Author of The Long Drunk and other fine ultra noir novels.
I came to Scrivener late in the game. I started writing my first novel, The Long Drunk, in one of the bloated versions of Word. Then I switched to Mellel when Word did one of their asinine updates that reduced the writing area to the size of a bottle cap. Mellel is a fine word processing program, but geared more for the academic set and not ideal for producing long form documents. All my problems were solved when a friend turned me onto Scrivener. It is primed for the creative mind. As a former film and video editor, I immediately liked the fact Scrivener is more of a nonlinear system, akin to the Avid and Final Cut Pro in the way you can organize chapters, sub-chapters, notes, and snippets of writing. Scrivener makes it very easy to write your story in whatever order you like and then effortlessly move the parts around. As a novelist, I find this essential. However, the most outstanding feature of Scrivener is the ability to compile a project in Mobi and epub formats. Since I decided to go the indie-publishing route with The Long Drunk, having to ability to output separate files suitable for the Kindle, Nook, and iBooks with literally a click of a button made my life easier and allowed me to create professional ebooks.