Dynamically linked text and some...

Question

OK so I'm obviously not looking for someone to code this but I'm hoping for some "been there done that" type input.
I have a set of InDesign files that for simplicities sake I'll care novel and another set that is derivative. Now I would like to be able to streamline the text edits from the novel InDesign files to the derivative files. At this point I'm considering the following bloated strategy mostly to wrap my brain around this and then an end goal of being able to pare the tool down to make things a little more unified.
1) Export the words from the textFrames and Tables as separate text files. (No footnotes to worry about thank God.) (At this point I'm confident in my ability to script this.)
2) Place the text files into the derivative InDesign files in their respective places. (I haven't done this, it's going to be a bit of a chore but I feel that I can find a way to script this using geometricBounds and contents... I'm in a conceptual phase.)
3) When the novel InDesign file changes, or once daily, the text script would execute and save over the old text files. The derivative InDesign file would then detect that the links had changed when its opened, links get updated and the new text is filled in.
It seems simple enough but I know with formatting, etc. things are going to get real sticky, real quick, but it feels like a better solution than extending the novel edits to derivative products one at a time. The other solution I can image is tracking changes and then doing a find replace over the dataset as an IDML.
Anyhow to basically summarize I want to push chunks of text from one set of documents into the other sets of documents.

Answer 1

I can see why John asked you about translation, because what you are describing is a pretty normal thing when you're managing documents across 20 languages. "Managing" is the key word here; SDL has all kinds of "content management tools" that will make your job very easy. Unfortunately, such tools are very expensive, so they're more likely to be useful to you if you're asking on behalf of 10-30 people. But it sounds like it's just you, to be honest, so I'm not going to go into descriptions of the global-team-cat-herding tools unless you ask. (They're great, especially if you have to herd cats.)
What I do, when I'm in your shoes, is I make a "fake" translation memory. I'd align my "parent" document against itself, saying that the source language was en_US and the target was en_NZ. I'd do this because translation memory tools excel at doing what you're trying to do (reuse identical content outside of its original context, automagically, with no laborious control-c alt-tab control-v work).  Of course, that's why SDL, a company that has built its fortunes on translation memory tools, has expanded its toolset to encompass monolingual content management. There are other such tools out there, of course, but I mention SDL because if translation is involved in your workflow there's a chance that you already have Trados. All that would do for you, if you were to make a fake TM as I describe above, would be to get your "master content" out of ID and into a database, which is where it belongs if you want to attempt contact management on this scale. That could be a homebrew database, or you could pick out a content management tool that was able to trigger the script to regenerate your stuff in InDesign. I can't suggest anything because I always ignore content management tools that do not have multilingual content management, localization, and internationalization built in from the very beginning.
So, homebrew: I dunno what your background in databases is like. Because I have had this conversation with Mac-based designers dozens of times over the years, this is where I usually mention Filemaker. What's your expertise level here? Because, honestly, if you wanted to script something but know nothing about databases, then I'd say: Move all of your content into Excel. Seriously. Save out CSV from there and route it into InDesign via Data Merge. Manage content in Excel. Make people submit changes in Excel. Handle change tracking by writing VBA scripts to do change tracking in Excel.
There are many other ways to do this on a roll-your-own basis, of course - I set up a little SQL database, my client set up a little web-form for new submissions, and then we collaborated on getting the database to spit out a nicely tagged XML file, which we could then import into ID and auto-magically format. This workflow is usually really thorny, but because we controlled how the XML was tagged up, it went off without a hitch. Most XML-into-ID projects are not nearly so smooth, or so I've heard. But I've never needed to lift a finger to fix the XML, it's always been perfect, and I'm told by many that usually XML projects in ID require a bunch of XSL transformations to make data useable at all. But, once again, if you have the skills and tools, this is another DIY-content-management technique worth investigating. (But pay attention if John posts about XML->InDesign projects; his experiences have apparently been as frustrating as mine have been easy.)
TL;DR: Don't try to manage your content in InDesign. Get it out of your page layout tool into a container that makes sense, like a CMS, or a homebrew Filemaker database, or even Excel. <shudder>