Moving off Scrivener: how to switch without losing work

By Brenn and Lindsay, the two writers who built Inkling

Scrivener is a good program, and this is not a post about it being bad. It is the practical version of the move: the steps, the honest caveats, and what does not travel.

Scrivener is a good program, and a lot of writers we know still use it happily. So this is not a post about how Scrivener is bad. It is the practical version of the move, with the steps and the honest caveats, including the ones about Inkling.

If you typed “how to move my book from Scrivener to another app” and landed here, the short version is: compile, archive, check the breaks. The long version is below.

Why do people leave Scrivener?

Start with what is good, because it matters for the decision. Scrivener is a one-time purchase: roughly $59.99 for the Mac or Windows version and $23.99 for iOS, with major upgrades paid separately, per Kindlepreneur’s review. It has no AI features and sends none of your text to any server; Literature & Latte said so plainly in a post explaining why Apple Intelligence prompts nonetheless show up inside it on a Mac. For a writer whose first worry is where their words go, that is a real point in Scrivener’s favour, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

People leave for three reasons, in our experience and in the threads we read.

The learning curve. Kindlepreneur’s review calls it complicated, and the Compile step in particular is where most people give up. It is a program you learn rather than one you open.

Separate licenses per platform. Mac, Windows and iOS are three purchases. A writer with a Mac laptop and an iPad pays twice to have the same book in both places.

Sync. This is the big one. Scrivener moves projects between devices through Dropbox, and when that goes wrong it goes wrong with your draft. There is a thread on the official Literature & Latte forum from a writer who lost roughly a tenth of a draft to a sync conflict on iOS, and Loreteller has catalogued the failure modes: conflicted copies, a project open on two machines, Dropbox not finishing before the laptop lid closes. None of these are bugs exactly. They are the cost of a desktop program whose sync is someone else’s file system.

If you recognise yourself in any of those, keep reading. If none of them bother you, Scrivener is a fine place to stay.

How do I get my manuscript out safely?

Three steps, in this order.

1. Compile to Word or plain text. Choose .docx if you want your formatting, or plain text if you want something that will open anywhere forever. Compile the whole draft, not a selection. If Compile is the part of Scrivener you never learned, the default manuscript preset with every document included is enough; you are not typesetting a book here, just getting the words out.

2. Keep the .scriv project as an archive. Do not delete it. Do not tidy it. Zip the whole .scriv folder (on Windows it is a folder; on a Mac it looks like a single file but is also a folder) and put the zip somewhere boring and safe, ideally two places. You may never open it again, but the day you need a version from three years ago you will be glad it exists.

3. Open the export and check chapter breaks. Open the .docx in Word or the .txt in any editor and scroll. Look at where the chapters begin. Scrivener builds a manuscript out of many small documents, and Compile decides how they are joined; the commonest surprise is chapter titles missing, or two scenes run together with no gap. Fix the separators in Compile and run it again. Do this before you import anywhere, because every app downstream will inherit whatever breaks are in that file.

Will I lose my notes, snapshots and research?

Some of it will not travel as such, and it is better to know that now.

Snapshots. Scrivener’s snapshots are versions of a document frozen in time. No export carries them across as snapshots. If a particular older version matters to you, open it, copy it into a document called something like “Chapter 7, old version,” and let it compile with everything else. Otherwise it stays in the archived project, which is fine.

Binder structure. The folders and nesting in the binder are Scrivener’s, not your book’s. Chapter and scene breaks survive if you set the separators correctly in Compile; the tree itself does not, and mostly you will not miss it.

Document notes and synopsis cards. Export these as text. Compile can include synopsis and notes alongside the text, or you can copy them into a single document called Notes before you compile. Either way they become words in a file, which is the only format that survives every move.

The research folder. This one is easier than it looks. Everything you dragged into Research is a file you already had: PDFs, images, saved web pages. Drag them back out to a folder on disk. They were never really Scrivener’s.

What about the Dropbox sync problem?

If sync losses are the reason you are leaving, the fix is not a better Dropbox setting. It is to stop keeping the only live copy of your draft in a folder that two computers are trying to write to.

Whatever you move to, ask where the draft actually lives and what happens when two devices disagree. In a web app the answer is usually “in one place, saved as you type,” which removes the conflict entirely at the cost of needing a connection. In a desktop app it is usually “in a folder, synced by something,” which is the situation you are trying to leave. Neither is wrong. Just know which one you are choosing.

And on the day you migrate: close Scrivener on every device, let Dropbox finish, then compile. Most horror stories start with a project that was still open on the iPad.

How do I know I can leave the next app too?

Ask one question before you commit: can I export everything, any time, in a format Word opens? If the answer is anything other than yes, or if export is a paid extra, or if it only works while a subscription is active, walk away. The whole point of leaving carefully is not to walk into the same trap with a nicer icon.

A tool that makes leaving easy is a tool that has to earn your staying, month by month, and that is the right relationship to have with software that holds your novel.

Where Inkling stands, candidly

We built Inkling, so here is the part where we tell you what we have and what we do not, since you are about to hold us to the standard above.

The candid difference first: Inkling is a subscription. Plus is $9 a month, or $72 a year as a Founding member while the founding window is open, and there is a 14-day free trial with everything unlocked and no card. That is a different deal from Scrivener’s one-time license, and if a subscription is a dealbreaker for you, it is a dealbreaker. We would rather you know now.

Here is what protects you inside that deal. You can export everything as Word, plain text, or print PDF at any time, not just while you are paying. If you stop paying, the desk becomes read-only and nothing is deleted: you can still open every story and export it. Your writing is saved to your account as you go, so there is no sync folder for two devices to fight over. Nothing you write is used to train any model, and the generator, which writes recaps from your own words and never writes your story, has an off switch in Setup. The full account is in your words stay yours.

Bringing a draft in: paste it, upload a .txt or .md file, or connect a Google Doc one file at a time (Inkling asks for the narrow drive.file permission, never your whole Drive). One honest gap: Inkling cannot read a .docx yet. If you compiled to Word, open it and copy and paste; if you have not compiled yet, choose plain text and upload that instead.

Once it is in, the storyboard lets you lay chapters out as cards and drag them into order, which is where a lot of the binder habit ends up living. Our page on Inkling as a Scrivener alternative goes through the rest, including what Scrivener still does better.

Whatever you choose, do the three steps first. Compile, archive, check the breaks. The draft is the one thing that cannot be bought again.