Some Good Software To Write E-Books.

[James_Wilde]

Hold on, guys. Emma asked what type of software we use to write e-books.

All this good stuff about formatting may put her off. And besides, her publisher will do all that for her. What she has to do is get a good MS to the publisher.

And if she's going to be her own publisher, time enough to get into that when the time comes.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by James_Wilde

Hold on, guys. Emma asked what type of software we use to write e-books.

All this good stuff about formatting may put her off. And besides, her publisher will do all that for her. What she has to do is get a good MS to the publisher.

And if she's going to be her own publisher, time enough to get into that when the time comes.

Actually, James:

She certainly asked about some of the formatting issues, stating that she was struggling: "I used MS word but now sick with it. After every new page I have to adjust lines, header, footer, page number and pictures." So, above and beyond writing software, like LO, OO, Word, etc., she seemed to be asking about certain formatting aspects. I think everyone here tried to answer what we inferred to be her questions and to address issues that we also inferred were what she was discussing when she mentioned the above problems.

Hitch

[BeccaPrice]

If you're using Word correctly, you should only have to mess with headers, footers, page numbers, and things like that once, when you set up your document. If you're constantly having to mess with them, you're doing something wrong. I'd have to see the file to figure out what. I'm no Word expert, although I know people who are, and I'm pretty good with working with it.

The key is to not impose formatting, but to use styles to define your formats. It's a bit tricksey until you get used to it, but Word styles are a big part of its power.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by BeccaPrice

If you're using Word correctly, you should only have to mess with headers, footers, page numbers, and things like that once, when you set up your document. If you're constantly having to mess with them, you're doing something wrong. I'd have to see the file to figure out what. I'm no Word expert, although I know people who are, and I'm pretty good with working with it.

The key is to not impose formatting, but to use styles to define your formats. It's a bit tricksey until you get used to it, but Word styles are a big part of its power.

Becca:

Indeed. I asked the OP why she was having those issues, looking to assist somewhat, in my first post on this thread, but never received any reply. Word's built-in styles and outlining feature are pretty much everything.

Hitch

[BookCat]

It would help immensely if the OP returned and clarified the issue a little.

[BeccaPrice]

for about 9 months, I made a tolerable living doing nothing but taking badly formatted word documents and imposing a style template on them and cleaning up the styles. It was a good education, but boring after awhile.

[Rizla]

Title says it all really. Whether you use a dedicated software package that does everything, or you use notepad in DOS, what do you use and what do you like about it?

[VydorScope]

I do the bulk of my writing in Word. I use other tools to make my ebooks out of my word files, but I do my writing in Word.

[Jessica Lares]

I use Scrivener too, and like someone said, it is better than ... (I wouldn't know, I'm only 24, hahaha).

I like that you have one file, and it's like a complete package. You have a Binder, and then you have individual folders, you can set them up anyway you want. Default, you get a folder for your Drafts, and then another for Research. There's also a Trash folder.

But then you can have one for Characters, Pictures, Notes, To-Dos, and whatever the hell you want. For people that aspire to be more organized when writing, and don't want the hassle of doing the file setups themselves, this is the perfect software.

And the backup feature is great. You can keep up to 25 of them, and it really works well when you have it pointed to Dropbox, Google Drive or whatever. So if you like to use multiple machines, it makes a cool setup.

You can also set up the formatting however you like so it always works and looks the way you like it.

Great, great, great software. Worth the $50.

[avantman42]

I tried Scrivener, and quite liked it, but it didn't have styles, and I had issues with documents having inconsistent formatting for no readily apparent reason. I found lots of little irritations with Scrivener. Individually, they were tiny, so I kept with it, hoping that I'd get used to it, but in the end it was just too much and I gave up on it.

I've also written in a text editor called Geany, using Markdown syntax for formatting. Using a text editor meant there were few distractions, which I liked. The side bar showed the headings, and so acted in a similar way to the navigator in LibreOffice and the binder in Scrivener.

I'm currently using LibreOffice. I've just installed the writer2xhtml extension recommended by gmw, which resolves one issue that concerned me, since it means that I can easily export to a nicely formatted ePub for final editing in Sigil. I've been using OpenOffice since before v1, then switched to LibreOffice, so it's very familiar to me. I've recently discovered EuroOffice, an Android app that allows me to edit .odt files on my phone, which I find occasionally useful. I've written a macro to provide me with a session word count, one of the things I liked about Scrivener that LibreOffice can't do out of the box.

[discopig]

I use Scrivener, libreoffice and Sigil.

[khahoon]

You might want to check out using Wordpress or similar blogging tools. They have extensive
plugin support. The nice thing is that you can always access your writing as long as you have some kind of net connection.

I use it on my local server here and works well for writing, collecting ideas, etc.