Smarter Artist Team – How to Plan and Outline Novels (Using Scrivener)

SEAN PLATT, JOHNNY B. TRUANT, AND DAVID W. WRIGHT (the Smarter Artist team) are the co-hosts of the top-rated Self-Publishing Podcast and the co-authors of the #1 Marketing bestseller Write. Publish. Repeat: The No-Luck-Required Guide to Self-Publishing Success. Sean is also the author of Writing Online, the writing how-to that has helped thousands of writers. Together the trio have published well over 4 million words of popular fiction.

Sean, Johnny, and David run Sterling & Stone, a publishing company with six distinct imprints — including The Smarter Artist, which shows authors and artists how to “get smarter faster.” As one of their first projects for The Smarter Artist, they launched Fiction Unboxed in 2014 — a record-setting Kickstarter project in which Johnny and Sean wrote a full-length novel in 30 days, starting without any ideas or genre, in front of a live audience, sharing every detail of their process including story meetings, emails, and raw story drafts.

The novel birthed through Fiction Unboxed (The Dream Engine, first in the Blunderbuss/Alterra series) went on to spawn what the Sterling & Stone team calls “open-source fiction”: an open story world in which any author may write and publish without requiring permission or paying royalties to the world’s creators.

Sean and David are the authors of the groundbreaking #1 horror title Yesterday’s Gone, the paranoid thriller WhiteSpace, the Available Darkness vampire thrillers, and the heart-wrenching novel Crash, as well as the traditionally published titles Monstrous and the Z series (Z2134 through Z2136).

In addition to The Dream Engine books, Johnny and Sean are the authors of the political sci-fi serial The Beam, the fantasy/western mash-up Unicorn Western books, and the literary mindbender Axis of Aaron, as well as many other titles. On his own, Johnny also writes the Fat Vampire series.

The Sterling & Stone team also writes for children under the Guy Incognito imprint, co-writes with and produces erotica author Lexi Maxxwell, and pens straight comedy at the “sitcoms on your e-reader” LOL imprint.

Johnny, Sean, and David host their trendsetting, boundary-pushing podcasts every week on YouTube, iTunes, and their two-posts-daily cornerstone indie author website, linked at the left.