I’ve recently made a pretty significant change to my writing workflow when it comes to the book I’m writing and I’m really happy with it.

When I wrote “The Outsourcing Playbook”, I wrote it as a series of individual files in Byword, which made sense because it was originally intended to be more of an email course than ebook.

I still love Byword — in fact, I’m writing this blog post in it before pasting into Ghost — but that style of writing, picking a chapter/topic and treating it as a standalone item, I found doesn’t really scale all that well past the seven topics of that book.

I had started “The Hiring Handbook” in a similar fashion before realizing it just wasn’t working. First off, I needed an outline rather than a random blob of topics I was storing in Clear so I tried to organize things in some way and get a real sense of progress.

I’d had a copy of Folding Text sitting on my laptop since it first launched, just looking for an opportunity to use it.

So, I started an outline for the book there.

Then I thought, what the hell, I’ll add the stuff I’ve already written into the outline so I can see how much I have done and how much I have left.

And once I did that and started playing around with Folding Text, my entire writing workflow changed.

Thanks to FT’s focus features, now I pick a section of the outline to write and ⌘] a time or two to focus just on that section. I can then pop it fullscreen and write away.

Then when I save, it’s all in one document and in the right place in said document.

It’s a really fantastic writing environment — especially when what you’re writing is long enough to require an outline.

And the best part of all (to me anyway) is that despite the .ft file extension, Folding Text documents are actually just plain text Markdown under the hood.

I can pop the file directly into Marked to preview everything, or if I were planning to use automated PDF generation tools for the final output, I could flow it right into those.

If you haven’t checked out Folding Text in the past, or, like me, have a copy sitting around looking for a use, I’d recommend giving it a throw for book authoring. It fits my needs to a tee.