Practical workflows, written for the work that matters.
Recipe 01
Submit to a literary agent.
Agents read fast and forgive nothing. The first hurdle is not the prose — it is the format. Loomwork ships with a William Shunn export profile that produces the manuscript every agent expects: 12-point Times, double-spaced, last-name / keyword / page in the running header, name and word count on the cover. You will not have to spend a Sunday afternoon fighting a Word template before the query goes out.
Open the file before you send it. Your agent’s assistant will be the next person to look at the page, and you want to know it lands clean.
Pick Manuscript (Shunn) in the Export panel.
Confirm Times 12pt, double-spaced.
Add author name, address, and email on the first page.
Export to .docx.
Open it in Word. Skim ten pages.
Attach. Send.
Recipe 02
Move a Scrivener project into Loomwork.
Scrivener works, until it doesn’t. The project bundle is opaque, the syncing is brittle, and one day the iPad refuses to open the binder. The cleanest way out is the front door: compile to a single Word document, drop it into Loomwork, and let the importer rebuild your scenes as proper blocks.
Set the project type to Novel on the way in and Loomwork will give you the binder and the page in their familiar arrangement on the other side.
In Scrivener, Compile to .docx with scene separators preserved.
Drag the .docx onto Loomwork’s welcome window.
Choose project type: Novel.
Loomwork preserves scenes as blocks and the chapter tree as your binder.
Spot-check the first three chapters. Done.
Recipe 03
Track research interviews.
Memoir and reported fiction live or die by what is in the notebook. Loomwork keeps a research room beside the manuscript: drop a transcript in as a research note, link characters to specific quotes, and the intelligence panel will surface those mentions when you write a scene that needs them.
It is a quiet kind of help. You do not have to remember which interview the line came from. Loomwork does.
Open the Research room from the navigation rail.
Drop transcripts in as research notes.
Select a quote, then link the speaker to a character.
Write the scene. The Intelligence panel will surface relevant quotes in context.
Recipe 04
Set up a daily writing sprint.
The hardest line of the day is the first one. A sprint timer collapses the choice into a button: twenty-five minutes, an ambient sound, and a clean session log waiting for you on the other side. Flow detection notices when you are typing without correcting yourself and dims the rest of the room.
You do not get a streak counter or a confetti animation. You get a quiet record of what you did.
⌘+⇧+S to open the sprint dialog.
Pick 25 minutes. Pick an ambient sound (rain, fire, paper).
Lock in. The chrome dims; the timer is a hairline at the top of the page.
Stop when it stops. Loomwork files the session under today.
Recipe 05
Start a memoir.
Memoir is structurally different from a novel. You are not arranging events you invented — you are deciding which true things belong on the page, and in what order. Loomwork’s Memoir project type opens straight into Author Mode and pre-builds an Outline you can rearrange before a single sentence of prose is committed.
Margin notes are the secret weapon. Memory cues you do not yet want in the prose — the sound of a screen door, what your grandfather kept in the glovebox — live in the margin until they are ready to come down onto the page.
New project → project type Memoir.
Author Mode is on by default. Toolbar gone.
Use Outline view (⌘+5) to plan chapters.
Press ⌘+⌥+M to drop a margin note for any memory cue you don’t yet want in the prose.
Recipe 06
Run a revision pass.
Revision is a different muscle than drafting. You are not adding; you are looking. Loomwork’s Revision Mode opens a Style Sheet panel and lets you pick a single thing to look for — dialogue, pacing, prose rhythm, continuity. Everything that does not match dims to a whisper, so the eye lands only on what you came to find.
Do the passes one at a time. The book will thank you.
Open the Revision Mode toggle in the Style Sheet panel.
Choose a pass: dialogue, pacing, prose, or continuity.
The editor dims everything except matching blocks.
Move through the manuscript end-to-end. Then pick the next pass.
Recipe 07
Sync your Mac and iPad.
The iPad is where a lot of writing happens now — the couch, the coffee shop, the Amtrak between Portland and Seattle. Pro sync mirrors your project folder between Macs over an end-to-end encrypted channel. The iPad app is coming in Q3; until then, the project is a real folder of Markdown files, so you can drag it into Files.app via iCloud and read it natively.
This is the consequence of plain text on disk. Your manuscript was always portable. We just had to honor it.
Settings → sign in to Pro.
Toggle Cloud sync on.
Choose which projects to mirror.
For iPad today: drag your mirror folder into Files.app via iCloud Drive.
The native iPad app arrives Q3 2026.
Recipe 08
Send to your editor.
Editors live in Word with track changes, and there is no point in arguing with them about it. Loomwork’s editor handoff exports your manuscript as a real .docx with proper Word-style markup — not a screenshot, not a flattened PDF. Your editor opens it in Word, accepts and rejects, and sends it back exactly the way they did for the last book.
When the file comes back, Loomwork imports the accepted changes back into your blocks. The trail is preserved.
⌘+⇧+E to open the editor handoff.
Loomwork generates a .docx with your markup as Word track changes.
Email the file to your editor.
When the marked-up file returns, drop it back on Loomwork to merge.
Recipe 09
Export to EPUB for beta readers.
Beta readers are the first audience that is not paid to be kind. They want to read on their Kindle or in Apple Books, on the train, on the couch — not on a Word document at a desk. Loomwork’s EPUB export bundles your manuscript with a real table of contents, chapter breaks, and metadata. Email it or sideload it to a Kindle.
It will look like a book on the device, which is what they need it to look like to read it the way they read books.
File → Export → EPUB.
Confirm title, author, and cover image.
Loomwork builds chapter breaks and a table of contents automatically.
Email the .epub to readers, or drop into the Send to Kindle service.
Recipe 10
Type a screenplay.
Screenplays are a different format and a different rhythm. Loomwork’s Screenplay project type switches the editor to Fountain-aware: character names go to caps, parentheticals find their indent, dialogue settles into the page the way it does in Final Draft. Export to .fdx and your collaborator opens it in Final Draft and never knows you were not using it.
You stay in one tool. The page knows what kind of page it is.
New project → project type Screenplay.
The editor switches to Fountain-aware: character names, parentheticals, dialogue auto-flow.
Type. The page handles the formatting.
⌘+E exports to .fdx for Final Draft.
Recipe 11
Clip from the web.
Half the research for a contemporary novel happens in a browser. A line in a New Yorker piece, a paragraph from a city archive, a quote from a Senate transcript. Loomwork’s browser extension lets you keep reading without breaking stride: select the passage, right-click, send it. The clip lands in the Research room with the source URL preserved, ready to link to a scene later.
The handoff goes through a loomwork:// deep link that only the desktop app responds to. Nothing leaves your machine. The desktop side strips control characters, refuses anything that smells like a script, and caps the payload at 50 KB — so a hostile page cannot smuggle a payload past the door.
Screenshot: right-click menu in Safari with “Send to Loomwork research” highlighted.
Install the Loomwork Clipper extension in Chrome or Safari.
Read normally. When a passage matters, select it.
Right-click → Send to Loomwork research.
Loomwork pops a toast: New clip from nytimes.com. The Research room scrolls to the new card.
From the card, link the quote to a character or scene. The Intelligence panel will surface it when you write that scene.
Recipe 12
Co-write with an editor.
Two people, one book. Co-author mode lets you invite an editor or collaborator into a project by email. They click the link, sign in, and the project appears in their dock the way it appears in yours. Database-level row security ensures only the people on the invitation list can read a sentence; everyone else is locked out. Track changes and comments cross the wire with author attribution.
Co-author mode is for two adults working on a book together. Communicate. The synchronization is robust, but two people typing into the same paragraph at the same instant will still produce the kind of conflict only conversation can resolve.
Open the project; choose Project → Invite collaborator….
Type their email; pick the role (co-author or commenter).
They receive a link, accept in the browser, the project appears in their dock.
Turn on track changes (⌘⇧T). Their edits arrive marked.
Resolve comments and accept changes the way you would in Word. Both writers must be on Pro.
Recipe 13
Polish your prose.
Revision is where the book is actually written. Loomwork’s prose linter shows passive voice, adverbs, filter words, and over-long sentences as a quiet underline in the margin — never a popup, never a redline. Walk through the manuscript chapter by chapter; each flag is a hint, not a verdict.
Pair this with the dialogue voice analysis (Pro): when a character’s drift score is high in chapter nine, that is where Maria starts sounding like David. Worth a closer look.
From the right rail, open the prose linter. Enable the four classes one at a time — passive, adverbs, filter, length.
Walk the chapter. Hover any underlined phrase to see the suggestion. Accept, reject, or ignore for the rest of the document.
For dialogue-heavy chapters, open dialogue voice analysis. Look at each character’s drift score. Click a high one to jump to the offending scene.
Take a snapshot before any major rewrite (version history, ⌘⇧H). Now you can roll back if the polish breaks something.
Recipe 14
Beta-reader workflow.
Beta readers are the first audience that is not paid to be kind. Get the manuscript to them, collect their reactions, and revise. Loomwork lets you skip the email-attachment dance: from the manuscript-prep panel, generate a private read-only share link with optional comments, send it through your mail client, and read responses without ever leaving the desktop.
Share links expire (7, 30, or 90 days), are revocable from the panel, and are not indexed by search engines. The reader does not need a Loomwork account to read; they sign in only if they want to leave comments.
Open the Manuscript Preparation panel from the toolbar.
Click Send to beta readers. Pick an expiry; toggle comments on if you want them.
Click Generate link; copy or send through email.
As beta readers read, comments accrue against the share. Open the panel to read and reply.
When you’re ready to revise, open version history (⌘⇧H) and snapshot the current state as before beta-reader pass. Revise. Roll back any paragraph that loses its way.
Recipe 15
Move from Scrivener to Loomwork.
Scrivener kept the binder; Loomwork keeps the binder and the page. The cleanest migration is the native one: drag the whole .scriv folder onto Loomwork. The importer reconstructs the binder, brings across synopses, notes, labels, and converts RTF document content into Markdown. A warnings panel afterwards lists anything that needed attention — usually footnotes, custom inspector fields, or formatting that did not survive the trip cleanly.
Spot-check the first three chapters before doing anything destructive. The original .scriv folder is left untouched; you can always re-import.
Quit Scrivener (so the project is not locked).
Drag the .scriv folder onto Loomwork’s welcome screen, or onto an empty project dock.
Pick project type Novel if it asks. The binder, notes, and labels come across; RTF is converted.
Open the warnings panel that appears after import. Review each item — footnotes, comments, custom fields.
Spot-check three chapters; fix any RTF leftovers (stray formatting, broken italics) by hand. The original .scriv is untouched.