Anyone familiar with this? It says ‘free’ then has 3 levels of paid fees… I need to learn to use my dusty Scrivener. It arrived in my FB feed.
learnscrivenerfast.com/learn-scrivener-fast/
No, and personally… I don’t believe that one needs to spend much money, if any, to learn Scrivener. If I were starting from scratch now, I’d begin with the Interactive Tutorial (under the Help menu), working hard at it, then I’d leap into doing something simple in Scrivener (learning by doing), whilst keeping the Manual (also under the Help menu) always at my metaphorical elbow so that I could refer to it, by using it a bit like an encyclopaedia.
If I still had difficulties, I’d purchase one of the now-numerous books on Scrivener, helpfully listed here, and read it from cover to cover.
Again personally, I like to learn by understanding key principles first. And if you want to use Scrivener for what it was designed for, the key principle to understand (in my opinion) is “chunking” - that is, expressing what you want to say in short chunks, and then manipulating those chunks so that they end up in the best possible order and in the best possible form and format for optimal communication with your intended reader(s). That’s the basics.
I’ve always written like that, “chunking” pre-Scrivener with scissors and Sellotape. But I can see that the notion might give others who’ve never completely re-ordered a long piece of writing in that way - or afterwards played Sellotape cricket at three in the morning 
- more difficulty.
Thank you. I am a ‘chunk’ writer, as you described. I will look at the list of resources you gave, but I have tried the online tutorial, and ‘Scrivener for Dummies’ but still can’t get the hang of it.
One thing to add is that this forum is truly excellent, one of the best such application information-sources on the Web, with a great many helpful people who’ll be very happy to answer any questions you may have. So if there are things you don’t “get”, do ask away!
Be very careful with anyone purporting to teach Scrivener.
A person recently wrote the support address because they had paid a very substantial amount of money for what turned out to be a package of tutorials, and they wanted to know why the program itself wasn’t included. They were, understandably, quite upset.
As it turns out, the package was sold to them by someone who had no formal connection to Literature & Latte, and therefore no ability to generate valid license keys. (Or ESellerate coupon codes for our store.) I’m not sure the misrepresentation rose to the level of fraud, but the vendor certainly did not mind being (incorrectly) perceived as a legitimate Scrivener reseller.
Katherine
mmm, my alarm bells are going off on this one, especially given the site’s Affiliates http://learnscrivenerfast.com/affiliates/ page:
At the bottom, the site’s author, Joe, claims that with sales from 1/day to 20/day, one can make from $18,000 to +$300,000 USD.*
This affiliates system makes me question how reliable those positive reviews are, and I’m always suspicious of strong, hyperbolic marketing language.
On learning Scrivener: the tutorial really helped walk me through using Scrivener. One point I’d also make is that there are a lot of things one can eventually do with Scrivener, but it’s best to start working with it with basic things. As Hugh mentioned, there are other, cheaper and more effective ways of learning and walking through Scrivener. I do think the manual can be a bit intimidating, though it’s an excellent and thorough resource.
So, when I started with Scrivener, I just copied/dragged over my previous written work into the Draft sections and started playing with documents and folders. For me, Collections were a more difficult/advanced concept, so I played with those later. There are some things I don’t use much at all.
Ultimately, it’s by using Scrivener that I learned it, along with some of the resources that Hugh mentioned, and David Hewson’s Writing a Novel with Scrivener.
*I’m continually astonished at the chutzpah of people. Geez. 
I came here with the same question, curious more than anything. I did watch the free screenshare and I was impressed with the production quality.
When I first got Scriv I was lost a lot. I’m a pantser, and Scriv didn’t seem much better than using Word or Notepad. Once I got 70K words down (in text docs, of all things), then Scriv started to make sense. For me, it was hard to start with Scriv without a body to work on.
What really helped me was reading use cases. After I got some ideas of how people used it, I was better able to dig into the features. I had to sort out my workflow to begin to leverage Scriv effectively.
Eighteen months later, my workflow has improved dramatically, and I can start with a blank binder and know what to do with it. I’m making myself learn more up-front plotting so I can improve my speed by reducing the editing that comes from pantsing. Scriv makes that much easier. I’m by no means a Scriv master, but I know that between the tutorial, the help file, the forums, and the tips&tricks&workflow info here, I’m much more productive and effective than I used to be.
Any web page where I have to scroll down through numerous sales pitches just to find the price is suspect in my books.
This fits the definition of “vertical marketing” aka pyramid scheme. The originator is probably doing this with a variety of programs, to see which ones can attract the most suckers. Avoid!
(And I did pay ~$50 for a Scrivener course from Gwen Hernandez, which was worth it to me.)
I watched the free video I was offered on how to use Scrivener after receiving a manuscript back from a publisher with feedback to act on. Not that this applies to my usage, but I was curious. Two things especially struck me. One was that I felt the narrator was going out of his way to make out that Scrivener is confusing or hard to use, which it really isn’t (I taught my mum to use it for NaNo, and if it was hard to use that wouldn’t even have been possible, since although she is actually ok with technology she has a zero tolerance policy for learning any that isn’t blindingly obvious!). The other was that the suggested workflow was horribly convoluted, and wasted a lot of time and effort compared to far simpler alternatives that would have allowed at least as much use of Scrivener if not more. I was disappointed and frankly rather cross.
However, it did have one positive side-effect for me in resurrecting a usage question/scenario that I had been meaning to explore more some years ago but never got around to. Within five minutes I found the answer to the question in the user manual, and ten minutes of personal playing with different options in Scrivener alongside other software provided the rest. I can now make far better use of Scrivener for my own studies, which I am delighted with.
It’s much easier to get people to buy lessons for something perceived as difficult.
Katherine