Review of StoryWorth

Рет қаралды 5,224

Күн бұрын

Note: To maintain independence, I do not accept discounts or any other kind of compensation for reviews.
0:00 It arrived
0:58 First impression
2:34 How the subscription works
3:54 Pricing
5:47 Characteristics of the book
7:00 A lot can fit in there
8:50 Who is StoryWorth good for?
10:16 Limitations of the product
12:44 Use Print Preview, Do a Spell Check
15:25 Bottom line
In a nutshell:
* Convenient way to capture stories and produce a hardcopy book
* Professional writers may find the lack of control too restrictive (limited character set, no italics, bold, underlining, chapter formatting is rigid, automatic substitution of characters such as double-dash, opening and closing quote marks, no captions can be added to pictures)
* Excellent for people like me who are natural writers, but amateurs.
* Those who are not natural writers will likely find it a burden to type their answers in. If you have someone who is a Talker, record video of them instead of using StoryWorth.
* The physical book itself is of reasonable quality for the purpose. It is not archival quality. However, they also give you a pdf, which will never fade.

Пікірлер: 37

@lavanyajakka4129 Ай бұрын

Very helpful feedback. Thank you

@ceceangel4561 Жыл бұрын

Thank you for being honest. This is the first review that I saw of someone actually having a first hand experience with the subscription

@EvatheDiva00 6 ай бұрын

thank you for this comprehensive review!

@youfa7619 7 ай бұрын

I rarely sign in before watching youtube. It feels alike a nuisance. I signed in, just to comment on how good this video is. Very thorough, verbally and visually. Thank you for this. It's a big help.

@joeincal3125 Жыл бұрын

Thank you so much for this review. I have a far better sense of the pros and cons now! You were very thorough, and very frank.

@kwkiwi1036 2 ай бұрын

Many thanks for a very helpful review. I'm just editing my book and checking it now. A fair bit of work involved there! I've downloaded a PDF draft and then printed it out in draft form at home on my laser printer. You need to ensure your print set up is the same as how the book pages will appear. I'm looking forward to finishing this. I agree, you need to like writing to enjoy this project.

@roderickyoung1243 2 ай бұрын

Very smart to print it out, first. Somehow, I see errors more easily on hard copy.

@natashaelise4852 5 ай бұрын

So helpful! Thank you 🖤

@mammacoughran4874 Жыл бұрын

Thank you for your review! My husband is a writer and I was worried this might be too elementary for him. Your review made me see it can accommodate multiple writing levels (page number wise). I loved that you smelled the book. Something I would totally do. 🥰

@roderickyoung1243 Жыл бұрын

If your husband is a professional writer, this may, in fact, be unsatisfying to him. Their format is quite restrictive - there's no way to caption pictures, no font control, not even bold or italics. As a casual writer, sometimes I really want italics to show my thoughts, or the occasional bold for shouting. And things like that emoji you used above simply get discarded in their publishing process. Just saying.

@thewhitematstudio Жыл бұрын

I appreciate the honest and non-sponsored review. Going to get this for my dad.

@roderickyoung1243 Жыл бұрын

Hope it works out well! If your father is a natural writer, he should enjoy it. Remember that you can customize the questions, so you'll want to target any specific stories that he tells all the time.

@thewhitematstudio Жыл бұрын

@@roderickyoung1243 awesome and appreciate the tips

@letabell1980 Жыл бұрын

Thanks for taking the time to review this. You have answered a lot of questions for me.

@mike_dyson_vacuum2326 Жыл бұрын

Very detailed and helpful review. Thank you for taking the time to share this.

@elainegreaves3081 Жыл бұрын

Thank you for this excellent review. Very helpful to see the finished product and hear your tips.

@SethGames 9 ай бұрын

This is good. I was considering doing this, but no special characters is a dealbreaker. I use bold, italics and other things in my writing. I really like the idea of this, though.

@roderickyoung1243 8 ай бұрын

I do hope Storyworth fixes this. I sent feedback on it, but the reply was that for now, the format is rigidly fixed.

@Living796 Жыл бұрын

Thank you for the detailed review! Very helpful

@jgmaute 8 ай бұрын

Thank you for the detailed and honest review/overview. I just finished and received my book. I found I could do some editing on the screen but really, as you mentioned, needed to preview then print each story to see how it looked and do editing on the hard copy then go back to the screen to make corrections. I really hated the blank pages so I made sure each story was an even number of pages to eliminate that issue. It's also important when you do the whole book preview to look at all the mistakes it finds. You can then click on the story titles and there will be a sign by each story that has a problem. In my case, the problems were pictures that were too small. It's easy to go back to the picture, click on it, then click on the + or - sign to change the size, or even hit the trash can to delete if that makes sense. But remember changing the picture size will impact the layout and length of the story so you need to save and preview again. I agree that people who are not comfortable writing may likely find this very difficult and the technical process can also be frustrating. Am I glad I did it? Yes. Would I recommend it? It really depends of the person who will be answering the questions.

@roderickyoung1243 8 ай бұрын

We think alike in many ways! I found myself making pictures bigger or smaller just to avoid the blank page. In some cases, I edited one or two sentences out of my story just to avoid almost two blank pages. And of course I agree, it's not for everyone.

@thegolem797 6 ай бұрын

Given that you have some experience with the system, you might be able to offer sone advice; I’ve added a picture to a story and now find that the text format alignment has gone to centre, and I can’t find a way to get back to left alignment. Any ideas please?

@jgmaute 6 ай бұрын

@@thegolem797 I did not run into this issue because I pit most of my pictures at the end of each story. However, I’d try to delete the picture, finish the story, then go back and add the picture and see if it impacts the alignment. Hopefully @roderickyoung1234 will have better advice. Good luck.

@roderickyoung1243 6 ай бұрын

@@thegolem797 Sorry for the delay in replying. I suspect, but don't know for sure, that they force alignment. I've noticed that sometimes they will allow something to stand the way you entered it, but when you try to print a pdf draft (which is the way it finally comes out), they force the formatting into their template. You might try reaching out to their customer support. I did for another question, and the unfortunate answer was that the customer has no control. Worst case, I suppose you could use Gimp or Photoshop to create the picture so that it looks exactly the way you want, even when auto-centered.

@thegolem797 6 ай бұрын

@@roderickyoung1243 thanks for getting back to me. I did get in touch with customer support, and it turned out quite useful. It seems that the app treats the first line of text under a picture as a caption, and centres it. In my case I wasn’t using captions, so the entire paragraph below the image was centred - I get round it by leaving two lines below pictures. Oddly enough, when I commented in this thread, two paragraphs under an image had been centred - but it seems to have corrected itself. I’ve opted to write using Word and then pasting into Storyworth as my eyesight is not what it was, and I can use accessibility tools and grammar/spelling check to make the job easier.

@ninat5007 5 ай бұрын

I appreciated your review. I'm getting ready to send mine to print. The way I (hopefully) got around some of the style limitations was using ALL CAPS for some headings within a chapter. So, the PDF shows what the pages will look like in the printed book? I have used dashes--and lots of quotation marks and some numbers, as in a list 1. 2. 3. The rigid formatting seems to allow this. What drove me crazy were the widows! I had to rearrange, add, or delete text to avoid a poem or story title being left as the last line of a page. The PDF shows that short lines, as with poems, work fine. I'm assuming that asterisks*, # signs, exclamation points, question marks and parentheses are part of the normal keyboard. Did you have any trouble with them? I have a few words with accents. I'll have to double-check the PDF to see if they work. Like déjà vu.

@roderickyoung1243 5 ай бұрын

The following printed fine in my final version: "Until working in east San Jose, I did not realize how many people in San Jose don’t speak English. Mostly Español , some Tiếng Việt . On a few occasions, I got to use my rusty American Sign Language. When it was Cantonese,..." Note the correct spelling on the Spanish and Vietnamese words. So the Latin characters seemed to work okay. Japanese and Chinese would not print, though. It's important to do a Save, then Print pdf when using characters that you can't type directly from a US Keyboard. I tried to do a line of fancy characters as a border to separate chapters in a short story, and it looked fine in the online editor, but after saving, the fancy characters vanished. Truly annoying. But we adapt, right?

@ninat5007 5 ай бұрын

Thank you! Truly annoying, and yes, we adapt! @@roderickyoung1243

@karenmccabe2167 Жыл бұрын

I'm so confused. I just purchased this for my mom, and extra copies for my 2 brothers. It didn't tell me that I needed to choose color. I think I paid about 175.00 .

@roderickyoung1243 Жыл бұрын

If you JUST put in your order, you may be able to stop it (if you want). If you paid $175, that sounds like you ordered one full color book, and 2 copies of black and white. Unless there are a lot of color photos in your book, in my opinion, black and white is fine, and saves a lot of money. It's your mother's stories that matter. If you have color photos that you want to keep for posterity, you can always digitize them (probably already did for the book). But also, at printing time, if you want color, you can just order it. The company will credit what you already paid, and you pay an up-charge for color. As I mentioned in the review, I strongly suggest printing just one copy in black and white, then reading through and making corrections, then printing any additional copies.

@ericlalonde5370 Жыл бұрын

Does the gifter have access to the account?

@roderickyoung1243 Жыл бұрын

I believe that the person who bought the gift sees all answers by default. Every time you answer, they get an email. But I think there's some setting to disable that, and also, you can add more people to be emailed if you want.

@Theleaddog Жыл бұрын

It’s not a paperback book. The hard cover books are made that way. Just saying.

@roderickyoung1243 Жыл бұрын

Fair enough, especially nowadays. The covers are hard, but you can see in the video that it's a glue binding, not a stitch binding. It's sufficient, given that the book would be very lightly read in the future. And also, there's the pdf file, which is the real archive.

@Theleaddog Жыл бұрын

You can talk and still have this book. Do you know that iPhones have an incredible dictation system now? It does all the grammatical stuff for you. All you have to do is talk.

@roderickyoung1243 Жыл бұрын

Good point. Dictation would take a lot of the typing burden away. Ultimately, it would likely still need some fix-up. For example, I might say that back in the 80's, I went on a long bike tour with Merrianne. Every dictation system would pick that up as "Mary Ann." And to make it worse, I also know someone who uses the latter spelling. I think it would really work best if there was another person (son/daughter, niece/nephew, etc.) to edit. But if you have a talker, and someone with time to capture them, I think video is superior in some ways. Like when they say "It was THIS BIG!" you can see that they're spreading their arms, and not their fingers. Also, tone and facial expressions would be captured. I'm a slow thinker, so video isn't as good as book like StoryWorth, where I can take my time composing.