Support for Indie Authors discussion

Thanks everyone for your input. I am going to use ProWriting for the grammar, etc and continue with word. Once I am finished this book, I will order scrivener and begin the training process. I selected ProWriting because it can interface with Scrivener and my documents where grammarly had limitations. Thanks again.

Justin wrote: "I use WordPerfect. I like to live like it's 2003"

LOL! Apparently, I'm in the same literary boat! I want to get out, though!

Eliza wrote: "I am making a good salary from home $1200-$2500/week , which is amazing, under a year back I was jobless in a horrible economy..."

Uh huh. Sure. Stop it.

You don't really need anything more than Google. Virtually every tool you need for producing a print ready manuscript is available via the Google applications. They may not be quite a easy to use, but they cost much less.

I've used Open Office and Word, Scrivener too (good for organization). But the most productive program I've found is ProWritingAid. That handles fairly simple editing, which I've discovered takes ten times as long and ten times as much work as writing the original draft (and I'm not concerned with complex things like style. I'm talking the simple stuff - e.g. typos, spelling, homonyms - to which every reader objects).
I tried Grammarly. Meh.

I've started using Novel Factory to help me write my sixth book, and so far I love it. It helps a lot with all of the planning side of things, which I have always found difficult. I've never really known where to start with planning my books in the past so I ended up having to do a lot of rewrites as I would completely change my mind about what the book was about or what I wanted certain characters to be like, as I hadn't formed a proper idea in the beginning. Although I would always get there in the end I really want to try to streamline my writing process, and Novel Factory has helped me with that so far. It has a lot of advice and tells you exactly what you need to do at each planning stage, and it's very easy to use and understand. I still haven't planned everything out in complete detail (I think it just goes against my nature!) and there is some evolution going on while I work on my first draft (I'm just under a quarter of the way through, so plenty still to go!) but when I get stuck it's great for helping me organise my scenes and think about the story in a more structured way. I really hope it cuts down on rewrites. I feel like it will, but it's a bit too early to say. I definitely feel like I'm writing with more purpose and have a better idea where I'm going with the story.

Although you can write in Novel Factory I still do the actual writing in Word and have Novel Factory open for planning and checking details about characters and locations. I think I prefer writing in Word as it is so familiar. However, I then copy and paste what I write each day into Novel Factory as it works out statistics on how much you need to write to stay on target and it's great for keeping track of my progress.

I use the inbuilt dictation app on my Mac to write my middle grade books in Scrivener, but when I'm out I use Google docs and the dictation function on my Android phone and then cut and paste into Scrivener. For shorter books (like Forget Kids - Get a Dog), I use Vellum, which I also use for making all my ebooks.

I gave up Word when I upgraded my laptop and it didn't work anymore.

I've been thinking of using Notion for my writing. Does anyone else have experience with it? I currently use Cold Turkey Writer to be focused and Google Docs to sync across devices. As of now, I only write short stories so it's sufficient.