Aeon Timeline synced, and it works gracefully–even though I have a “prequel” scene that appears well after it would appear if the novel were following a strictly chronological order.
Let’s say you have a five-novel series in one Scrivener project. Each novel is written in its own folder, along these lines:
In Aeon Timeline, your events are shown chronologically in Timeline, Spreadsheet, Subway, and Relationship views, without regard to how you place these events into your novels. But the narrative order of events, shown in Narrative or Outline views*, can place events into any novel without regard to where the event falls on the timeline; so an event that took place in the time period of, say, Book 1 can be placed into the Book 5 narrative.
When you sync Aeon Timeline and Scrivener, it will sync Aeon Timeline’s narrative-order scenes with Scrivener’s narrative scenes, exactly where you wish to portray them in your novel. Yet its timeline remains strictly chronological.
Isn’t this exactly what you want to achieve?
In case it’s helpful, here’s how I set things up in Aeon Timeline, using Novel > Chapter > Scene > Passage
I’m not familiar with Vellum, so maybe there’s a workflow issue that would prevent this kind of simple setup.
Steve
* In the forthcoming version 3.5, you’ll have more options on how to display things.
Oh I see what you mean now. Thank you for the clarification .
Follow-up questions:
I write novels that are about 150K words each. Have you run into issues of the files getting too big?
Also, how do you use the Narrative part? I’d love to see how others actually use it.
Thanks again.
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I’m very glad this is starting to make sense.
I write novels that are about 150K words each. Have you run into issues of the files getting too big?
I think Scrivener can easily handle novels of that length. The way it works under the hood is that each “scene” or “passage” (if you follow the kind of setup I’m using) is a separate RTF file. So all Scrivener is doing is loading each file according to what you are selecting in the binder. You might be looking at just one scene by itself, or all of the scenes of your novel; it doesn’t matter, because it’s just loading each file serially (but very fast). If you write all the novels in one Scrivener project, as I am doing, it can handle them because of how it works: It’s not loading one massive file before it can display anything; it’s loading the documents (scenes or passages) one at a time, according to what you’ve selected in the binder. It’s a brilliant thing, really.
Also, how do you use the Narrative part? I’d love to see how others actually use it.
I’m using the beta version 3.5, so I might confuse you if I make a video using this version. However, a while back I made a shoot-from-the-hip video for another writing community, where I show how I use Scrivener together with Aeon Timeline 3 to write my multi-novel series. Perhaps it will be helpful. But please, come back with questions if you need to.
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I think the most important concept is that the Timeline, Spreadsheet, Relationship, and Subway views are timeline views. They show events in the order they occurred.
On the other hand, the Narrative and Outline views show events as they appear in your novel or novels, whether in chronological order or not. Moving them around in these views does not change their order in the Timeline, Spreadsheet, Relationship, and Subway views.
Scrivener syncs with the Aeon Timeline Narrative/Outline views, so changing the order of things in Scrivener will change the order of things in the Narrative and Outline views, and vice versa. However, none of these changes in the order will change the order in Timeline, Spreadsheet, Relationship, or Subway views (unless you explicitly change the date of the event in the Inspector).
From a workflow perspective, we’re all different. In my case, I outline in the Outline view. I’m writing a fantasy where the exact dates/times are not important until a later stage, and that’s when I move to the Spreadsheet view to nail down dates and times. Others prefer to start in the Timeline or Spreadsheet view because nailing down dates/times is more important. I would imagine writing historical fiction would fit this approach best.
I hope this is helpful.
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Thanks. I’ll check it out.
Followup question. I watched the video you put up, thank you. I do things a little differently, but before I try to put everything in one Scrivener project, I have a pre-emptive question and it’s fine if you don’t know the answer (maybe someone else will).
I write the 4-Act structure almost exclusively and set up my Scrivener folders to reflect that (with the prologue and epilogue being outside the main narrative). So I’d have Prologue, Main Narrative (Act 1, Act 2A, Act 2B, Act 3), and Epilogue. Not all my stories have both prologue and epilogue, but the point about Acts stands.
I do it this way to mind my story-level pacing. I’m not on outliner, but more of a pantser or plotser, so I keep a close eye on the word-count per Act as I write. So if my goal is 100K-words for the novel, then each Act is 25K-words. With several novels in one Scrivener document, how does one limit the word-count displayed to just the novel one is working on? I know you can select the Act folder in the binder and get word-count that way, but I rather like the ability to easily determine where I am on Act word-count and Main Narrative word-count. It helps me stay on track and keeps my story from meandering as I discover it.
Any tips on maintaining this ability with multiple novels in one Scrivener project would be appreciated.
Thanks again.
Great question. I’ve made a video showing an approach that hopefully fits your workflow:
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Thank you. This is very helpful.
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Following up on what Steve showed. Here is a written method that works like above with several tweaks and I will include pictures. My pictures are on version 3.4
How to have multiple Novels from a Series on the Same Aeon Timeline?
On the Scrivener Side:
- Suggest a new master project.
- Migrate all the keywords, labels and custom metadata into the new project.
- Now drag in book one manuscript only into your book one folder. Add book two folder rinse and repeat till have 10 book folders with none of the research.
- If project becomes sluggish during the process of importing novels, then first delete all snapshots that were pulled in.
- If still sluggish, then delete the text inside the scenes. Your original books will retain the source material.
Aeon pulls in and syncs custom metadata in the form of text files and keywords, as well as acts, chapters, and scenes as Narrative Events, but without the Scene text material.
Consider expanding the Synopis info for a brief scene description and can choose to display or not in Aeon Timeline.
- New Custom Metadata field: “Story Notes”- I suggest adding a new custom metadata field called Story Notes (wrapped text). I use this field to add notes on anything I might need to add to a book.
- Static Collection: “Update”- If add to this field because of needed changes, then I add the scene where changes are needed to a static Collection called “Update”. As I address issues for the items in this Collection, I remove them from the Collection. This collection can include scenes from any of the books.
Pro Tip- as I suggest for Aeon Timeline, use a custom icon for each scene from one book, so each series has its own custom icon. So when you are correcting items, the icon identifies visually what book it is from. (You could have a key file in Project Bookmarks to look at if needed.) Then open the “Update” Static Collection and delete entries from it as you address the issue.
On the Aeon Timeline Side: - Add a Book Relationship: On the Aeon Timeline side, add a relationship called Books [Label each book in the series by number or an abreviation of the Title.] Now, you can select multiple narrative items in Book one and associate these with the Book one relationship.
- Give each Book in the series a Unique Event Color: I also made the events for each Book in the series a unique color to help differentiate the books. With this setup, you can use the filter view to isolate one or more books to analyze interactions and the timeline. A glance at the color of the event, immeadiately identifies which Book it is from in views that are chronologically based. [Timeline, Subway, Relationship and Spreadsheet views]
I hope this makes sense to you. Message me if not.
Images are from example where I pulled in project with a fully realized novel done twice to simulate adding two books. Book one is EG1 (Earth Guardian) and EG2 for Book 2 in the relationship field. You can then filter by one book or even several books to analyze what you are doing. Book one is green, book 2 is purple.
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