: As a ghostwriter, can I edit my author's Scrivener file? Has anyone had experience editing someone's private Scrivener files from offsite? Or, can you conceptualize what I'm asking here and see

I don't have a lot Scrivener-specific experience.

You can, subject to being careful not to both edit the same file at the same time. I don't think Scrivener has file locking/version control that way for collaboration (I'm not 100% sure about that).

You shouldn't do it for 2 reasons

1. Version Control

How do you know what you've changed and maybe you would prefer to revert to an earlier version.

I'm a fan of keeping backups of drafts and changing a copy of a draft. That way you know when and how things have changed on a project.

There is something great about seeing who's changed what. This can be done in

Google Docs,
Microsoft Word (file swapping and possibly online),
or search for Scrivener + Git. nocategories.net/ephemera/git-scrivener is not hard to set up but a little bit technical.

I also know writer-teams who use wiki software so they have inbuilt version control. One chapter per wiki article and their research notes are there too.

2. Collaboration

Seriously consider Google Docs for live collaboration. If you don't write simultaneously then never mind that.

3. Backups and corruption

Editing the Scrivener bundles directly should work, but Murphy is looking over your shoulder. It will eventually bite you, so have regular backups off-site as well.

If the Author you're ghost-writing for is absolutely non-technical I recommend editing chapters they've finished with. In which case you should be able to deliver files named as, Chapter-01-edited. So your files are noticeably different from the originals.

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