Best Novel Writing Software for 2024

Writing a book is a demanding task. Whether you’re a first-time writer or an experienced novelist about to publish your sixth book, it is only natural to need help writing and editing the book. Of course, you can get outside help, but no one can do all the heavy lifting for you. At the end of the day, you are the one who deeply cares about the quality of your work.

Using novel writing software can help you optimize your work efficiency, keep track of your progress, and prepare for self-publishing or selling a novel to a publisher. Novel writing software ensures your novel meets industry standards and makes it easier to develop your writing style without worrying about incidental details.

How Specialized Book Writing Software Speeds Up Manuscript Writing?

When it comes to great authors and best practices, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Every great author has their own writing habits and uses different tools to optimize their work. JK Rowling, for example, prefers “pen, paper, and MS Word,” while Hemingway was fond of his Royal Arrow typewriter.

Today, there are many reasons to use writing software and processing tools. But let ‘s take a closer look at them and see how they can benefit your work as a professional or aspiring writer. Here are some of the benefits of using writing tools.

Learning the Structure

Creativity is an important quality for a writer. But you also need to learn about writing structures, dialogue, plot, timeline, character placement, and worldbuilding. Many book writing software provides templates to help you focus on these details and boost your work performance.

Saving Time

Technology makes everything faster. So you can accomplish more in less time. Whether you are a blogger, a novelist, or a fiction writer, you can benefit from a wealth of great features that AI-powered writing software offers, such as keyword inclusion, structure, grammar, tone, final editing, and pre-formatting.

Saving Money

Another benefit of using AI writing software is that you can save a considerable amount of money in the long run. When you choose novel writing software, you no longer have to spend your money on expensive word processing tools or content writing services. So you can easily create high-quality content on a regular basis.

8 Best Novel Writing Software

Here, we will highlight some of the best software for writing a novel that can help you become a professional writer and content creator. Each writing tool here has incredibly unique features to help you take the pressure off during your writing process and help you grow your creativity.

1. Scrivener

Scrivener is one of the leading novel writing software used by many best-selling novelists, screenwriters, non-fiction writers, students, academics, lawyers, journalists, translators and many more. Scrivener provides easy access to your background material when you need to check your writing’s consistency with other sources.

Scrivener consolidates all parts of your text and allows you to write, research and organize texts in a single, powerful platform. You’ll be able to divide long documents into manageable sections of any size and arrange them according to specific taglines and categories.

Features

• User-friendly sharing and collaboration features
• Easy exporting to popular formats such as Word, PDF, Final Draft or plain text
• Familiar with text editing to add bold, italics, highlight sections, add comments and annotations and many other formatting features
• Outliner to help you organize your writing with an overview of a chapter, a part, or even your whole manuscript

Pros

• Writer-centric design
• Drag-and-drop feature on the corkboard to help you move and replace chapters
• Useful features for non-fiction authors including footnotes and references
• Compatible with Mac OS, iOS, and Windows

Cons

• Beginners may have difficulty navigating the interface

Pricing: One-time $59 license purchase.

2. LivingWriter

LivingWriter is a powerful text editor, and novel writing software primarily aimed at fiction writers. But the excellent collection of features in this tool can be adapted to nonfiction books as well. Most of the sections are specifically designed for fiction, including novel templates, an outliner, and a glossary of characters, events, locations, and more.

You don’t have to worry about the security of your work since Living Writer stores all your book content in encrypted formats in Amazon Cloud Services. Even when your subscription ends, the data remains stored in the cloud for at least a year.

Features

• Story Elements is a handy feature that allows you to keep a running list of character names, their description, their history, and other important information
• Story Board is a powerful brainstorming tool that will help you adjust or modify your novel sections
• LivingWriter’s templates give you great ideas to start your novel

Pros

• LivingWriter is compatible with Windows, Apple’s Mac, Android, and iOS.
• You can share and export your content in a variety of files like Docx
• Top of class user interface, offering important tools without distracting too much from your work

Cons

• Subscription fees may be too expensive
• Not the perfect choice for non-fiction writers
• No offline version

Pricing: Freemium. From $8/mo.

3. Scriborg

Scriborg is a fully customizable novel writing template built in Notion with many great features and tools to help professional writers and aspiring writers organize and edit their work. With Scriborg you can create outlines of the novel chapters of your book. The storyboarding feature also allows you to customize your content and rearrange all sections.

Scriborg offers powerful character arc planning and lots of templates to help you get started. Non-fiction writers can also benefit from this novel writing template by using research centers and linked databases.

Features

• Great integration feature with your content calendar and other notion services
• Intuitive user interface
• Drag-and-drop feature to organize and move ideas like sticky notes.

Pros

• Centralized app for all writing purposes from mind-mapping to writing and editing
• Useful writer guidance including templates, tips, and frameworks to build your story step by step
• Automatic saving

Cons

• Scriborg is not as comprehensive as other writing software

Pricing: One-time 10€ fee.

4. Novlr

Novlr is an online novel-writing software that includes a word processor, a user-friendly progress-tracking dashboard, and a cloud-based platform to automatically back up and save your writing whenever you’re online. The Novlr app has an incredibly minimalist, aesthetically pleasing interface and a distraction-free mode to help you focus on your work.

You’ll be able to easily structure your text, dividing it into chapters and sections and making notes about all aspects, such as characters and plot. This novel writing software offers a built-in grammar checker and style suggestions. You can also work on collaborative projects and contact other collaborators, such as proofreaders and book editors within the app.

Features

• Novlr word processor with a sleek interface and well-designed toolbar
• Story planning to help you create chapter and character outlines
• Editing assistance and Proof Reader tool to check your work for errors and find spelling and grammar mistakes. The tool will also highlight stylistic inhibitors such as passive voice and weak adjectives.

Pros

• Aesthetically pleasing and modern interface
• Excellent display features for both desktop and mobile devices
• Cloud-based platform that will automatically save your work

Cons

• The price is a little bit steep for writers
• Some templates are not fully customizable

Pricing: Freemium. From $8.33/mo.

5. NovelPad

NovelPad is an easy-to-use and simple novel writing software that makes the writing process more efficient and enjoyable. NovelPad allows users to add scene cards to the plot board, organize them into plots and subplots, and rearrange the chapter board to manage the story. The scene card feature allows you to build and rearrange sections by merely dragging and dropping.

As you work on collaborative projects, you can add reviews of individual scenes, view progress, archive, label, and assign chapters and locations in a single platform. You can also add reminders and notes to each task, ensuring you never miss a deadline. Novelpad’s intuitive interface lets users focus on writing, not writing tools.

Features

• Alert Notifications
• Collaboration tools
• Content Management tools and Workflow Management features
• Graphical User Interface with an incredible Text Editor

Pros

• Easy to use navigation bar
• Character boards and scene boards

Cons

• Doesn’t provide comprehensive real-time collaboration options
• Not a perfect choice for writing nonfiction books

Pricing: From $8/mo.

6. Vellum

Vellum is intuitive book writing software used by many bestselling authors like James Scott Bell’s gripping thriller Your Son Is Alive and J.T. Ellison’s Taylor Jackson box set. Vellum’s import and export features are very user-friendly. This software will automatically detect and separates chapter headings for you and allows you to rearrange them in an outliner.

Vellum’s main selling point is access to pre-built professional book styles from which you can easily select, customize and prepare your preferred book style for publication. Vellum offers 8 pre-built book styles, including Meridian, Trace, Artisanal, Kindred, Sudo, Oxford, Parcel, and Chroma. But you can also customize the structure and appearance of each style or create new book styles.

Features

• Layout design adjustment features
• Box sets to offer readers a smorgasbord of stories

Pros

• Easy to learn and intuitive navigation
• Aesthetically pleasing and distraction-free design

Cons

• Fairly expensive one-time payment

Pricing: Freemium. Then one-time $199.99 fee for publishing.

7. Atticus

Atticus is another widely used book formatting tool that helps you turn your manuscript into a publication-ready book. Atticus offers a great selection of easy-to-use and fully customizable templates that you can adapt and reshape to your liking. You can easily export your documents into reader-friendly formats, both for print and eBooks.

Atticus is more than a simple word processor. With this writing software, you can set writing goals and track your progress more efficiently. For independent authors who plan to self-publish, Atticus is an indispensable tool that will save you a lot of time and energy.

Features

• Cross-Platform Use: Atticus is available for Mac, Windows, Linux, and Chromebooks, as well as in the web version
• Built-in theme templates and a theme builder that allows you to create and save your own themes and styles
• In-app Spell Check and easy integration with various tools like Pro Writing Aid and Grammarly
• Export features currently supporting EPUB format, as well as PDF files for print.
• Export features currently supporting DOCX and RTF

Pros

• Autosave, Cloud Storage, and Backups
• Offline Use
• Fairly affordable compared to alternatives

Cons

• Many features should be added after installation

Pricing: One-time $147 fee.

8. Ulysses

Ulysses is probably the best writing app for Apple users who want a distraction-free interface and a well-chosen collection of handy features. Ulysses helps writers focus on their writing by delivering a minimalist interface without skimping on features.

Ulysses provides an incredibly powerful backup and sync system that will automatically save you work every 12 hours, 7 days, and 6 months, so you can easily restore it in case of an emergency. Ulysses is definitely not the cheapest writing app on the market, but it offers rich writing features that not all writing apps offer.

Features

• Enhanced view modes and design that will automatically change based on the time of day
• Export options supporting PDF, Word .docx, HTML, PDF, ePub, and plain text

Pros

• Stunning and clean interface
• Top-notch features
• Distraction-free mode
• Goal tracking features
• Direct publication and sharing features in other services like WordPress, and Medium

Cons

• Only available on Apple devices
• Expensive subscription pricing

Pricing: $5.99/Mo or $39.99/year

To Sum Up

Good writing software should have a clean design to encourage you to be focused and creative. It should also be user-friendly so every writer, regardless of age and experience can easily use it. Other features, such as grammar and style check, export and import functions, and easy integration with other tools are also important.

These 8 novel writing software are among the best tools available; each offers a wide range of incredible features, templates, and themes. But remember the most important thing is that you feel comfortable in the digital writing environment. We recommend using free versions of each software to ensure it’s the perfect choice for you.

Besides all the writing software tools presented here, you can use free book writing software tools like Google docs to save money. However, keep in mind that free writing software may not offer all the features you need for productive and creative writing.

Comparison Table

• Best for self-publishing an eBook on Amazon – Vellum 
• Best for creating professional manuscripts – Scrivener 
• Best for distraction-free writing – Ulysses 
• Best for beginner novelists – LivingWriter
• Best for writing non-fiction documents – Scriborg
• Best for working on collaborative projects – Novlr
• Best for editing and organizing completed manuscripts – NovelPad
• Best writing app for Apple users – Atticus