How I Wrote A 90,000 Word Book Using Evernote From Start To Finish

I just wrote a 93,000 word book. It's called Marissa Mayer and The Fight To Save Yahoo.

I can't exactly explain why, but I wrote the entire thing in Evernote.

It was a weird choice by me because Evernote is not a word processor. It's a note-taking application. It wasn't built for book-writing.

One reason I used Evernote was because I kept all of my reporting notes and research in Evernote, and I wanted quick access to all that while I was writing.

It felt less clunky switching between screens in the same app than switching between Evernote and a slow-loading memory hog like Microsoft Word or the surprisingly lethargic Google Docs.

Another few reasons:

Evernote constantly saves what you're working on and backs it up to the cloud.
I have Evernote on my phone and iPad, and it was nice to be able to pull up my draft and review it anytime anywhere.
Evernote note windows are sparse, and I like that for writing.
I've developed a "process" around turning reporting/research into writing in Evernote, and when you're doing work as open-ended as long form writing, it's nice to have some step-by-step tasks to do to ground you.

If you're writing a book soon, you should probably do it in Microsoft Word or even Apple Pages (I can't recommend Google Docs). But if you want to be weird like me, I've outlined my process in the following slides. Sorry that I had to blur out so much. There are sources and spoilers to protect.