There are many options out there for ebook writing software - but which ones are worth it? We review the top 10 options.
Monica Dube|
The Best Novel Writing Software. Here’s our list of the best novel writing software tools we recommend. Microsoft Word. Microsoft Word is one of the oldest word processors out there, and it is still widely used for writing books. Word has a lot of features to offer, and with a new suite of productivity features added regularly, this. That’s not to say writing software will never be relevant. It could happen. But after testing and trying all of them, I have yet to find software that helps write a book. I’ve been writing professionally for 15 years and wrote four New York Times Best Sellers with basic software.
The age of handwriting your ebook and typing it up later is long gone. While I am a lover of beautiful stationery, ebook writing software can be much more useful.
In our selection, we review the best editing, writing, dictation, and converting tools currently at the market. Some of them practically take you from the first idea to the virtual bookshelf, and others import your manuscript and transform it into a beautiful ebook. Of course, everyone knows Blurb, and we write a lot about Sigil, that being the favorite editor of our technical team, but people have different needs and there are many reasons why you would want to look for an alternative to these apps. What is more important to you: ease of use or number of options? Do you need somewhere to write and edit the text, or just import it from a doc file? Did we leave out your favorite? Drop us a comment, and we’ll do our best to write about it.
If you need your manuscript converted to an epub, PublishDrive can do it for you: simply save it as a .docx file, and drag & drop it to the “Content file” field.
Contents
(The article was updated on July 16, 2018.)
Dictation Tools
When it comes to writing software, most writers still swear by Scrivener. We already have an article on what we liked and didn’t like about it. But writing a book is a hard physical labor. You’ll have to sit at the front of the computer for hours at a time. It is slow and needs your full, undivided attention. Thankfully, there is a way around it. More and more professional writers decide to dictate their books: there are several software solutions able to do the job for you. This saves you from getting repetitive pain injury by the time you reach page 50, even if you can’t afford a secretary. Dictating your novel can be a great way to speed up the writing process and let your thoughts go relatively free – if it works well. What is the best dictation software to use?
Google Docs Voice Typing
As an Android user, it seems logical to try Google Docs Voice Typing at first. To use Google Docs voice input you have to open Google Docs with a Chrome browser, click ‘Tools’ and select ‘Voice typing.’ (Or use the shortcut cmd+shift+f on Mac / ctrl+shift+s on Windows.) You’ll have to allow the browser to use your microphone in order start typing – I mean, dictating. There are also around 100 commands you can give the app, including New paragraph, move to the previous column and more: check out the help center for a comprehensive list. Dictation works in around 80 languages and regional accents in total, even in Hungarian! Voice commands, however, only work in English, and only if both the account’s language and the document are in English.
While I dictated this paragraph in its entirety, I had to do a lot of editing afterward. I also couldn’t get the Google Docs voice typing to do any punctuation (it knows commands like ‘period’ and ‘comma’ in six languages). Bear in mind, however, that I’m not a native speaker of English, and while my Google Assistant never has problems understanding my commands, when it comes to a longer text, my intonation can be difficult to follow for a machine. You can also use voice typing on any Android or iOS device with the GBoard(Google’s very own keyboard): I have never used GBoard to dictate anything longer than a note or text message, but it works just fine.
Dictation on iPhone, iPad, and Mac
Since the birth of Siri, every Apple product comes with built-in dictation. To turn on dictation on your iPhone, just open ‘Settings,’ and depending on your iOS version look for ‘Keyboard’ or ‘Language and input’ to find ‘Dictation’ and switch it on. Once it is on, you will see the little microphone next to the keyboard: just tap it to start dictating! I find Siri’s dictation less trustable than Google’s: it has trouble understanding even the simplest of words (is there anything wrong with the way I say but?) and dictation lagged even a sentence behind me. I know the lag is necessary as the AI is using context to figure out what I was saying (lots of similarly sounding words in English), but it was so behind me that I started doubting if it is listening to me at all. The transcription of your voice is done on a remote server, so you’re better off if you dictate in 30 seconds long segments. This is something I’ll probably need to get used to.
Bear in mind that using a good mic (such as an iPhone’s noise-cancelling mic you use for calls) or holding the mic close to your mouth can make all the difference! (And it helps if you speak slowly and clearly.) If your Apple gadget doesn’t understand you, keep trying: with time, it gets better at recognizing your accent.
You can also use Apple’s dictation on a Mac computer: go to ‘System Preferences’ and turn on ‘Dictation and Speech.’ (Depending on your iOS version, it could also be under ‘Keyboard.’) If you enable ‘enhanced dictation,’ your iOS will download a language package of around 400 MB, but it speeds up the recognition time and enhances accuracy.
Dragon and Dragon anywhere
The best-known dictation software is Dragon – Naturally Speaking. Dragon is available for Mac, Windows, and phones (Dragon Anywhere). It is the best app currently out by all accounts – but it comes at a price. Dragon for Windows and Mac starts at 300$ and offers no trial version – however, you have 30 days to ask for your money back. The app version offers a trial period of a week; then it is 15$ a month or 150$ a year; you’ll have to sign up online, then download the app and log in. (If you don’t like it, don’t forget to cancel your subscription after the end of the trial period.) For this price, Dragon offers 99% accuracy, custom words and brilliant and intuitive editing options. Just watch this demo:
Ebook writing softwareReedsy Book Editor
For a WYSIWYG ebook editor that converts into a valid epub, we recommend Reedsy’s editor. Reedsy’s aim was to create an online marketplace where writers and publishing professionals can find each other, and their platform offers great collaboration opportunities without the usual pain of following up version numbers and making sure that everyone is working with the right file. With this ethos, their publishing platform is cloud-based: you can either write your whole book there or copy and paste it in once you are finished. Just sign up with Facebook or Google to create your first book. My favorite feature is the automated front matter with an auto-generated copyright page. You can, as expected, add pictures and notes. On the downside, the customizing options are insufficient: this is the price you have to pay for them to be able to generate your beautiful book automatically.
Vellum
Created with usability and elegance in mind, Vellum is a fantastic software for creating Apple-, Kobo- and Amazon-approved ebooks and POD books with one click. While there are other, much cheaper software solutions to do this for you, some of them even listed in this guide, Vellum is unique: it creates not only professional but beautiful text-centric ebooks. If your goal is to create a book as elegant as a Penguin edition, Vellum can be your choice. The creators took care of everything: simple to use, efficiently imports from Word, and easy to change things even after the epub export.
(Source: The Write Life)
Creatavist
Behind the plain and off-putting title page (which pretty much shares nothing about what you’ll find inside) hides a fantastic app that is great for all your publishing needs: their motto is ‘create once, publish everywhere’ (COPE). Just sign up with Facebook and decide whether to publish under your name or create a profile for your publishing house, and you are good to go. You can use Creatavist to write and edit your books and stories, add pictures and audio and publish it on the web or download it as an enhanced ebook. It is excellent for creating magazines and scrapbooks and lets you publish directly to Amazon or Barnes&Nobles.
iBooks Author
For those of us who prefer the option to work offline (ever had to work on planes and trains?), Apple iBooks Author is an excellent choice with amazing personalization opportunities and, obviously, the option of easily sell in iBook Store (but your book still has to go through the approval process).
(Source: iBooks Author – App Store)
PressBooks
Just as Tumblr transformed the standard of personal websites with its ease of sharing different types of content, PressBooks intends to do the same for ebook and print book publishing. Aimed for self-pub authors and small publishers, it is, in fact, a WordPress based application with limited personalization options unless you are familiar with CSS. You can write your book straight into the browser or import it from Word.
Scrivener![]()
Scrivener is a bit of an outlier in this list, being not a conversion software but the greatest text editor ever made. It is very complicated to write long and complex texts as a Word document; if you want to change or check something later, it is almost impossible to find the right spot. Scrivener was created for compiling complex projects: books, research articles or screenplays. If you have millions of footnotes and endnotes, work with thousands of references or just would like to see your storylines in cute little windows, Scrivener is just for you.
Best Writing Software For Mac
(Source: learnscrivenerfast.com)
Zinepal
Zinepal is similar to Beacon in the sense that it recycles your existing material into ebooks. Using it is literally as simple as using a stick: just give it your blogs RSS feed and click ‘create.’ It also lets you try it out without registering which is a great plus (I’m still receiving spam from everywhere else I ever subscribed to). After it created your book (it takes around five minutes), you can personalize the output. Don’t put your hopes high; all options look very “newspapery”.
Calibre
Calibre is the most popular ebook manager software ever created and is my personal favorite. It is mostly known as an ebook library manager: it pretty much handles every input and output format, can send your books to your reader on a wire or wirelessly, lets you easily edit metadata and is great to list your books according to specific information. If you are like me and have collected a library made of thousands of books, or have a nook and a kindle and a tablet, Calibre does the work in the background and sends the right format to the right device, no questions asked. It is also great as an ebook converter for personal use, or if you would like to send your books to your friends, but the codes it creates are cluttered, and stores (like Amazon) greatly dislike it. (Ebooks created with Calibre often fail the validation.) If you are using Calibre, check our manuscript preparation guide to avoid getting a cluttered code.
Jutoh
Although the user interface seems a bit off-putting, I have quickly fallen in love with Jutoh: it seems to be creating amazingly clean epub and mobifiles. The ‘Document Cleanup’ function is a must have: it offers one-click removal of all rubbish coming from the text editors (tabs, line breaks, etc.) It doesn’t even let you convert your book until everything is in order.
InDesignWriting Program For Apple
In desktop publishing, InDesign sets the standards. No need can arise that cannot be solved using InDesign. The software today is used not only to typeset beautiful books but is here for all your publishing needs: you can create presentations, forms and websites using InDesign. With great customizability comes great… well, difficulty, when it comes to learning it. InDesign is by no means an intuitive, easy-to-use software. It takes some time to explore and master it. (It is probably worth it, though.) InDesign is amazing to create print-ready, press-friendly PDFs. On the downside, however, exporting your beautiful book into an epub might not turn out as well as expected. Sometimes, it is just easier to start it over from scratch and ditch the extensive formatting.
(Source)
I hope you enjoyed this selection of the most popular ebook writing and editing tools currently on the market. We tried to provide a selection including free and paid options for all platforms and online work. Which one is your favorite?
Once you're done writing your manuscript, it's a good time to start thinking about ebook distribution. Consider using PublishDrive! With free ebook conversion, built-in promo tools, and distribution to 400+ online stores, PublishDrive will streamline your publishing journey. Create your FREE account to get started!
If you turn phrases for fun and/or profit, your best option for a Mac writing app depends on what you want to write, and how.
Sure, you could stick with a word processor to pour your thoughts onto the page — but you've got better choices. If you want something a little less stuffy, cluttered, and nine-to-five, or more focused on creative writing, we've found four solid choices that take two very different approaches to helping you express yourself. All are either Essentials or Editors' Choices in the Mac App Store.
Ulysses
The first three apps on this list all take a similar no-frills approach to writing. They sport clean, minimalist interfaces, keep all your writing in a single window, can swap documents between their iOS and Mac versions, and use some variation of the Markdown syntax to handle all text formatting.
Ulysses impressed me most among this crowd for its breadth of features and ease of use. An outstanding series of introductory texts ease you into using Ulysses, one simple step at a time. Their witty writing allows you to learn the program while you're using it.
If you want to track your own productivity, or challenge yourself to meet a certain word count, it's easy to set goals from Ulysses's dashboard. Don't know Markdown XL, Ulysses's native tongue? No worries — a handy cheat sheet of syntax waits behind a button at the top of the program. (Ulysses also supports old faithful keyboard shortcuts for bold, italic, and linked text, if you don't want to type Markdown XL's extra characters.)
Ulysses keeps these two features and a handful of others, including options to export your work to text, ePub, HTML, PDF, or DOCX formats, in pop-over menus that you can tear off and keep onscreen for easy reference.
Ulysses isn't WYSIWYG; you can download themes to change up its color scheme at the Ulysses Style Exchange, but you can't view the effects of your formatting until you preview or export it. The Style Exchange also offers a host of free templates for PDF, HTML, and ePub exports, with different looks, fonts, and styles.
Ulysses comes with built-in iCloud support to hand off documents between its Mac and iOS versions. It can also publish your work directly to your Medium or WordPress site, once you enter your account info. And its subscription model means that your monthly $4.99 fee unlocks the app on both the Mac and iOS.
Best Book Writing Software Mac
Ulysses offers a lot of options in a polished, user-friendly package. Unfortunately, it has a good portion of its thunder stolen by…
Bear
Nearly everything Ulysses does, Bear does just as well, in an arguably prettier package. Bear's fonts and color scheme, while still clean and stark, go easier on the eyes than Ulysses's utilitarian gray. Its stats panel is much easier to read, though less detailed. And Bear strikes a happy medium between full WYSIWYG formatting and Markdown simplicity by clearly labeling different header tags as you create them, and offering the option to actually show text as bold or italic when properly marked.
I liked Bear's tagging system, which makes it really easy to organize files. Just type in a hashtag anywhere in your document, and Bear will either create a category for it on the fly in its list of documents, or add that document to an existing category. I was also impressed with Bear's ability to share a note to any program you've added to your Mac's Sharing menu, including Facebook, Twitter, and Reminders.
Beyond that, Bear duplicates a lot of Ulysses's virtues, from its overall interface to its friendly help files. And the program's basic version, which packs plenty of power, is absolutely free on both Mac and iOS. However, to match Ulysses's features, you'll need to subscribe to Bear Plus, for $1.49 a month or $14.99 a year. That subscription gets you features like iCloud synching, ePub export, and customizable export themes, all of which Ulysses includes right out of the box.
iA Writer
iA Writer is inexpensive -- just a one-time $15 fee -- and it packs a reasonably robust feature set. iCloud sharing and synching with its iOS sibling is built in, as is WordPress and Medium support. Like Bear and Ulysses, iA Writer offers downloadable export templates, and its help files include instructions to make your own with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. But for all these virtues, iA Writer still falls short.
Its stark black-and-white interface makes Ulysses look colorful. It feels brusque and utilitarian, not welcoming. On first use, the program dumps you right into its interface with no introduction. Its lean, efficient Help files explain the program well, but after Ulysses and Bear's gentler tutorials, iA Writer's lack of frills can feel jarring.
Word count and other stats are crammed into a tiny menu at the bottom of the window, and you can't set goals for any of those parameters. They're squeezed into the same small space as iA Writer's Format and Syntax menus, which can format text or quickly highlight all the nouns, adverbs, adjectives, or other parts of speech in your document — a nifty feature undercut by lackluster interface design.
Finally, a real-time preview window can show you what your text will look like when it's finished and formatted. But it feels odd to have the same text side by side; if you want to see what text looks like when formatted, why not just have a WYSIWYG editor?
iA Writer isn't bad on its own merits, but with such impressive competition, it can't help but suffer in comparison.
Scrivener
At the opposite end of the spectrum from its spartan rivals, Scrivener is a jumbo-sized Swiss army knife stuffed with a sometimes overwhelming array of fun and useful tools. The other programs in this roundup are undeniably more versatile, lending themselves just as well to note taking, blog posts, journalism, or technical writing as they do to writing fiction. In contrast, Scrivener's built to serve the needs of folks writing novels, short stories, screenplays, and — given its ability to store pictures, cached web pages, and other research material alongside a given text — possibly term papers. For $45, you'll definitely get your money's worth.
Scrivener's somewhat long in the tooth compared to its rivals here, with a dense but coherent interface filled with the kinds of colorful icons that seem to have fallen out of fashion among Mac apps. It arguably needs such a crowd of buttons to display even a fraction of the features stuffed into its every nook and cranny. (My favorite: A ridiculously options-laden name generator for authors in need of inspiration.) Scrivener's user manual, however engagingly written, is 546 pages long. It's not messing around.
Even after years of using Scrivener, I still sometimes find myself hunting through its menus in search of that one command I need. Consistently formatting text files in a given project to anything other than Scrivener's default settings can be a pain, and it keeps its settings for targets and statistics in separate popup windows.
But despite this complexity, Scrivener does a good job of getting out of your way. Scrivener offers an outline mode, and a corkboard mode that displays each of your scenes as virtual notecards on which you can hash out what happens when. But if you just want to start writing without worrying about its bells and whistles, you won't have a problem. Because it's so like the Finder, Scrivener's system for storing scenes in various folders makes sense immediately. And like all the programs mentioned here, Scrivener offers a fullscreen mode that blots out everything but the text you're working on, to avoid distractions.
Scrivener also offers a respectable if occasionally glitchy screenplay mode. It won't replace Final Draft, but if you want to have fun writing a cinematic masterpiece about Dominic Toretto battling Dracula, you'll end up with a decently formatted final product.
Scrivener also shines when it's time to publish your work. Its voluminous list of export formats includes all the usual suspects, plus ePubs, Final Draft screenplay files, and even Kindle books. You can even select only specific chapters or files to compile and export — handy when you've got multiple drafts of a novel in a given file, but only want to create a PDF of the most recent one. However, this versatility has one glaring exception: Scrivener doesn't support iCloud, though it can share documents between its iOS and Mac versions.
Which app is best?
If you want a jack-of-all trades writing app with WordPress, Medium, and iCloud support built in, Ulysses is your best bet. If you're not willing to shell out $4.99 a month indefinitely, try the similar Bear first. You may not ever need its advanced features, which would give you a terrific writing app for free.
But if you're serious about creative writing, and you want a stalwart companion to help drag stories out of your brain, Scrivener's your best bet. Its learning curve is steeper, but its powerful features make that climb worthwhile.
Got any favorite apps we haven't mentioned here? Let us know in the comments below.
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