What Software To Use For Writing Books?

By: Shawn Nag  |  Posted In: Design Tips, Tips & Tricks  |  July 16, 2010

The advent of the personal computer empowered the authors to typeset their own books. Many authors gave up the older way of writing a book and getting the manuscripts typed before taking it to a publisher. These days all you need to do is to prepare a digital copy of your book using a word processor. Unlike the typewriter, computer softwares allow you flexibility in editing your book from any where in the middle. You have the flexibility to delete and add new things in the middle of a paragraph.

These softwares don’t just allow you to write your book but make your life easy with a whole lot of additional features. They check your spellings and highlight any errors matching with the inbuilt dictionary which have versions from all the major languages in the world. Some advanced softwares can also advise you on sentence constructions They allow you to format paragraphs at one go, insert graphs, tables and histograms. Some of the popular software used for writing books are:

  • Microsoft Word: This is perhaps the most recognized word processor in the world. The reason for it’s popularity is it’s user friendly interface. The latest versions also gives you suggestions on the sentence construction which is far ahead of it’s competitors.
  • Open Office Writer: MS Word’s greatest competitor in the open platform. This software has an interface similar to MS Word and does almost everything that Word does. The biggest advantage of Open Office Writer is that it comes absolutely free and can be easily downloaded from the Internet.
  • Corel WordPerfect: This is not as popular as Word and Writer but does the same work as both of them do. It has a very user friendly interface. For those who like dictating than typing this software serves as a better option than it’s popular competitors.
  • Adobe PageMaker: Although the development of this software has stopped, it remains one of the favorites of many people till date. It gives the option to customize the page more than most word processors. It takes a little time for you to get adjusted to PageMaker but once that is done there is no software like PageMaker.
  • K Word: This software was once very popular with many authors for it’s user friendly interface. The software off late is going through regeneration to challenge it’s competitors.
  • Mellel: This word processor is very popular with the users of the Macintosh platform. This is marketed especially for the technical and academic writers.

It is important that you get your book printed from a professional printer after writing it using the above software. You can hire the services of a printing agency like PrintPapa in this regard. They have expertise in printing rack cards, letterheads, business cards, brochures, posters etc. other than books.