I’ve used Scrivener for five years, writing four novels and other how-to books and short stories with it. It organizes your writing process by separating your writing into chapters (or scenes within chapters) and keeps them all visible at once in a menu column on the left.

It has a corkboard feature for outlining your novel or seeing all your chapters at a glance. You can also use the Compile feature to put all your scenes and chapters together into a full-length manuscript file with ease.

Scrivener even saves the compiled manuscript into most any file type, and will format it for the kind of work you’re writing (novel, short story, screenplay, etc.).

It will also compile in ebook file formats like .mobi and .epub for self-publishers.

It’s a superior tool because it keeps all of the moving parts of writing longer works in one place, provides tools to make the daunting task more efficient, and has a million other features I don’t even use.

-- Baker Lawley 08/10/15