Sam Dave Pollard

Author of Tickling Hitler.

I must have tried at least a dozen different pieces of software supposedly designed for writers.

Not one of them can hold a candle to Scrivener, in my opinion.

It’s an incredibly powerful, yet flexible, toolbox.

How you work with Scrivener is always up to you. Scrivener doesn’t try to tell you how to do things. If you’re the nerdy, super-organised type, that’s fine. Scrivener can cope with that. But it’s also happy with the ‘get it all written and sort it out later’ approach to writing.

There’s never any sense of being overwhelmed by a writing project when you use Scrivener. You can hold an entire book (or number of books, come to that) in a single project, but at any moment in time you can focus on just the stuff you want to focus on. The rest of the project melts into the background until you’re ready for it.

Excellent support comes as standard due to the written manual (the best I’ve seen for any piece of software I’ve used in more than 35 years of using computers), a tutorial in the form of an actual Scrivener project (so you’re inside Scrivener itself while learning how to use it) and an excellent forum where the developers and other helpful users will have your problems sorted out very promptly.

Quite how they manage to sell this at such a ridiculously modest price, I’ve no idea. I understand plans are afoot for a new version. How on earth they think they can improve on the current version is another thing that baffles me.

If you have any interest at all in writing, of any sort, you’re seriously missing out if you haven’t given Scrivener a try.