I’ve finished writing the book Startup Communities: Building An Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City (a solo effort) and am now deep into Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving In A Relationship With An Entrepreneur which I’m writing with Amy.
I’m looking for a great collaborative writing tool for a book. I used Scrivener on a solo basis for Startup Communities – it’s outstanding for the first draft. I eventually had to drop into Word to work with the production system for my publisher (Wiley) but that’s probably the case for any non-self-publishing experience at this point.
However, I can’t for the life of me figure out a workflow with Scrivener that works effectively for two writers. It’s a single-user product and all of my Dropbox related contortions work to share the file, but then only one person can actually work in it at any given time. So “pair programming” (or “pair writing”) might work, but we are both banging away at the book next to each other while on our treadputers (on different computers).
I’m moving everything to Google Docs for now, but I’m looking for feedback from other writers who have done books as joint projects where there were two writers. I don’t really want to pass documents back and forth (or share separate files via Dropbox) – I want a true collaborative writing solution.
Any thoughts out there?