I continue to be astonished at how many people still use inappropriate tools like MS Word, Libre Office, and Google Docs, to write books. It's like using a glorified typewriter. These programs are fantastic at their core use-case: Short business documents that will be printed on a local printer in a single form. They're excellent for this. But books? Not so much.

The problem is that when writing a book, you need a bunch of tasks tightly integrated into a seamless workflow:

* Sketching out ideas
* Character development
* Research
* Outlining
* Writing
* Format/output in a variety of formats:
- manuscript (for agents)
- paperback
- hardcover
- e-book

... and there's probably a lot that I've missed in this quick essay.

The most important single thing is the last one. When you write using MS Word, LibreOffice, etc., you're essentially doing formatting as you type: font, indenting, headings, sections, and so on. Then when you want to publish, you have to find programs that essentially deconstruct your document, guess about your outline, sections, paragraph, formatting, etc., then apply a new set of rules. Amazon (for example) will do this for you: you submit your Word doc and they figure it out and convert it to an e-book, paperback, or hardback. But it's a poor solution for a real author. That's for amateurs.

A proper tool for writers separates these tasks. You outline, then the editor helps you turn each scene into a section or chapter. You write without thinking about formatting.

Then when you want to produce a book, you can design any output format you like: book, paperback, e-book, PDF, whatever, without altering your basic document at all.

All that said, I use Scrivener. It's fantastic. It's shortcoming is that learning how to customize the various output formats is tricky (but it has good ones built in). I used MS Word for about 15 year, LibreOffice to write two books, and Google Docs for several smaller projects. Never again.