What is the best book writing software? That’s a question many people have, and it’s an important one. After all, if you’re writing a book, you’re going to spend a lot of time using a book writing software. So it only makes sense you would use one that serves you well. There are a lot of book writing softwares, and some are more sophisticated than others. The bottom line, however, is that you should choose one that gives you the options you need and that keeps you away from distractions. I personally go old-school with MS Word and Pages on Apple devices.
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What's the best book writing software? That’s a good question, and it's an important one because if you're going to be writing a book, you're going to spend a lot of time using that software where, so it should serve you. Now, let me first say that there's no software that's going to be perfect for everybody. It's very, very subjective. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to walk you through how I think about book writing, software and how I Pick the ones that I use and why I picked them.
There are two things I'm looking for in a book writing software like Microsoft word pages, Google docs, et cetera. What I'm looking for is the ability to have a nice layout and formatting and the ability to avoid distractions. Now, why do I want a nicely out in nice formatting? Well, it's very simple: If I'm going to be looking at a document that I'm working on, then it needs to look nice and it doesn't need to look publishable.
It doesn't need to be what the publisher will use, but it just needs to look nice to me. And that’s simple psychology. You need to stay motivated. If you open a document and it looks like garbage, then you're not going to be motivated to open that document, let alone spend hours working on it. That's not going to happen.
Now, the other thing is I want to make sure that I'm not too, too distracted. Ideally, I'm looking for software that has a full screen feature or something that keeps me focused on the writing itself and not anything else. Microsoft Word does a good job of that. You can have a full-screen feature
The same is true with pages. I personally use Pages because I'm a Mac guy, but Microsoft word works just as well in that matter. And when it comes to Google Documents, you can also put your browser in full screen, but the disadvantage with Google documents is that you are on an internet browser, so you're very, very close to a lot of distractions. And so that's a disadvantage.
With that being said, I use several book writing software. I use pages. As I said, I sometimes use Microsoft words when I get sent something in that format. And I also use Google documents with certain clients because we are having backs and forth. So there are different benefits to the different book writing software, but essentially what you want to do is find the one that makes you happy. Find the one that gives you the options you need and also the one that keeps you from distractions. There is more sophisticated software. And there others like Scrivener and CeltX.
I believe CeltX is more geared towards screenwriting. Scrivener is very much geared toward book writing, both for fiction and nonfiction alike, and it has great options to organize your writing. And so that's a great thing. However, there is a learning curve to using Scrivener. It's a little more complicated than the average word processor, but it can be a good option if you're a committed nonfiction or fiction writer and you have to do a lot of research, organize a lot of thoughts and, put a lot of information into one centralized location.
Now, as I said, what you want to be looking at is how well does that book writing software helps you hit your writing goals? Does it make you distracted? Do you not find the options that you want? These are the questions that you want to be asking yourself, and that's what will help you make the best decision to find out, which is the best book writing software for you.