Why Bloggers should Compose Posts on Scrivener

Scrivener? You may be saying. Isn’t that just for novelists and book writers? Why should I use that— pay money for that— when I am just a blogger?

OK, that’s another problem. If you blog, and your blog has more than just pictures or videos— if there are words— You Are a Writer. You may be an unpaid writer, and you may be so insecure that you haven’t adopted the identity of ‘writer’ yet— or you just add ‘not a REAL writer’ — but you are a writer. Deal with it.

Scrivener is a tool that writers use to write their work. You start a Scrivener ‘project’ and you can make any number of folders for chapters and divisions of your work, and under the chapters you have pages called ‘text’ which are often used for the scenes of a fiction chapter.

I use it for my blog. I no longer compose my blog posts while online, using the ‘new post’ thing on my blog. I have a Scrivener project for blogging. I have folders for my individual blogs— there are a few active blogs— and sub-folders for the date range.

Why do I do that? Several reasons. The main one is that blogging is insecure. My very first blog, before I started my Blogger account, was on a blogging service which no longer exists. I’ve had more than one blog on services that no longer exist. Since I have my back blog posts preserved on Scrivener now, if my whole blog went down I could re-create it somewhere else.

I’ve been having a bit of a time with Blogger since I moved my blogging efforts back to that service. I’m wondering how committed Google is to blogger. I’ve been having troubles commenting on other Blogger blogs. Google could discontinue Blogger or turn it into a paid service at any time. 

Also, I’ve heard, also about Blogger, that people have had their whole blog taken down for no reason, by mistake. It’s never happened to anyone I know of, but it could happen. If it happened to me, I wouldn’t lose my posts.

Finally, bloggers are WRITERS. After you have been blogging for a while, you may have enough posts on a certain topic to gather those posts together, make a new Kindle project for them, add more material, and publish it as an e-book or a printed book. 

The down side of Scrivener is that it does cost a little money. Once you have it and get used to using it, you won’t want to do without it. Now, before I first bought Scrivener I downloaded a free Scrivener alternative called YWRiter. That would work to preserve your blog posts as well.