I remember the first time I heard someone say that they wrote their books on their phone. I was like who does that. How can you write a book on the phone? All I could imagine was typing on tiny keyboard with my thumbs. No that wasn’t for me. However, I ended up having to eat those words because this year I wrote a book on my phone.
No, I didn’t use the tiny keyboard. I used my favorite tool, Evernote. A few years ago, I found Evernote was great for taking dictation. I used it a lot to write blog posts while I was driving. I never thought about using for recording my manuscripts.
I decided to participate in the annual NANO – Novel In A Month last November. I wanted to try a new genre and a new story. My first thoughts came to me as I was driving to work, and I opened the Evernote and captured them.
I decided that to keep the daily commitment of writing, I would dictate my manuscript instead of turning on the laptop.
Each day I would talk into my phone. I didn’t hit the 50,000 goal but I was so pleased with the 26,000 words I did record.
I want to share a few tips with you if you decide to use your phone to write your book.
Evernote has two ways you can do dictation. You can do voice audio or voice record. I like voice record because it transcribes the words for me. The more you use Evernote the more it gets use to your voice.
I highly recommend me editing what you capture as soon as you finish, because sometimes the words don’t come across as well as you would like so you don’t want to wait a few days to read the transcription because you might forget what you were trying to say.
I decided to use a different note for each chapter instead of putting it all in one big note because it was easier to go back to one chapter when I was doing revision and look over a note versus trying to sort through the chapters in a large note
What I like about Evernote is the app is on your phone but you also can have access to it on your computer. Sometimes I just copy and paste and send it in an email to myself. I can print it out and read it in print form.
I hope these tips were helpful.
Have you consider writing a book on your phone?
