Nobody has ever failed to write a book because of their word processor, and the search for the perfect one is the most enjoyable form of not writing. That said, the tools do differ at length — what is fine for an essay is genuinely painful at eighty thousand words.
Writing and formatting are different jobs
Worth settling first, because half the confusion in this question comes from conflating them.
Writing software helps you produce and organise the words: drafting, restructuring, keeping research nearby, finding chapter nine at midnight.
Formatting software turns the finished words into a book: page breaks, typography, a contents page, an EPUB that passes validation. That is a different set of tools — Vellum alternatives covers those.
Everything below is the first kind. None of them produce a book you can sell, whatever the marketing says.
The seven
| Cost | Platform | Best at | Weak at | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scrivener | One-off, mid | Mac, Windows, iOS | Structure you rearrange | Learning curve; compile |
| Ulysses | Subscription | Apple only | Calm plain-text writing | Apple-only; subscription |
| iA Writer | One-off, low | Everything | Getting out of the way | Few organising features |
| Microsoft Word | Subscription | Everything | Everyone else has it | Slow and fragile at length |
| Google Docs | Free | Browser | Collaboration and comments | Struggles past ~50k words |
| Obsidian | Free | Everything | Books grown from notes | Not built for long prose |
| VS Code | Free | Everything | Plain text, version control | A code editor, plainly |
Scrivener, if structure is the problem
The one built specifically for long documents, and still the strongest answer if your book has parts that move. Chapters are cards you drag; research, images and notes live in the same project; you can see the whole shape at once.
Two honest caveats. The learning curve is real — expect to lose a day to it. And Compile, its export step, is a well-known source of misery: powerful, unintuitive, and the reason getting a PDF out of Scrivener needs a post of its own.
Ulysses and iA Writer, if you want quiet
Both are plain-text editors with a clean interface and almost no chrome. You write; they do not suggest anything.
Ulysses has better organisation — a library, groups, goals — and costs a subscription, Apple only. iA Writer is a one-off purchase, runs everywhere, and deliberately has fewer features. Both store your work as Markdown, which matters more than it sounds: the file is readable in fifty years and every export tool understands it.
Word and Google Docs, if other people are involved
Word is not a good long-document tool. It is slow past a few hundred pages, its styles drift, and track changes on a whole manuscript is a stress test.
It is also what almost every editor, proofreader and traditional publisher uses. If somebody else will touch your manuscript professionally, that consideration beats every other row in the table.
Google Docs is better for collaboration and comments, and worse at length — it starts labouring somewhere around fifty thousand words.
Obsidian and VS Code, if the book comes out of notes
Neither is a book tool, and both are used as one for good reasons.
Obsidian suits a book grown from notes you already keep — non-fiction where the raw material accumulated before the plan did. It stores plain Markdown files in a folder you own.
VS Code suits anyone comfortable in it already: plain text, real find-and-replace across the whole book, and version control, which means you can recover the paragraph you cut on Tuesday. Writing a book in VS Code is the setup.
What actually matters at 80,000 words
Ignore feature lists and check these five:
- Does it stay fast? Open a 300-page document in it before you commit.
- Can you find chapter nine instantly? You will do this a thousand times.
- Is find-and-replace real? Across the whole book, not one file.
- Can you get the words out? In a format something else can read, without a fight.
- Do you own the file? If the company disappears, is your manuscript still readable?
Point five rules out more tools than anything else, and it is the argument for plain text: Markdown files in a folder are readable by everything, forever, and no subscription lapses them.
The step none of them finish
Whichever you pick, you end up with words and no book. Then the formatting job starts, and for most people it is the moment they discover their writing tool's export is not what a store wants.
The shortest version of that step is to write in plain text and treat formatting as an export rather than a second application. bukpress takes a Markdown manuscript and produces both a typeset PDF and a reflowable EPUB from that one source — so the same file serves print, the stores and your own storefront, and a correction is one edit and one rebuild.
That works from Ulysses, iA Writer, Obsidian and VS Code directly, because they already write Markdown. Scrivener and Word need one export step first — self-publishing from Markdown is the whole route.
The answer
- Complicated structure — Scrivener.
- You want quiet, on Apple — Ulysses.
- You want quiet, anywhere — iA Writer.
- An editor or publisher is involved — Word.
- The book is made of notes — Obsidian.
- You already live in a code editor — VS Code.
- You cannot decide — iA Writer or any plain-text editor, and start today. The tool is not what is stopping you.
Frequently asked questions
Is Scrivener worth it? If you will restructure the book, yes. If you write straight through and never move a chapter, you are buying a learning curve for a feature you will not use.
Can I write a whole book in Google Docs? Yes, and it gets sluggish somewhere past fifty thousand words. Split it into several documents if you stay, and expect to reassemble them later.
Do I need writing software and formatting software? Effectively yes — they are different jobs. The exception is writing in plain text and exporting straight to PDF and EPUB, which collapses the second job into a build step.
What do traditional publishers want?
Word, almost always. If you are querying agents, write wherever you like and deliver a .docx — how to write a book proposal.