What program do you use for writing a book?

Generally Google Documents for me. Makes it easy to access from home or work (sometimes I can work on it a little when I have a break).

 

Only downside is NSA agents are reading your books before they're ready

 

Open Office.

 

I'm in the planning stages right now (goal is to have something done this summer for once) and have been playing around with Storybook. You may run into it while looking for suitable programs, if you do keep in mind it is pretty bare-bones.

 

i've always used only ms word for all of my writings other than scripts, for which i use final draft...

ms word is the lingua franca of the writing/publishing world and i don't see any value in using anything fancier than that...

 

I'm really not that computer savvy, so it's plain and simple old Word for me.

 

Well then at least I know someone will read it!

 

I alternate between MS Word and Google Docs depending on which computer I'm using at the time. I have a Chromebook, which only runs Docs, and a Windows 7 computer. I quite like both. Docs is better for writing manuscripts, because it doesn't autocorrect you. A double hyphen doesn't autocorrect into an m-dash. It's not utterly impossible to get an n-dash.

I'd love something on this little laptop of mine that I can edit documents on without going online, without risking it being read by someone I don't want reading it, but I don't know if Scrivener will even work on a Chromebook, and I have one big problem when it comes to spending money for things. A complete lack of it.

 

If you go to the Word options settings you can turn on/off whatever autocorrect you want.

 

4. Other: Scrivener.

Reason: it's cheap and I like how everything is contained within a single project file. However, when I get around to buying Pages I imagine my novel writing will be transferred to that and Scrivener will be used solely for film projects.

 

I use Pages, which is a Word equivalent on a Mac. It's all I need in a writing program.

 

Microsoft Word. I don't like Google Docs because it often messes up the formatting, but I do use it as a back up to the back up for saving.

 

Same. It's free and easy. Why not?

 

iPages. Great, versatile programme that does everything I need. Loved ClarisWorks too, but that was LONG ago...

 

I haven't noticed Docs messing with my formatting at all.

I have, however, noticed that its grammar/spellcheck is really annoying. It uses "popular" spellings more than correct spellings. Apparently if I want to say "he had a lot of problems" it wants me to compound to "alot". ALOT IS NOT A WORD. I wonder if I can turn it off...

 

Hi,

Word 2000 for me on my desktop and open office writer on my laptop - it came with it and free was the right price for me!

One thing I would say, some of the features on later versions of word don't translate to certain publishing programs, and I think both CreateSpace and Smashwords have a warning about using them and recommend 2003 or earlier.

Also skip the synonyms etc in whatever writing program you use. They're generally pretty lame. I keep Microsoft Bookshelf 97 open as I write and simply flick across when I need more info - synonyms, antonyms, dictionary defs, historicity and some encyclopedia stuff. Bookshelf was wrapped up into Encarter after 97 so that may well give the same writer support.

Cheers, Greg.

 

Greg:

Just as an FYI if you're going between Word and OpenOffice. LibreOffice seems to have better compatibility these days. It is a fork of OpenOffice, and many (if not most) of the original OpenOffice developers when to LibreOffice when it split. I also find that with the latest version, LibreOffice runs faster. It's free, just like OO, and might be worth a look for you.

I've seen some of those warnings as well (maybe on Smashwords), but if you think about it, it's kind of sad that a service 'recommends' that you use ten-year old software in order for it to work properly. Hope they fix that soon.

 

Hi,

Thanks Steerpike. But don't knock the standardization on old software. It's actually one way to standardize and bring out the best results in publishing. If you think about the vast changes that happened to Word 2007 you can understand that making one publishing platform capable of working equally well with all word processing software is problematic. Better to standardize on an older version and know that modern versions of the word software can save in previous versions, then to try and accomodate every variant of every program and end up with problems.

I see this latter problem cropping up regularly on various sites relating to publishing questions. The same question keeps coming up - "I used program - A,B, and C and it gives me these errors - X,Y and Z." Usually they relate to things like spacing, formating, paragraph set ups etc. My advice always is to go to the old faithfuls to publish. Word 2003 ain't sexy. It's got fewer features. And people hate Microsoft because they seem to be there purely to make megabucks at people's expense. But at the end of the day it's the industry standard. Every publisher can use it, even CreateSpace though they prefer PDF's.

Cheers, Greg.

 

I just began using Scrivener and it's pretty good if you have a lot of intricate details you need to sort out and arrange. There's a bit of trial and error in using this and I still find myself gravitating toward Word but it's definitely worth a look if you're beginning a project. It formats your writing into a standard MS which has been helpful to me.
It cost me about 40AUD.

 

ywriter5 which I found recently through a relative. It hasn't got many formatting options for the text, but more than enough for most purpose. It's made from the start to write books and creating chapters/scenes and moving those is as easy as dragging them. You can do a lot of things too if you need worldbuilding, create characters, places, objects and add them to scene. Quite handily, it use color code (can be deactivated) which highlights characters names, places and other things you added.
Also has in-built word and character counter. That counting work for chapters, scenes, count the total of the book for each chapter and tell you how many words have been added today.

Has backup feature too, including one which you can use online if that's your wish.

A very nice program in my opinion. You probably won't use some of the functions from the get go but some can be very useful for certain genre. (Such as allowing to put a Day/Hour/Minute of the scene, and how long last the scene. For Time-critical important books)

 

I use Word starter 2010. It came with the laptop and it does what I need it to.

 

Scrivener. I used to swear by Word, but Scrivener does what I need Word to do, and does it much more easily and cleanly. And you can organize your work in many different ways with Scrivener - how you use it is your choice. And it costs only $40. That's as good as free for what it saves me in time and frustration.

 

I use LibreOffice Write to do my writing. It has a good spellchecker, good document import-export functions (e.g. export to PDF, DOC formats), and I like the built-in Thesaurus.

I have installed a demo of Scrivener, but I haven't been able to get used to it just yet...