What kind of writing do you do and what tools do you use?
What kind of writing do you do and what tools do you use?
Writing a book, content marketing/blogging, journaling, doing research?
Do you outsource your writing?
#ask-ih
After digging in and realizing how much launching a software product is not about writing software but actually writing content, I learned I probably need to get pretty good at writing.
I've put out (almost) 2 books and several hundred blog posts.
I like to do first drafts on paper, just cuz I like the experience of sitting in a cafe/bar with a pencil and my thoughts, and without a screen in sight. But you can't edit like that.
For computer tools, I use GDocs for everything. There are zillions of tools, but GDoc's inline comments for feedback outweighs the strengths of pretty much every other option. (I've tried so many...)
For books in particular, you also need something for interior page design, which is going to be either Scrivener (fiddly and customisable) or Vellum (out of the box lovely), which both are (mostly) Mac only.
When I was travelling and blogging, I set up email posting, and then used a bluetooth keyboard attached to my phone to type blog posts on the go. Upon sending the email, it would get posted to Wordpress, and it was cobbled together (through IFTTT or similar) to go out to everywhere else from there.
All that being said, it's easy to get wound up in tools and waste a ton of time. Ultimately, writing happens by putting words on paper/screen. I'm pretty sure the tools make approximately 0 difference to the quality of what you end up with.
Thanks for the reply. I am 100% with you on starting out on pen and paper. I write out a one-page to-do list by hand every day just because there's something about writing it out that feels right.
For google docs, do you use the comments to make notes to yourself? Or are you collaborating with other people?
Totally wary of tooling hell. That can happen pretty easily in software as well. At the end of the day, just have to produce things.
I use GDocs comments for both feedback and personal notes.
My current book draft is shared with something like 30 people who have been very active at various stages of the writing/editing process (they usually get involved intensely for a few days and then disappear). And I'll probably share it with another 50 for feedback in the upcoming 6 weeks before I fully launch.
I wouldn't go that crazy on feedback for a blog post, though. If it was sensitive and important for my business, I might share it with one or two people internally. But if it's just for me, I usually just write it once, proof it once, ship it, and then modify based on the rage/support/indifference I see from folks on Twitter etc.
As a note to self, they're also great since they stand out visually and are hard-to-miss when you're scanniung the doc. I use them mainly for todos (e.g. "illustration here", "rewrite this") and open research questions (e.g. "is this actually true?").
Thank you for such detailed insight! I've never need to collaborate with so many people on a Google Doc before, but I can see how the comments can really help keep that organized.
Do you have any pain points at all with Google Docs in general?
Only pain is that the docs can take a while to load when they get big (like 60k+ words), and I once had a doc at 100k words with lots of comments where commenting basically broke.
Apart from that, I wish add-ons were a little bit more powerful (e.g. I wanted to write a daily word-count add-on, but you need to remember to open a side-pane every time you load the doc for the add-on to be active.)
Aaaaand... Hmm. Better control over style while exporting to different formats would be nice. Although PDF and ebook export are both possible, the formatting is far too limiting, so I need to move everything over into a different tool and style is there, which is fairly tedious and reduces my willingness to make small adjustments to an already-finished book.
Other tools offer the stuff that I've mentioned above, but as I said in the first comment, good commenting trumps pretty much everything (for me at least).
Also, it might be worth noting that for my personal writing (e.g. a blog post draft), GDocs doesn't really matter, since I rarely use comments for that. But I still use it, just because I value using as few different tools as possible, since it's super irrtating to have multiple "repositories" where a document might be which you have to look through to find it.
Have you considered breaking your doc up when they get really long? I'd imagine it's just preferable to keep it all in one place. Do you use the outline tool to navigate around your doc?
Loading huge chunks of data in the browser is a seriously hard problem. Although there are some cool projects working on it. I know of react-virtualized (https://bvaughn.github.io/react-virtualized/#/components/List) which makes it possible to have a lot of data and only render what is needed which gives a big performance boost.
Thank you so much for taking the time to write out these responses! It's very insightful. I've started working on an editor of sorts and this input is very valuable.
Yeah, breaking it up is what I ended up doing. Can put links between them at the start/end for navigation if needed (main doc is just under 70k words now and that's working fine.)
I use the built-in outline view constantly (view->show document outline, I believe). One annoyance with that is that it's not always default-on for my proofreaders, and they really suffer without it, so I find I have to explain it to every person I share with. You can also generate a pretty good inline Table of Contents, but it always requires some manual pruning of unimportant sub-headings, etc, and you have to click to update it whenever your headings/pages change. So that's fine for final publication, but not so viable during the writing process itself.
http://www.hemingwayapp.com as a second pair of "eyes" to keep things concise.
https://bear.app as my writing app of choice. Simple, yet powerful. Use it to write my blog posts and export to Markdown.
Awesome suggestions! The hemingwayapp is really cool. I've used bear.app before just for taking some notes. If working in markdown I've personally liked Typora a bit better. It feels cleaner. Although bear.app may have made updates since I last used it.
Thank you!
As for content writing for the blogs, website pages, etc.. most of the time I end up writing them for certain new projects.
But established projects, or soon to be sustainable projects are assigned a marketing budget, or investment budget.
The best way forward is to have a minimal marketing budget that allows you to delegate the writing to a creative. It helps you focus on marketing your software and establishing a revenue stream.
Not everyone's into marketing, writing, designing, etc, so hiring a professional can sometimes turn the tables when it comes to conversion rates, and finally, the resulting bottom line.
Thank you, this is helpful. This is definitely a place I want to get to.
You're most welcome.
I came to the same realization. Had to switch from "Build it and they will come" mindset to "Build an audience with valuable content". I've recently downloaded the Medium app so when I commute to work or have some time to myself I can quickly open the app and start adding to a draft.
That's a fine way to add drafts, considering that Medium auto saves so frequently (at least it does on web). I'm grabbing that pointer Mike!
Do you post mostly on medium? Or do you have a mix of posts to medium, posts to personal blog, posts on twitter, etc?
Yeah I mostly post on Medium. After some research and reading DHH thoughts on Medium blogging it sold me.
A new project only needs a couple targeted articles. You can hire people for this, or write them yourself to save money. You can use Google Trends to identify search trends and use Alexa.com to learn how people are finding your competitors.
Software doesn't matter. I use VSCode or iAWriter; some people use the WordPress editor; George R. R. Martin (the Game of Thrones author) uses Wordstar 4.0!
Most of my traffic is organic and comes from my personal blog. I write technical tutorials, entrepreneurial/random articles, book summaries, and listicles – whatever sounds fun, really.
In general, you want to use your writing to build a mailing list. Nathan Barry and Paul Jarvis do this well. Like a blog, a mailing list is a marketing asset that you can keep for your whole career – even between companies.
To become a better writer, read this – it takes 30 seconds. In addition, The Boron Letters cover copywriting tips. In general, write like you're required to pay $50 per word. :)
Finally: if you're great at something, you can write longform articles on it. Tim Urban's Wait But Why and Julian Shapiro's blog don't have many articles, but Tim Urban was able to interview Elon Musk due to his blog, and Julian built a growth agency from his.
The Game of Thrones books look like they are a printout directly from Wordstar 4.0! That man must be able to keep a lot of thoughts in his head at once.
Your blog is pretty awesome. Did you ever have a challenge of writing about things that have already been written about? For example, React explains keys in the React docs. Was your thought process like "I'm just going to explain this in my words"? I find I have trouble writing about things that have already been blogged about because I feel like it is copying or there's no way I could say anything better about the topic.
The Scott Adams post is great stuff.
Thanks so much for all of these suggestions!
Thanks! The way I look at it, there are 7.5 billion people in the world and more are coming online every day. So even if the React docs explain something, there's probably someone out there who needs it explained differently.
My post ideation process is, "Do I find this interesting?" That's why I wrote about introverted entrepreneurship, multitenant Rails apps, and using MobX. I never expected that they'd perform so well!
Only need that 1000 true fans.
Love this. I'm going to use the "Do I find this interesting?" filter from now on. Thank you!
I write posts for our company blog and my personal blog from time to time. Tools
I just tried out iA Writer on Windows. It's pretty cool. The focus mode is nice.
Do you have an automated way of publishing to jekyll? Or are you copying/pasting from sublime to VSCode? If so, why not just use one of those?
Pablo is really cool. Seems a lot like Adobe Spark.
I only use Sublime Text for certain paragraphs that need batch editing and not always needed. I also open the files directly sometimes in different editors for different things - that's the nice thing about writing in plain text or markdown files, lots of tools work directly with them.
I commit the md files to the repo with SourceTree when I publish to jekyll. I've also tried forestry.io which is pretty neat if you work with a team.
I have a blog for web developers where I speak about soft / hard skills: web-techno
I use:
Vim. If you want a powerful editor, this is the way. It's not that difficult to learn and it's very, very good. I write everything with it. Even this comment, right now. You can add any plugin you want: grammar checking, improving your writing, spellchecking is natively in there (and very good one on top), markdown syntax, markdown structure, and so on and so forth.
Hugo. This is a static website generator. Basically I write my posts in Vim, use git to push it on my server and a git hook automatically generate the website (plain HTML).
Website generators are great because:
But how do I exit vim?! Jokes aside, I don't know if I would be very good at using Vim. Keyboard shortcuts have always been a weak spot for me.
Static site generator are awesome and only getting better :) I can't believe it took until 2018/19 for them to really start to catch on.
I'd suggest you read On Writing Well by William Zinsser, then absorb the style guides of the brands you like most.
Even if it's not you writing the content, it's important that you have an idea of what good writing looks like, so you can sign it off with confidence.
Thanks for the tip.
Totally agree with your second point. It's the same principle about knowing some accounting because you'll be at the mercy of your accountant if you don't.
I write blog posts and mostly do this in markdown as it allows me to focus on the text itself and not how it looks. I switch between iA Writer and Code depending on the length of the article.
I use cupper to generate accessible docs for my plugins. It’s based on markdown so easy choice.
I have Grammarly to help me write without errors (disclaimer: I write this on my iPhone so it’s not checking what I type).
Markdown is turning into a pretty common thing. I wonder if people outside of software developers use it as much.
Grammarly is great! I've been thinking about getting the premium version for more advanced suggestions. Haven't pulled the trigger though.