Tools for writers – what I rate and what I don’t

There are numerous writing tools available, some free, others premium. Individuals and businesses are lining up to part indie authors from their money, but what is worth paying for and where should you save your precious pennies?

Here are the tools I recommend…

Writing

First and foremost, Word versus Scrivener (and Google docs).

if you want to collaborate with others, or have people reading your copy as you go, Google Docs is ideal. The app has advanced significantly in recent years, becoming almost as sophisticated as Word. And, unlike Word and Scrivener, it’s free.

You can add paid extensions, such as the grammar checker ProwritingAid.

Because I’m used to Word (and its idiosyncrasies), that’s what I use for writing but when my annual subscription runs out later this year, I’ll be giving it the heave-ho.

I tried Scrivener, but because I have the patience span of someone who has drank three litres of diet coke and is now trapped in a mile-long queue for the toilets, something that came with a 45-minute tutorial on how to use it wasn’t for me.

One of the initial selling points for Scrivener was the ease of working with long documents, so that you weren’t endlessly scrolling through text.

You can get around this in Word and Google Docs by using headings for your chapters and scenes:

Label the chapters and scenes with something descriptive, such as Nell’s first meeting with Daniel, or Lewis meets the murderer without realising it, so that you can quickly navigate your manuscript.

Copyediting/proofreading

While AI tools such as Grammarly, ProWritingAid and Quillbot are terrific boosts for writers, they cannot replace the human eye. I have used all of the editing and proofreading tools indicated above, and they perform well, but your manuscript will still require an expert proofreader at the end.

These days, my preferred copyediting tool is Quillbot because it’s the best I’ve discovered. Even when set to British English, the software is skewed towards Americanisms (substituting line for queue, for example), and there are other suggestions you will want to reject. However, the built-in thesaurus is fantastic.

Writers spend a lot of time trying to come up with different ways to depict our characters’ movements, actions and emotions, and Quillbot is super for this.

Plotting

If you need help constructing a story, Derek Murphy’s one page plot template is a great place to start. It’s geared towards fantasy, but it worked for me when I was writing a romcom the first time I used it.

It’s also free, and you can find it here.

Eva Deverell’s plot spread sheet is the more detailed version and is useful for keeping track of your characters and word count.

Plottr

When I decided to write a crime novel, I realised I would need to plot it tightly from the outset, so I bought Plottr software. It is worth spending a significant amount of time plotting out a novel before you being writing in order to prevent getting stuck somewhere in the middle with no idea what should happen next.

However, I have never been able to write a first draft without reworking it almost entirely, and this is where Plottr comes in handy. I can use the plot templates to reverse engineer the novel, rearranging chapters and scenes around so that they are in the correct order.

Kamchatka, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

Plottr provides templates for every genre—from crime/thrillers to romances– and you can use it to create a story bible to ensure that the names of your restaurants, the colour of paint in the kitchen, and a person’s appearance are consistent throughout.

Formatting

Draft2Digital

Draft2Digital allows you to create stunning e-books from Word documents and jpg covers. You can even add decoration based on your genre. For my romcoms, I use the sweet bows at the beginning of each chapter.

Draft2Digital can also produce print books from Word files and jpg e-book covers, or you can upload your own print book cover and print formatted interior.

The books made from Word files and the jpg e-book cover aren’t as beautiful as those made by designers, but since you won’t be selling the bulk of your books in print form, who cares?

If you want to format Word documents for print in order to upload your novel directly to Amazon or Ingram Spark, you can use Word to create the print version, but it is very fiddly and tedious, even if you download the templates from Kindle Direct Publishing.

Atticus can make print formatted books for roughly the same price as a graphic designer will charge, except you only pay a one-off fee for something you will be able to use time and time again and you can easily correct files if necessary.

Pdf creation

Don’t waste your money on Adobe for the love of God. The majority of its functionality will be wasted on you, unless you’re a designer who is familiar with InDesign for creating print pdfs.

Draft2Digital will do you a pdf, but you can also use smallpdf, which is much, much cheaper (and which I used to create this document). If all you need is pdf of your Word document, try one of the free converters, which are limited to a certain amount of files on smallpdf.

I hope this helps!