If you’re thinking about writing a book, it can be a good idea to download a writing software or program to help you along your journey.
But once you start investigating, you’ll discover a huge range of options out there. Figuring out which one to choose can feel like a task in itself.
In this article, I’ve rounded up some of the best writing software on the market today.
Best Software for Writing a Book
Fictionary Storyteller
Originally designed for story editing, Fictionary Storyteller has since evolved and now offers incredible support throughout all stages of your writing and editing journey.
There are different subscriptions available: here I’ll look at the basic subscription plan, which comes in at $19 a month.
For this plan, you’ll gain access to Storyteller software for both writing and editing your book. You don’t need to download this software – once you’ve set up your account you’ll have login details and can access the program through the internet.
Once you’ve begun writing your book in Storyteller software, you don’t need to save it elsewhere: your work will be saved in your Storyteller account.
Storyteller’s design enables you to plan and write your story with a clear overall grasp of story structure.
It’s set-up so that you write in scenes, able to see right from the start how your different scenes work in sequence with each other, and how well these scenes together form a story. By using this structure, you avoid accidentally writing rambling, unstructured passages.
As you write your scenes in Storyteller, you’ll be able to assess straight away whether or not your scenes contain the 38 essential story elements, which work together to ensure a scene is well-paced, gripping and immersive.
A few of the best features for planning and writing your book include:
Story Goal Tracking: As you write your scenes, Storyteller’s story goal tracking function allows you to ensure each scene is relevant and necessary to your story, and that it takes your story in the right direction. It easy to lose yourself in the joy of creating a scene, only to discover that you’ve veered off-track and your beautifully written scene doesn’t function well within your overall story. The story goal tracker helps stop this happening, so you’ve fewer scenes to cut or rewrite at the end of your first draft.
Character Development: Storyteller’s character tracking feature allows you to ensure your character’s motivations remain consistent. Using this tool in conjunction with the Notes section helps you to track the gradual development of major characters, so that their growth is believable and convincing.
Scene Goal Analysis: Storyteller helps keep you on track as you write by ensuring each scene contains a gripping goal, stakes and structure. An optional artificial intelligence tool will analyse your scene goal and structure for you, so that you can check each scene contains conflict, tension and clear structure as you write. This way, if you’re getting lost as you write, you’ll figure this out before falling too far down the rabbit-hole.
Setting Analysis: The Settings tab helps you ensure that you’ve written detailed and immersive settings for each of your scenes.
Scene and Sequel Tracking: This tab helps you ensure you’ve a strong mix of action and reaction scenes. It’s important to balance out action scenes with character and setting development scenes as you write, and Storyteller will help you keep an eye on this.
This is just a short summary of some of Storyteller’s great features – there are many more available.
Storyteller’s downsides include the fact that the software doesn’t work offline, and there’s no specific capacity within the software for copy-editing, typesetting or publishing your manuscript once it’s finished. You export your manuscript into a Word Document, and start copy-editing at this point.
ProWritingAid
ProWritingAid is a writing tool designed to help you improve you copy-editing skills by checking for grammar errors, spelling mistakes, and other issues with your prose.
ProWritingAid is a great software for helping you improve your writing at the sentence-level.
The Premium Plan is ideal for both drafting and writing your book. It comes in at $30 a month.
Let’s have a look at some of the features which will help you write your book:
Passive Voice Checker: This is a great training tool to use as you write. For those of you accustomed to academic writing, the passive voice may be one of your creative writing nemeses, for it can make your scenes feel dull and flat if you overuse it. ProWritingAid’s tool will pick this up for you as you write, so that over time you’ll probably find your voice naturally changes to become more active and immersive.
Chapter Critique: Once you’ve written your first draft of a scene or chapter, ProWritingAid’s chapter critique will analyse your chapter for you, providing feedback on how compelling your opening is, the strength of your voice, how vivid your descriptions are, how well you’ve drawn out tension, your character introductions and so on.
Most valuable of all, the critique will highlight potential improvements for the areas where your chapter could benefit from further improvements. This is a great way to let you know whether your scene needs more work or whether you’re ready to move onto the next chapter.
Sentence Variety Tracker: Another area where it can be great to get feedback as you write, the sentence variety tracker will help ensure you develop your character’s voices in a way that’s engaging to readers.
Show and Tell Tracker: The bane of many writers! We all know we should show and not just tell. And yet, sometimes it can be so hard to tell the difference between the two. ProWritingAid’s tool will help you figure out where you’ve shown and where you’ve told.
ProWritingAid is available both offline or online, but doesn’t have any specific publishing features such as typesetting, or any of Stoyteller’s visual story editing aids.
The critique reports are thorough, comprehensive and useful, but don’t always explain how the computer tool has reached its analysis when it comes to the positive critiques, so it may be harder to replicate your success in future scenes.
Likewise, as in all softwares which offer prose rewrite suggestions, writers should be very careful about accepting all the suggestions, as this can have a negative impact on the consistency of their voice.
Atticus
Atticus is a comprehensive book formatting software with several features which can help you turn your draft into a publishable book. It’s particularly useful for any writer planning on self-publishing their book.
Custom Chapter Headings: Atticus can help you create custom chapter headings and ornamental breaks. This helps you make your book look professional, whilst also giving it the personal touch. You can choose from a variety of pre-designed formats or design your own using a Book Brush account.
Automated Front and Back Matter Feature: This allows you to easily add pages to your book including title page, table of contents, copyright page, dedication, author biography etc. Moreover, you can duplicate this across many books.
Typesetting: Typesetting can be an overwhelming task for writers self-publishing their first book. Atticus software has been designed to take care of this for you, helping you create a polished and professional looking book. Atticus offers different streamlined typesetting options for different book themes, although you can also personalise your typesetting should you choose.
By saving you time and effort in these technical matters, you can spend more time focusing on the creative writing aspects of your book.
Another great feature of Atticus is its price – for a one-off payment of $147, you gain lifetime access to the software.
It’s a really useful software for any writer planning to self-publish. What it doesn’t offer is the same level of critiquing and reporting that Storyteller and ProWritingAid do.
Ulysses
This software is designed to allow writers easily to shuffle around the different parts and scenes of a book. It’s a comprehensive tool for drafting, editing and publishing.
One of Ulysses great features is that its available off-line, so you can take yourself away from the online world of distractions while you write. Features include:
A built-in proof-reader and editing assistant: it offers suggestions for capitalization, punctuation, semantics, redundancy, style and more.
A deadline feature: which allows you to set deadlines for yourself.
File organization structure specific to book-writing: So you can easily organise your files into scenes and chapters.
Once you’ve finished writing, Ulysses can turn your texts into PDFs, word documents, e-books and blog posts.
Ulysses is designed for writing, but not specifically for fiction book writers, so it’s doesn’t have the same target towards fiction-writing that some of the other softwares mentioned above do, nor does it have all the extras in terms of critiques and reports. It’s also only available for Apple users.
Its pricing comes in at about $39.99 per year.
Hemingway
Inspired by the clarity of the prose for which Ernest Hemingway was famous, this is a writing tool designed to make your prose more clear and concise. Its features include:
Colour coding: to help writers keep their sentences punchy and direct.
Text analysis: Highlights weak phrases, complex words, excessive adjectives and adverbs, and passive voice. It also provides a readability score for your prose.
Rewrite suggestions: Using artificial intelligence to show how you could rewrite your weaker sentences.
Price-wise, subscriptions vary between $8.33 and $12.50 a month, depending on which plan you choose.
It’s perfect for writers of fiction, non-fiction and business writing looking to keep their prose clear, concise and direct. However, if you’re a writer who never quite matched with Hemingway’s prose style, then this might not be the best tool for you. It’s ideal for proof-reading, but not for story editing.
Best Novel Writing Software for Beginners
Fictionary Storyteller Premium
If you’re a beginner writer, I can’t recommend this option highly enough. It’s all very well for Storyteller to have been designed to help writers ensure their scenes meet all the essential story structure elements – but what if you don’t understand what these elements are?
In this case, Storyteller Premium comes into play.
At $39 a month, this subscription also offers unlimited access to Fictionary Live classes: online classes teaching you the basics and the advanced complexities of story structure and the story elements, and how to maximise the potential of your Storyteller subscription.
These interactive classes are available at different times, allowing for access from various different time-zones, and taught by different Storycoach editors, so you can gain insights from the perspectives of different teachers.
Aside from these extra classes, the pros and cons are the same for the Storyteller software as those mentioned above.
Plottr
Plottr’s a great software if you’re looking to start planning a novel and don’t know where to start.
For between $60 and $270 a year depending on which plan you choose, you’ll gain access to a range of great plotting tools. Features include:
A range of built-in story structure templates: these cater to a variety of genres and storytelling techniques.
Introductory tour: to help new users navigate their way around.
Plotlines and Subplotlines: designed to allows you to lay out your key scenes using diagram. You can make scene annotations on your cards, and move them around as you choose.
Character tabs: where you can make and keep notes about your different characters, and you can use these to track character traits and development across plotlines.
Although great for new and seasoned writers alike, the software’s particularly useful for beginners who are still learning to work with different storytelling techniques.
World Anvil
World Anvil has been created as a world-building tool for writers, especially perfect for writers of Fantasy and Sci-Fi.
When creating fictional worlds, it can be tricky to keep track of everything you plan and create. If you’ve ever tried making a folder of Word Documents and then trying to keep tabs on them all as you write, you’ll know exactly how tricky this can be!
Which is where World Anvil steps in, helping you to create comprehensive worlds and keep everything together in one easily-accessible place.
Within Word Anvil you can create detailed maps, timelines and family trees. You can create detailed governments, institutions and organisations, connecting them all together.
It’s not just limited to setting: you can also create detailed character profiles with backstories and relationship dynamics.
World Anvil also allows for artist collaboration, so that others can contribute to your world. You can share the world you’ve created with readers or your writing community, and if you allow, they can offer contributions and feedback. You control the privacy settings, so you’re completely in control of how much collaboration is allowed.
Monthly Subscriptions come in between $7 and $34 a month depending on which plan you choose.
For writers of speculative series, this tool can be a great way to encourage reader involvement in your work, and allow for greater world-building to take place than that you’ve time for within your stories themselves. For anyone looking to create a more interactive experience for their readers, this is a really exciting tool.
The downsides for beginners are that there’s a lot to get your head around as you navigate the software, and you risk losing sight of your story as you lose yourself in the world-building process.
The Novel Writing Factory
The Novel Writing Factory software includes a lot of great features for beginner writers. These include:
Plotting Toolkit: You’ll find questionnaires, genre-specific templates for developing plot, character and setting, with guidance for creating a strong story right from the start.
The Novel Writing Roadmap: Quick tips and structured lessons help you learn your craft as you write.
Dynamic Plot Manager: Helps you break down your story into manageable blocks so you can get a birds-eye view of your project.
Subplot Manager: Allows you to keep track of different subplot threads, themes, characters and items, with the ability to drag and drop elements to reorganise your story as necessary.
There’s an affordable starting price plan for beginners at $75 a year, allowing you to work on one novel. For multiple novels you’ll need to go up to the standard plan at $198 per year.
The downsides include a steep learning curve for beginners, who may struggle to incorporate all these various elements together in their stories. The software doesn’t work offline, which is another limitation.
Sudowrite
Sudowrite is an artificial intelligence tool designed for fiction writers. There’s a wide variety of features created to assist writers in the book writing process, including:
Character Development: suggestions for adding depth and complexity to your characters.
Story Engine: Once you have your genre, characters and outline in place, Sudowrite helps you generate story beats, breaking down events that happen in each chapter.
Brainstorming: If you’re suffering from writer’s block, and looking for ideas on how to move your story forward, Sudowrite can come up with story ideas for you to consider.
Story Bible: This will help you generate ideas for world building, including magic systems, governments, economies and more.
Text Generator: Sudowrite will actually generate the text for you.
The cons of this are fairly evident from the outset: if you actually enjoy the process of creative writing, why would you want an artificial intelligence tool to do it all for you? Moreover, the text is not going to carry your own individual voice, or your characters’ voices.
There’s uncomfortable issues around plagiarism, since artificial intelligence will use other writers’ work when coming up with its own ideas and text.
However, if you’re looking for help with generating ideas and overcoming writer’s block, this can be a useful tool, as long as you use it with caution.
Cost-wise, Sudowrite starts at $10 a month on the monthly plan.
Best Writing Software for Editors
Fictionary Storycoach
Fictionary Storycoach shares all the same features as Storyteller, but has been designed for professional editors to edit clients’ manuscripts. It’s available for $49 per month.
Storycoach is designed to work alongside a client’s Storyteller account. The editor’s Storycoach account links to the client’s Storyteller account, allowing the editor’s comments and feedback to be available to the client in their own account.
It’s a great tool to allow editors and writers to work together.
There are certain features shared by both Storyeller and Storycoach which are invaluable for the editing process – whether you’re editing your own work or a client’s. The features I’ll discuss below are available in both Storyteller and Storycoach.
Story Arc Visualisation: Once you’ve a completed manuscript to edit, the Story Arc visualisation feature jumps into play. Creating a compelling story is one of the key aspects of structural editing, but visualising the story as a whole can be a tricky feat to pull off.
With Fictionary’s software, the computer will do the job for you, identifying them most likely key plot points scenes and showing you how they hold together. This gives you a great idea of what the reading experience will feel like: where the story flags, where it races too fast, and where it’s paced just right.
Story Map: The story map is a great way for you to visually track the various story elements and their development throughout the narrative arc.
By marking the elements as you edit a manuscript, showing them as either complete, needing work or absent, you can see which areas of the story need further work. Moreover, by seeing all the elements together you can often find single solutions for multiple problems. For example, if a scene lacks both conflict and a clear goal, usually clarifying a single scene goal will allow you to create clearer conflict through adding obstacles to the character’s goal.
These are just a couple of the excellent editing features available on Storycoach – sign up for your free trial to explore these and the rest.
ProWritingAid Premium Pro
This tool is probably most useful for writers in the self-editing stage of their writing, but can also be useful for professional editors.
The Premium Pro subscription costs $36 per month. It includes all the features available in the Premium version but includes more of certain limited, but particularly useful, features. These include:
Sparks: These ‘sparks’ are AI-generated suggested improvements to your sentences. The sparks give feedback as to why they are suggesting these alternative sentences, so that you may opt to take on board the feedback without using the suggested rephrasing.
The AI generated rephrasing suggestions may well not be in your or characters’ voices, so I’d suggest using these with caution. Nevertheless, they’re a valuable way to see what might be lacking in a manuscript’s prose.
Manuscript Analysis discounts: This works in the same way as the chapter critique, but on a much larger scale – analysing your entire manuscript. The critique looks at character development, plot and setting and provides feedback on what works and what doesn’t. As with Chapter analysis, this is a computer-generated feedback tool, and not a substitute for a human reader, but it can give excellent suggestions as to where you should direct your editorial energies.
Reedsy Software
Reedsy is a great free software that’s been developed to help writers work with independent editors and typesetters, so that they end up with a draft that’s publication-ready.
Writers can either write their first draft in Reedsy, or import a finished document into the software.
Some useful features include:
An insert tab: Located on the toolbar, this allows you to insert images, citations and scene breaks easily.
Easy collaboration with editors: the software has been created to allow you and your editor to seamlessly collaborate on the document.
Formatting for publication: Reedsy will deal with common typesetting errors for you automatically. There are a few standard options of typesetting available you can choose from, and for more complex typesetting requirements you can hire an independent typesetter to collaborate on the document with you.
Copyright form: Reedsy simplifies the copyright process for writers who are self-publishing.
It’s also easy to export copies of your book for safe-keeping in a .docx file.
Although Reedsy’s spell and grammar check options are limited, the software allows for ProWritingAid to be added to the software so you can increase your copy-editing capacity as you work on documents within Reedsy. There’s not the same detailed storyediting visualisations as you find in Fictionary Storycoach, but it’s a good software for independent editors who clients don’t have a Storyteller subscription.
Grammarly Pro
Grammarly was initially designed to help writers improve their writing of all types (not just fiction), by checking spelling and punctuation. It’s since developed to include features which check your writing for correctness, clarity and engagement.
It’s a great app to use if you’re a professional proof-reader, as it will help you find sentences which need some copy-editing. And likewise, if you’re proof-reading your own manuscript, Grammarly offers a useful objective eye.
Its Pro subscription offers a variety of features useful to fiction writers and editors:
Sentence Re-writing: with just one click, Grammarly will rewrite sentences for you. This won’t, however, be in the character’s specific voice.
Fluency: If English isn’t your first language, Grammarly will help you improve the fluency of your sentences.
Plagiarism detection: This is very useful, as it can be easy to accidentally plagiarise the work of others writers we admire, especially in the realm of non-fiction.
The caveat here is that Grammarly wasn’t specifically designed for fiction writers. It’s great for writers of non-fiction, but for fiction writers and editors, ProWritingAid’s tools might be more appropriate.
SlickWrite
SlickWrite is a totally free app offering features that you often have to pay for elsewhere. It allows for up to 30,000 words to be checked at a time. Its features include:
Vocabulary variety checker: which does exactly as you’d expect!
Flow Tool: helps you check for variety in the flow of your sentences.
Statistical Feedback Tool: gives you feedback on your grammar.
Word Associator: which works similarly to a thesaurus.
Feedback from online reviews suggest that the app can be slightly tricky to use, but overall contains a great range of tools available for a free app.
Best Program for Writing a Book
Living Writer
Living Writer is a relatively new writing program, which has garnered many enthusiastic online reviews from users.
Users particularly value its attractive interface and the fact it’s a cloud-based program rather than a desktop-based one. There’s a live collaboration feature allowing you to share your story with others for reviews and editing. Autosave features help you to prevent losing your work and you can export to Amazon manuscript templates, PDF, Docx etc.
Its other features include:
Sidebar feature: allowing you to easily separate and see your chapters, scenes, and story elements. You can easily drag and drop chapters and scenes to reorganise your work.
Right Sidebar: where you can view and edit all your notes and comments.
Virtual Corkboard: allowing you to view all your scenes and chapter on one page.
Smart Text Feature: Recognises your story elements and auto-suggests them as you type, linking with your notes.
Pre-loaded templates: of story structures, including the three-act structure etc., with guidance
Cost-wise, it comes in at $12 a month, with a 14 day free trial to start.
The downside is that it doesn’t have book formatting capabilities, or the same amount of visual story editing features as Storyteller, or the same wide variety of copyediting features and reports as ProWritingAid.
Scrivener
Unlike MS Word and Google Docs, Scrivener’s a program that’s been designed specifically with book writing in mind. Its various features include, amongst others:
Colour Coding Tools: A popular way for writers to annotate their drafts as they write.
A Word Frequency Analyser: To keep track of overused words as you write.
A Project Binder: So you can navigate through your various files with ease.
Synopsis and Notes Section: There’s a more user-friendly version of notes and comments for writers than you’ll find in standard word processors.
Perhaps most importantly, Scrivener has been created specifically to handle large manuscripts, so you can easily move large sections around without the same struggles you’ll encounter using cut-and-paste in MS Word, which might cause your file to crash.
The cost is a single payment of between $23.99 and $95.98 depending on whether you’re getting it for IOS, Single platform Word/Mac or a bundled license for both Word and Mac.
In terms of disadvantages, you don’t get the same level of critique, analysis and visual aids as you get with Storyteller.
Microsoft (MS) Word
It’s worth mentioning this classic here, because although it’s not specifically developed for novel writing, the program does have certain advantages, most notably, it’s the program most writers are most familiar with.
That’s not something to be sniffed at. Many writers simply prefer to focus on their writing rather than learning new technologies, and as long as you’re proficient with MS Word, it’s reasonable to choose this as your preferred program.
MS Word isn’t ideal if you’re planning to self-publish, because its formatting doesn’t lend itself to the best typesetting for your book. However, if you choose to write your manuscript in Word, then transfer over to MS Publisher, you should be able to overcome this issue.
If you’re hoping to get published traditionally, you know that literary agents will have no difficulty opening manuscripts saved in MS Word, and a publisher will deal with the rest of it.
The disadvantages of Word are that, because it wasn’t really designed for novel-writing, the program can easily freeze if you move around large sections of text, and it isn’t the most user-friendly way of viewing an entire book. It also lacks almost all of the various features mentioned in the different softwares and programs above.
In terms of cost, most people already have Word set up on their computer. A one-time purchase price of £119.99 brings you access to an Office Home and Student Bundle which includes MS Word.
Google Docs
Google Docs is an easy and convenient tool for document creation and editing, allowing real-time collaboration, cloud storage, automatic saving, and accessibility from any device with internet connection.
Like MS Word, it’s not designed specifically for novel-writing, but for many writers, a pre-existing familiarity with Google Docs can be a strong motivating factor to choose this as their program.
It’s easy to share your work with beta readers for reviews, to add editing comments in the sidebar, to add chapter headings allowing for quick access, to write or edit documents while offline, and to add voice typing.
Moreover, Google Docs is available to anyone with a google email account for free.
However, it lacks most of the story editing, copy editing, reports and book formatting features of the various software discussed above.
YWriter
YWriter is a program developed specifically for novel writers, and as such, has some really useful features:
Scene and Chapter Divides: which allow you to easily create and edit different scenes.
Speech engine: Will read your work out loud to you once you’ve written it.
Tabs sections: For scenes, characters, locations and notes.
Word Count display: which works ore intuitively than that of Word or Google Docs.
Storyboard: Which shows your chapters and scenes in graphs, and where each character is present.
Once your manuscript is completed it can be exported into ePub or Kindle formats to read, or into LaTeX or RTF files.
The program runs offline in Windows iOS and Android.
Although the outlining features are quite basic, one of the big advantages of YWriter is its price. It’s completely free to download and use. The developer suggests a one-off donation of $24.95 to help support the program.
Of course, it also lacks the various story editing, copy editing, and reports features of the various software mentioned above.
How To Select the Best Writing Software for You
Let’s look at the factors which might affect how you choose the writing app or software to best suit your purposes.
Your Budget
Your available budget is bound to be a deciding factor as to which software you choose. When taking this into account, a key point of consideration is whether you hope to traditionally publish or self-publish your work.
If you’re planning to self-publish, and you intend to take your author business seriously by investing in professional editing, advertising and marketing, then investing in a professional software can really make financial sense.
If a software allows you to write better book faster, then it’s going to allow you to publish more books – and if you’re running your own self-publishing business, then increasing the volume of high-quality books you publish can substantially improve your income.
If you’re hoping to be traditionally published, then it’s worth thinking about which writing software will help you prepare the strongest manuscript possible to send to an agent. It’s less important to take into account a software’s proof-reading or typesetting features, as these matters will be dealt with by a publishing house. That said, you’ll still benefit from ensuring your manuscript is clean of errors and easily readable as part of the submission process.
Purpose of the App and Stage of your Writing
As we’ve seen, different software has different purposes, though there are crossovers between them. Which software you choose will be influenced by what you’re seeking to achieve.
If you’re looking for help getting started on your story idea and planning your novel, then a tool like Plottr could help you at this stage of your writing.
If you’re needing an app to help you organise your scenes as you write, then Ulysses, Storyteller, Living Writer or YWriter might be just what you’re looking for. If you prefer to stick with what you know, then MS Word or Google Docs might be your preferred choice.
Once you’ve completed your first draft, then you’ll need to structurally edit your novel, in which case Storyteller could be perfect for your needs.
After your story has been structurally edited, then you’ll want to target your prose in more detail through a copy-edit, and ProWritingAid might be ideal at this point.
Once you’ve edited your story and your prose, then it’s time for a grammar check – in which case a tool like Hemingway can be useful for a final spelling and grammar check.
If you’re self-publishing, then a software like Reedsy or Fictionary Storyteller will allow you to work directly with independent editors, and a software like Atticus will help you typeset and publish your final book.
What you don’t want to do is skip one of the earlier stages in favour of the latter. Writing a successful novel is about so much more than having perfectly crafted sentences.
Indeed, if you’re hoping to get your work traditionally published, whilst you’ll want your draft to be in good shape as regards spelling and grammar, it’s arguably even more important to focus on creating a structurally sound and immersive story.
A publishing house will have their own proof-readers. But an agent is less likely to take on a poorly drafted, structurally weak story lacking a strong voice. So whichever software you choose, don’t forget about the importance of structurally editing your novel!
Conclusion
There’s a vast range of software options out there for writers. One great way to figure out which is best for you is to make new writing friends, and discuss the pros and cons with people who’ve experienced them all.
One way to do this is to join the Fictionary online writing community, where you can make new friends at all stages of the writing process. You’ll also benefit from free online webinars on how to write and publish your own book.