Find your way around the editor
Three parts to the screen
It helps to think of the editor as three columns.
On the left: your manuscript. The structure of the book, top to bottom—any front matter, then the chapters with their scenes inside, then any back matter. Click a scene to open it. Every chapter and scene has a … menu beside it for renaming, moving, archiving and adding, and Add a chapter sits at the bottom of the list.
In the middle: the page. The scene you're working on, shown the way it will look in print—the same trim size, margins and fonts as your finished book. The page number you see is this scene's own; the book's real page numbers are worked out when it's built.
On the right: notes and review. The Notes rail holds working notes for the scene and for the book as a whole. They're yours alone and are never printed. When a book has comments or suggestions on it, a review rail appears here too; you can hide it when you'd like the width back.
Screenshot: The whole editor with a scene open, showing the manuscript list on the left, the printed-looking page in the middle and the Notes rail on the right.
The toolbar
Screenshot: The editor's toolbar across the top, with its labelled groups visible—Book, Work, View, Paragraph, Images, Zoom and Mode.
- Book — Details (title, imprint, cover), Page setup (trim, margins, fonts; for the book's owner) and Publish, which builds the PDF or EPUB.
- Work — switch between Write and Outline (the whole book as a list of scenes with their summaries); open Notes; Find (Ctrl+F, or Ctrl+H to replace); and Listen, which reads aloud from your cursor—a lovely way to catch the sentences that don't quite flow.
- View — guides that show the margins, a dark page if you prefer it, and the theme.
- Paragraph — the style of the paragraph your cursor is in (Ctrl+Shift+E centres it).
- Images — place a picture from your media library after the current paragraph, or open the library itself.
- Zoom — or hold Alt and scroll. Fit sizes the page to the space you have.
- Mode — Writing or Suggesting. In Suggesting, every change is marked for the author to accept or reject later. If you've been invited to a book as an editor, you may find you're kept in this mode; that's by design.
Saving happens by itself
There's no save button. Write saves as you type, and the little word at the bottom right—Saved or Saving…—tells you where it's at. Once it says Saved, you can close the tab whenever you like. Write also keeps a version every few minutes while you work, plus one before any big change, so an earlier draft of a scene is always there to go back to.
If your connection drops, or Write is briefly out of reach, it says Not saved and keeps trying on its own until your words get through. You don't need to do anything. Meanwhile, this browser holds on to what you've written. If the tab closes before your words reach Write, open the scene in the same browser and a note at the top offers to Put them back.
If you're signed out while you have words waiting—your session ran out, say—Write doesn't take you away from the page. A note says so, with Sign in again, which opens the sign-in in a new tab. Once you're in, come back to your tab and it saves by itself.
If a scene was changed somewhere else
With the same scene open in two places—two windows, a laptop and a tablet—Write keeps them in step. If both have changes of their own at once, a note at the top shows exactly what differs: struck words are only in the saved copy, underlined words only in this window. Use the saved copy is usually right, especially in a window that's been open a while; Keep this window's version puts what's on your screen in its place. Either way, the one you didn't choose is kept in History, so nothing is lost.
Word count
The scene's count sits at the bottom of the page. The book's total is in the Library under its title, and in Details.
Picking up where you left off
The editor remembers the scene you had open in each book. Come back tomorrow and you'll land right there.