Bestselling author of Girl with a One Track Mind.

Scrivener has revolutionised the way I approach writing. I think in visuals — I use mind maps and diagrams to jot down ideas — and Scrivener allows me to utilise the fluidity of this, but in an organised digital environment. There’s an on-screen cork board to see all the index cards created, so I can check my chapter/page headings — and synopsis of each — at a glance; in seconds, I can easily navigate through thousands of words, and to any position in the text, by simply scrolling through the menu bar; I can drag any chapter/page and place it elsewhere in the draft; and I can insert quick thoughts and concepts into my drafts with just one click. By offering a non-linear writing platform, Scrivener gives writers the ability to approach their work in a spontaneous, flexible, innovative way — which enables a more creative result. Of the five authors I’ve recommended Scrivener to, all are now converts to it, and, like me, will never go back to using Word to write with. Scrivener is worth every penny: quite simply, it’s the best writers tool there is.

Bestselling author of The Door Within Trilogy, Isle of Swords and Isle of Fire.

Sticky notes, manila folders, and 3X5 cards — Rest in Peace. The geniuses at Literature & Latte have created a writing software package that is immensely powerful and extremely affordable. As soon as I downloaded Scrivener, I watched the Tutorial and found myself drooling. Once I started using Scrivener on my next novel, I found myself wondering how I ever wrote a book without Scrivener. Think of a feature you’d like to have with your writing software… seriously… anything that would make the writing process easier. How about having every chapter both separate and part of the whole so that you can move them around with total ease? Or maybe you are an outliner like me and you’d like to see the outline on screen right next to your manuscript. Perhaps you are totally a visual writer; how about being able to drop art and photos into a display window that sits open on the side of your manuscript? And for the ADD writers out there — yeah, I’m one of those — how about a mode that blocks everything else on your desktop and completely focuses you on the page you need to finish? If this sounds good, wait. I haven’t even covered a 3rd of what Scrivener can do for you. The beauty of Scrivener is the interface. Everything you could possibly need is right there on the same screen. Because of Scrivener, I am flying through my next manuscript. God bless the folks at Literature & Latte! Now, go download Scrivener for yourself… now.

Norwegian author of novels Historien om Henrik Wiklunds barnebarn, Tårnseilere and children’s fiction Selma.

Scrivener is the ideal software solution for fiction writing! Thanks for creating this wonderful and effective way of helping me structure my writing process, it has made a real difference to me and has really put the fun back into writing! Scrivener, though it has a lot of features, is easy to use and works well with non-English manuscripts. The editing features allow you to tailor the program to your writing needs, be they short fiction, poetry collections or long 300+ page novels. Check out the instructional videos if you are a Scrivener novice, a good place to get started on your personalised Scrivener manuscript. Scrivener is constantly making my everyday writing workflow much more creative, visual and fun! Word doesn’t even compare. So for those of you who have not tried Scrivener yet; I’d say: go scrivening!

Head of Psychology at the University of Dundee and the author of Talking the talk.

I use Scrivener for writing all my books and longer articles. I used it right from the beginning to produce my most recent book, Talking the talk: Language, Psychology, and Science. I like the way Scrivener works like a science writer thinks. The software makes it easy to keep track of material and the organisation of the document without getting too bogged down in formatting issues at an early stage. It also makes it easy to reorganise stuff and navigate through a very large document. I found the split pane feature particularly useful. The program is exceptionally stable and bug-free. It’s easy to use and the documentation and support are superb. I can’t now imagine writing a book in any other way.

Author of the 13 book Scream Street series, published in the UK by Walker Books and in the US by Candlewick Press. He has also written a number of books for specialist reluctant reader publisher, Barrington Stoke.

Today I finished the first draft of my 32nd book — and the eighth I’ve written entirely in Scrivener. I’ve also used Scrivener to write dozens of short stories, a handful of magazine articles and countless book proposals. I’ve got a stage script or two on the go, and I’ve even had a shot at my first comic book script.

As a writer, changing software is a big deal; I’d got used to how to write in MS Word, even if that meant the usual glitches I’d come to expect from the industry standard software. I was used to scrolling through page after page of manuscript to find that one spot where I wanted to rename a minor character, or drop in a clue to the identity of the villain. I knew I’d have to spend time juggling with formatting before submitting my work. I accepted that I’d have to deal with a couple of force quits, and bring a manual back-up of my book to life, kicking and screaming. It’s all just part of the job and, after all, Word isn’t exclusively for writers — it has to fulfil a thousand different roles for a thousand types of user.

Then I discovered Scrivener — software created especially for writers. That’s why I use it. It was designed with people like me in mind. You’ll read elsewhere on this website that Scrivener allows you to split your work up into chapters, scenes and even paragraphs; that it’s a place where you can keep all your research material within easy access; that you can view two versions of a scene on screen at the same time, putting an end to the laborious copying and pasting between different files; that you can reorganise your plot quickly and easily via the cork board; that you can export your work to dozens of different formats, each with a seemingly unlimited list of potential customisations; that the software saves your work every time you pause from typing, and makes automatic back-ups in case things go wrong. It’s all true — Scrivenerdoes all this and more. But I use Scrivener simply because it allows me to write without worrying whether the program I’m using will let me write.

Whatever you want to write, give Scrivener a try. I’m certain you won’t regret it.

Author of Ask A Punk, Volume 1.

I recently purchased a new Mac. THE first thing I did after powering it up and logging in was download and register a new copy of Scrivener. I have used this program every day, usually many times a day, for several years. I use Scrivener to write drafts of my weekly “Ask A Punk” blog posts, and when I decided to turn the first year of those posts into an ebook, I used Scrivener to reformat and compile the separate files. I also use it as an outlining, research organizing & writing tool on projects ranging from novels and comic books to videogames and screenplays. …In fact, I tell my writing and screenwriting students that they should, before shoveling out a couple hundred dollars for Final Draft etc., make sure they have a story to tell, and the perseverance to tell it, by using Scrivener. Thank you for creating this.

Author of Flavours of Thought, Blocks and The Art and Science of Light Bulb Moments.

Since I have migrated all my book production activities to Scrivener — for my own books and those of my clients — productivity has shot up several fold. The ability to selectively compile different versions of a book makes serialisation and management of new editions a breeze. I haven’t used a word processor for any serious writing for several months now. I just write now freely using my Mind Mapped structure in Scrivener and the software manages the process of production — it’s like having a database for your book.

New York Times bestselling author of Halo: The Cole Protocol as well as Crystal Rain, Ragamuffin and Sly Mongoose. 

Scrivener is the most amazing piece of software for a writer: it reminds you of the paradigm shift when you took that leap from typewriter to computer. You remember that you used to use the older tool, and how to still use it, but you can’t ever look back. It’s replaced all the other tools I used to employ to cobble together a workflow and has become the indispensable tool I use to write my books.

Author of Think Better: an innovator’s guide to productive thinking.

For years, I searched for an app that supports my writing style. I tried them all. If you’re a writer, you know that standard word processors just don’t cut it. They’re either too directive, too bloated, or bog down on long documents. Finally, I found Scrivener, and I’ve been in love with it since it was a beta. It’s now a full-throttle, high-performance beauty, with features that make writing, organizing, rewriting, combining, rearranging, dividing, tracking, editing, annotating, and footnoting easy, intuitive, and yes even fun. I could not recommend Scrivener more highly. When I drive, I drive a BMW because I love its power, its safety, the way it handles the road, and its responsiveness to my every driving need. When I write, I write with Scrivener. Take it for a spin. Put it through its paces. You won’t want to write any other way.

Author of Professional CodeIgniter.

As a professional copywriter and technical book author, I may not be the ‘usual creative type’ that uses a tool like Scrivener, but I certainly do use it and love how it keeps me organized with all the little research, interview, and drafting/review cycles I undertake. Sometimes I’m putting together a 20-page chapter, and other times a 500-word case study, but either way, Scrivener is up to the task!

Author of 14 detective novels including Bei Zugabe: Mord!

Scrivener is simply amazing. It has completely changed the way I’m able to construct my crime novels. Writing my 14th book with Scrivener was a huge pleasure from beginning to end. There’s no way back now. Book No. 15 is already in the making. Scrivener is an excellent writers tool. Looking back, I wonder how I could ever have written a book without it. Therefore, I highly recommend it to all my colleagues out there.

Author of Genetics for Dummies.

When I wrote the first edition of Genetics for Dummies, I created a massive document that I called my ‘metajournal.’ It was the holding place for everything about my writing process from obsessing over page counts and deadlines to annotating my literature cited. By the time I was asked to revise the book for its second edition, I had discovered Scrivener. Gone were the days of scrolling back and forth, scrambling around trying to remember what text went where, and juggling multiple files for text and citations and journaling.

Using Scrivener, all my materials reside in a single location. Citations imported from the web or pdf documents are annotated in the document notes section. Keywords make everything easy to relocate. Synopses can be cut and pasted straight from the abstract of the scientific paper or re-written to suit my own tastes. The split screen allows me to reference citations and my text draft simultaneously. With the backup feature, there’s never a worry about losing something.

All in all, Scrivener delivers outstanding value and makes even the most complex writing projects easy to manage. It’s a must-have for any serious writer.

Author of Kindle Secrets with Scrivener for Mac: Make Money Self-Publishing Now.

As a child, I was an eager and fortunate listener to my mother’s amazing stories. She procrastinated until retirement to start trying to publish them and died in a kayaking accident soon after, well before the self-publishing revolution took hold.

I only wish Scrivener existed then so she could have shared her stories with the world. Like her, I have the same writing bug and tried a few times to figure out how to use Word to self-publish, investing in expensive programs that did not live up to their promises.

Since then, I discovered Scrivener and never looked back. It’s like the answer to a writer’s prayers as I was finally able to self-publish with ease. I am thrilled to be able to help empower other authors to be able to use Scrivener to self-publish now that they can do so with a few clicks on a computer. This is the best time in the world to be a writer, largely I think due to the Scrivener App’s existence and I don’t take it for granted. I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of what’s possible now and it is inspiring to have the world at your fingertips because of Scrivener. Best app ever!

National bestselling author of The Bishop amongst many other books.

I’ll never again write a novel without Scrivener. It’s a fast, efficient time-saver, perfect for anyone serious about making a living as an author.

Author of Alex. 

Nine months ago, I was a wannabe author who hadn’t written anything longer than a couple of pages. Word drove me to despair. I discovered Scrivener for Windows, and since then it has become my bible. Seven books later, and counting, my first book is being released this month by eXtasy Books. The rest will then follow throughout the year. I highly recommend Scrivener for all writers, not just authors.

Author of Dead of Wynter, Helltown and Lights Out. 

The first time I ran Scrivener, I knew I would love it. The concept is so simple and so elegant. Why didn’t someone think of this sooner? Finally, here is a piece of writing software that doesn’t get in my way. It’s so flexible that I’m sure every writer uses it in a different way. And, I love the idea of keeping everything about my novel, including all the scenes, online research, and multiple revisions, under one roof.

Author of Under the Mountain, The Glass House, and Dragana Savic.

Scrivener has revolutionised my working day. Instead of scrabbling around in piles of paper, with sixteen different windows open on my screen, I now have everything I need in one aesthetically pleasing place. I love being able to store all my research — web pages, photos, PDFs, whatever — in the same project file as my work in progress. The split-screen facility enables you to glance across at research documents while you type (and to easily leaf through these). It works because it’s so intuitive: a computerised version of the typewriter surrounded by cuttings. My desk is immeasurably tidier since I got a Mac and started using Scrivener, and I find that I work far faster too. In the 2 years I’ve had Scrivener, I’ve written 1 complete novel, 8 short stories, and several articles, with countless other projects in the pipeline. It helps organise my thoughts as well as my papers.

Author of Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0.

I write technical books and articles as side work, which means I write when I can find the time to do it: I never write the book or article in a linear fashion from the beginning, but I prefer to take random notes on the topics of the various sections of the book, and expand them later.

Scrivener is way superior to a traditional word processors because it allows this workflow: taking notes and keeping them organized inside structure of the book. I struggled with Word to try and achieve the same result, but now that I found Scrivener I’m going back to a traditional writing software only when I’ve to fine-tune the styling of the text before I send it to my editors.

I think more technical writers should use it.

Artist, transformational life coach and author of Creative Awakenings: Envisioning the life of your dreams through art.

I searched everywhere for a program that would help me organize my manuscript, Creative Awakenings. As an artist, I am a very visual person and I needed the software to serve two purposes: to allow for organization as a storyboard (visual) for over 30 pieces of art, and for a finalized concrete product I could deliver to my publisher. After researching other programs and starting with MS Word, I was fortunate to stumble upon Scrivener! Scrivener was the perfect software for my needs. I highly recommend this product to anyone seeking a tool to support the organization of their manuscripts and projects. Even my editor was pleased with the end result! I continue to spread the news about Scrivener to everyone I know who writes and works with MAC. Thanks for developing this amazing product.

Founder of Core JKD.

I find myself using Scrivener more and more in my writing tasks, from poetry, philosophy, my novels, curriculum outlines, screenplay synopsis, and on and on and on. It took me like a virus. At first I would occasionally cough out a few phrases, then, as I got myself exposed to its features, I would find myself lying quite comfortably in the throes of fever induced by Scrivener’s intuitive, clean interface and flow. I actually look forward to using the program (no other program quite has this effect), in fact, I think it has added pleasantly to my own genetic code.

Bestselling author of The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear. Also Feeding the Monster: How Money, Smarts, and Nerve Took a Team to the Top and Hard News: The Scandals at The New York Times and Their Meaning for American Media. Seth has also been the contributing editor at Vanity Fair since 2005.

Ever since my book came out, whenever I’m asked by other writers what advice I’d give them when embarking on book projects, I tell them to explore Scrivener. The difference between having hundreds (or thousands) of files, all with different scraps of information, to having one “master” file where I could keep all of my research and writing is enormous. It’s an incredible program that does exactly what software is supposed to do: simplify my life so I can focus on what’s important.

Applied Mathematician and author of The Half-Life of Facts and Overcomplicated.

After days of searching for the perfect piece of writing software, my editor solved it in a single word: Scrivener. And I haven’t looked back. Scrivener allows me to connect and organize my ideas and made writing my first book a joy. It is now an integral part of my writing arsenal and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

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.

Writer of Least I Could Do, Looking For Group, The Bear, Gutters and plenty more.

For the past decade, I’ve been writing comic strips and comic books using MS Word — the typewriter equivalent for millennials. I pushed forward with the thought process: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Yet, I always felt there were ways I could be working more efficiently.

Finally, I picked up Scrivener and haven’t looked back since.

Scrivener is made for me. It does everything I want, and showed me how to do things I need. It’s changed my entire workflow for the better, and has me thinking about stories in a whole new way.

For comic strip or comic book writers, I couldn’t even begin to recommend Scrivener enough. I suppose I’ll try, though.

Author of Buttonless: Incredible iPhone and iPad Games and the Stories Behind Them.

I’m convinced that without Scrivener, I wouldn’t have been able to complete my book in time for my deadline. I needed to organize and transcribe nearly 100 interviews while working on Buttonless, and Scrivener is designed beautifully to accommodate such a daunting task. Sifting through and formatting hundreds of thousands of words is unbelievably easy, and the program runs surprisingly smoothly even on my now-aging Mac. I will never attempt a large-scale writing project again unless I’ve got a computer with an installed copy of Scrivener on hand.

A professional writer for over 30 years, Rowena writes for companies such as Microsoft, Osborne/McGraw-Hill, and America Online. She has ghost written short stories, published nine novels, and produced over 172 articles for Livestrong, Guardian Liberty Voice, Airbrush Magazine, and natural medicine sites.

Being blind has its own set of challenges. Being a blind professional writer is akin to a scuba diver looking for a place to dive in the desert. Sure, there are lakes and pools but none of which are deep enough to enjoy a satisfying dive.

There are few things worse than purchasing a program from a well-known corporation, only to discover that it does not play well with my Braille display or screen-reading program. In short, it is inaccessible.

When I purchased Scrivener, I did so with ambivalence, certain the program would be inaccessible, or partially accessible. I loaded the program and started using it, putting it through the blind-user gauntlet, encouraging the app to fail. It did not. It performed like a well-trained guide dog, obeying my commands without a glitch. In truth, it behaved more nobly than Microsoft Word and Apple’s Pages.

I now use Scrivener on all my devices to write articles, blog posts, novels, short stories, as well as keeping notes and recipes. It has taken the place of all my word processing programs, note applications, and story-writing apps.

Scrivener is an essential tool for any writer, whether they are blind or sighted. I applaud them for taking the time to develop a product that not only works, but out performs those produced by Microsoft and Apple, corporations that should be more diligent at producing accessible applications.

Thank you Scrivener team for developing such a valuable truly accessible tool.

Writer for Wildstorm’s 2009 Resident Evil comic book series.

I have bought, and been disappointed, by nearly every writing tool available for the Mac. Each one would have a unique feature that I loved, but would be lacking in some other regard, so I found myself moving projects in and out of different pieces of software as I wanted certain tools. But then I stumbled over the Literature & Latte site and my world changed. Scrivener is simultaneously the most featured and flexible writing tool I’ve ever used. Within fifteen minutes of launching it, I was in love.

I used to use separate applications for comic book scripts, my journal, research projects and my novel manuscript. Scrivener has replaced all of them. As much as I love the flexibility of creating and organizing the actual script or manuscript, the single greatest feature of Scrivener is the ability to keep every disparate snippet of text and random photographic reference in a single Scrivener project along with the work in progress. I am a horribly disorganized individual and all of my projects end up requiring extensive amounts of reference material. Pasting it all into the project doc has literally saved me hours of time. I would never have finished the scripts for Resident Evil or my novel manuscript without Scrivener.

Author of the Ulysses Moore children’s saga.

Scrivener is simply the best way to organize the clouds of my brain. It is the most efficient way to arrange ideas and documents and use them in a long plot.

Author of The Well.

Most people are familiar with word processing applications such as Word and Pages. For years, we’ve accepted that these represent the only way to write. Well it’s not true: there is another, better, more productive way. It’s called Scrivener. Scrivener is a complete research, authoring and document management environment. Not only does it offer you ways to zip around the largest of documents with incredible ease, it also enables you to manage the whole creative process from one place — including collating research and maintaining character notes. I wouldn’t use anything else and I can’t recommend it enough. Yes, there’s a bit of a learning curve — but only because we’ve all learned to write ‘the wrong way’ — using frankly inadequate tools. Once you master it, Scrivener is fast, logical and massively productive. And it costs peanuts. If you’re a writer, it’s the best £29.79 you’ll ever spend.

Former Editor of Surfer magazine and author of two previous biographies: Dale Velzy is Hawk (Croul Publications, 2006) and Bing Surfboards: 50 Years of Craftsmanship and Innovation (Pintail Publishers, 2008), along with Hobie: Master of Water, Wind and Waves (Croul Publications, 2013). He is now Senior Editor and author-in-residence at Croul Publications in Newport Beach, California.

I have recently completed my latest book, Hobie: Master of Water, Wind and Waves, using your excellent program.

It is the comprehensive biography of a man who is such a rock star in the worlds of surfing and sailing that, like Sting, Madonna and Prince, he is known by his fans worldwide by just one name. This very day, Halloween 2013, Hobie turns 80 years old.

The book is 300 pages, 9″ by 12″ portrait format, 17 chapters, 585 photos/illustrations all of which are captioned. Captions alone total 15,000 words.

At the beginning of this year, after some 18 months of research, I knew I had to write 1,000 words a day for 100 days to complete a manuscript for my publisher, Croul Publications, in order to complete the book for a release date later this year — in time for 2013 holiday season sales in the USA, Europe and Australasia.

Alas, I was able only to write the book’s actually required 120,000 words in 130 days. Still, not a bad problem.

It was, I am convinced, Scrivener’s genius software that made that possible.

The ability to import all of my research — 80-plus interview transcripts, a multiplicity of scanned documents, website references and more — that made the research access so simple and immediate that it saved me countless hours of searching, launching and re-launching various platforms, shuttling between multiple screens and programs, etc.

The search function was also a fantastic help as the manuscript became longer and more complex in checking for possible redundancies in the chapters. It was also a boon in building the final index. The synopsis function, that I mostly used in corkboard form, is also terrific in keeping track of chapter content as it evolved during the writing.

For a long-form author engaged in a complicated project with a vast array of background research, Scrivener is light years ahead of any other word processing tools, none of which I’ll ever use again except for one- or two-page documents.

I have not so far written movie scripts, but I have started one, albeit not very ambitious, for an 8-character, 4-minute short, and I’m using Scrivener to do it. I have drank, drunk, drunken your Kool-Aid.

Perhaps interestingly, I came across Scrivener by serendipity. My neighbor here in Laguna Beach, California, is a retired systems analyst and computer whizz; an early tech-whiz kinda guy. He told me that he’d seen on some blog somewhere that novelist Michael Chabon was raving about Scrivener after using it for his latest book, Telegraph Hill.

When I referenced that link, long lost now, about how much research Chabon had on file about Oakland history as background, I immediately thought, “Aha!” — and I took Scrivener’s 30-day trial option. Just five days later I was already convinced and paid my $45, not quite believing how inexpensive it was.

There’s no question in my mind now that it is the best investment I ever made.

Blogger and author of The Way of Cats.

This year I faced my biggest Scrivener challenge. I’ve been writing with this incredible software since the beginning. Now I had the thoroughly modern dilemma of turning posts, from my popular blog, into a book.

I certainly did not want to cheat: that disappointing maneuver of throwing blog posts into a word processor until I reach my word count. I wanted to turn my material into a real book that would delight my fans, and make me new ones. Enter the latest Scrivener.

I would pull in blog posts with related themes using the handy web import feature. I would create a folder, and put all the different blog posts into the folder as documents. This gave me a fast word count when I clicked on the folder. I arranged them into a better order for a book chapter. Pro-tip: turn all that web stuff into editable text by opening a new blank document to Paste and Match Style. Gets rid of the pictures and the links and makes me see it in a new way.

I would background the text from each post into a different highlight color (love that!) and chop it into pieces and ditch the parts I don’t need. Blogging is a shorter medium and I must assume this is the first blog post my reader has ever seen. In books, we have a history, depending on where I put this chapter.

Now, I have the essence of what I want to say, I re-arrange it until it flows from beginning to end. Now I fill in the parts that need to hook together the different parts. Before I know it, I have a chapter. Or two. Or an idea for a new chapter.

Do that long enough… and there’s a book.

Thank you, Scrivener.

One contributing author of The Stone Eye.

For many months I have searched a chance to finally work with Scrivener — many attempts have been made in the past before, never reaching the aim of writing a novel, a short story and stuff like that. Then, when I needed to cooperate with German writer Martina André regarding the short story ‘Du bist ein offenes Buch’ (‘You are an open book’) for the episode novel ‘Das Steinerne Auge’ (‘The Stone Eye’) we decided to work in two ways — creating the drafts with Microsoft Word first, exchanging our ideas and later importing them into Scrivener which finally lead to something I want to call structure. Structure was missing before and while we have sent fourteen versions of the final short story to each other we realized that we had to organize us in another way — and this was the point where Scrivener (which I bought earlier at Version 1) came into gameplay. Finally, I had the chance to really pursue my writing with Scrivener, creating the first real project with it and — last but not least — got my first short story published in a whole novel with other well-known German authors. So Scrivener was the missing puzzle piece which I found… at last — fortunately!

Author of Top Producer.

I spent months testing different software for authors. Most programs were rigid, too structured. They distracted me from the primary mission — writing my first novel — and turned computer sessions into engineering nightmares. The programs emphasized technology and formulaic patterns, thereby defeating their value as tools.

Then I found Scrivener. There’s only a modest learning curve to get started. And the software serves all the core needs of writers. As an outliner, Scrivener organizes your book. It’s easy to track events and descriptions. You will never again lose time flipping between pages to confirm whether a character has blue eyes or brown.

As a filing system, Scrivener enables you to save research in the same file as your narrative. No more bushwhacking through cluttered hard drives to uncover buried articles. It’s easy to flip between your book and research when confirming details.

As a word processor, Scrivener offers easy-to-use tools: text editor, spell checker, and fonts to name a few. I especially like the export function. It’s easy to translate Scrivener files into Microsoft Word — a feature that keeps my publisher happy.

Scrivener is excellent value for the money. Plus, it’s a robust platform. I have never lost files or experienced quirky behavior. Scrivener won’t write your book. But it will make your time at the computer more productive.

Editor of MacUser UK and author of The Independent Guide to the Mac, The Independent Guide to the iPhone, and The Ultimate iPod Guide.

Scrivener remains my writing tool of choice for day-to-day large projects.

Author of The Watchers of Ur: Cradle.

As a new author, I had some trepidation about trusting my scribblings to a standard word processing application. Too many bizarre formatting gremlins inhabit that world. So after doing some research, I found Scrivener. From the first evening filling my cork board with scene ideas, to the later stages of the project when I would spin out a quick EPUB or MOBI or PDF document for my editor or beta readers, Scrivener always had the right tool for the job. As an iPad owner, the sync feature with SimpleNote has unshackled me from my MacBook and allowed me to have a viable writing desk anywhere I travel. And isn’t that really the point of any good tool? To allow the artisan to shape his world without making special accommodations for the tool.

Independent authors, who want to truly compete with the big six stable of writers, must make quality their top concern. Even though we may sell our works for pennies or a few dollars, the reader expects our product to be equal to the traditional publishers. Scrivener allows independent authors to publish their work, in a variety of popular formats, with the click of a button. The results are magical.

So Bravo to my new friends at L&L for creating a truly wonderful tool for the modern 21st century writer. I pledge to sing the praises of Scrivener far and wide throughout the land!

Author of Comment domestiquer son maître quand on est un chat amongst other novels.

About me: I’m french, journalist and writer. Specialized in cinema, ecology and humour (well, hope so!)

A proof you can write in French using an English software: three books, and a fourth still in progress were carried by Scrivener.

Scrivener offers me exactly what I could have required if the software’s developers had consulted me. It fits into my chaos and my procrastination, my misdirections and my way to zig-zag from one topic to another.

I’m sincerely thinking to use only 20% of the features of Scrivener (I’m not a playwriter, and quite not persevering with software’s How-to) and that’s already all I could have expected and even much more. And, mainly, I’m honoured to be a member of the Scrivener’s writers community.

Award-winning author of Sabra Zoo.

Scrivener is a writer’s best friend. You can do everything in it: plan using index cards, keep your research in one place, structure as you will, and most importantly, write with no visual distraction on the screen. Genius.

Writer-Producer, Star Trek: Voyager, Star Trek: Enterprise,Threshold & 12 Monkeys.

My greatest ally as a script writer isn’t the pen or word processor — it’s the corkboard. A mental playground to organize my thoughts. For years I’ve been searching for the digital equivalent — a place in the computer where I can structure a script, or pin up the logline for a potential TV series, or keep an inspiring image. In the real world, those snippets and index cards often end up buried somewhere, forgotten. With Scrivener, I can keep them tacked to my virtual corkboard forever, waiting for the day when I happily rediscover them… Scrivener has so many useful features, there’s almost too many to list. The full screen mode can’t be beat for blocking out the distractions of the internet and e-mail — if only it could unplug my ethernet cable to keep me from goofing off. I’ve tried other writing programs for the Mac, but none of them really fit my style. If I had the brains and the patience, Scrivener is the program I would’ve written for myself. Try it, you’ll be hooked.

Author of the Estasia and Prodigium children’s sagas.

If my mind represents the creativity, Scrivener is the chisel to mould my novel. The easiest way to keep track about my plot, characters, environment. After using it, I cannot write another book without it.

Bestselling author of Crimes and Guilt.

Scrivener ist elegant und einfach. Und es funktioniert. Ich kann es nur empfehlen. (Scrivener is elegant and simple. And it works. I can only recommend it.)

Author of Draco’s Fire, Boarder Patrol (Spring 2010) and Wolves at the Gate (Fall 2010).

I’ve been a Scrivener user for more than two years. I just recently found out that you have wonderful technical support as well as wonderful software. Thank you so much!

Scrivener changed the way I write. I create a file for each scene and shuffle them in the bulletin board view until the story works, then I group them into chapters. I love that Scrivener lets me work in small pieces like this, especially when it comes time to revise a completed manuscript.

I’ve read that the best writing is transparent. Scrivener is like that. It gets out of the way and lets me work on my manuscript the way I need to work on it. I’m much more productive with Scrivener than I have been with any other software. I recommended it to my writing friends every chance I get.

Award-winning screenwriter & novelist. His work includes the 3-book series of supernatural gothic novels, The Transgressions Cycle.

Being a professional writer isn’t about waiting for the Muse, it’s about being able to sit down, day after day, and work. That takes more than creativity and inspiration, it requires craft and process. This is where Scrivener is awesome! Writing itself is the easy bit – building, planning, developing and drafting stories is where the hard work is done. Scrivener brings order to the story chaos in my head.

New York Times bestselling author of The Marriage Pact,The Year of Fog and No One You Know.

A decade-long PC user, I recently bought a MacBook for the express purpose of writing my next novel on Scrivener. I’m glad I did. I do a lot of research for my novels, and I love having my research documents conveniently filed alongside my writing. I also like the way Scrivener adapts to the way I write — non-chronologically, in fragments that I later piece together. I’m now moving along at a brisk pace, enjoying the flexibility and simplicity of Scrivener.

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.

Author of The Book of Lost Souls, amongst many others.

I took to Scrivener instantly. All my outlining, character worksheets, research articles, the synopsis, the pitch — everything exists in one place. No more opening three or more files to find what I need. With Scrivener, I can easily find and work on sections without having to type in chapters or scenes with Word’s Find function. I can add notes without the fear they’ll show up in the final product.

When I sent my work to agents, I knew the book looked professional. I never had to add headers or title pages — Scrivener took care of all that for me. And now that I’ve decided to self-publish, Scrivener has proven it’s more invaluable than I would have thought possible. While so many indies send their work out for formatting, I simply drag in my cover art, modify the novel title page, add in the copyright and dedication page, and choose how I want to format my book. Viola! Scrivener formats and compiles so cleanly that I was able to pass Smashword’s meatgrinder in one go. In a single upload I’m in the premium catalog, which greatly increases where people can buy my book. I’m even available on iBook!

Being an indie author means wearing many hats. With Scrivener, I can spend less time worrying about the details and more time doing what I need to do — write.

Award-winning screenwriter commissioned by Warner Bros, Working Title/Universal and Film4. Also the author of Screenwriting Unchained, a bestselling book introducing his ground-breaking Story-Type Method.

As a professional screenwriter, I use Scrivener for all my projects from beginning to end: research, outline, draft, it’s completely changed the way I work. I used to manage documents in a variety of formats depending on the stage – research webpages scattered in various browsers, short documents in Word, screenplays in Final Draft. I can now keep everything tidy and immediately accessible in the same Scrivener project. Being able to use Scrivener on my iPad keeps me productive when I’m on the move. I usually export to PDF when I deliver a screenplay, but if a producer insists on Final Draft I can easily export to that format.

I love Scrivener for writing screenplays so it only felt natural to use it to pen my first non-fiction book, Screenwriting Unchained. Researching, structuring and formatting this was no small feat as the 470-page manuscript included many infographics and case studies. Scrivener made the process incredibly easy and flexible. It also made exporting to a variety of formats for eBook and print books a snap. At the moment, I’m using Scrivener to write Problem Solved!, the second volume in my Story-Type Method series, as well as a trilogy of YA novels. I even use it to write some of the blog posts on my website… Over the years, Scrivener has become a versatile, dependable creative partner. I wouldn’t want to write anything without it!

Multi-published author of romantic suspense, including Checks and Balances.

I’ve been using Scrivener from the the very beginning. Before it was even a paid app. And as soon as the paid version was available in beta, I was one of the first to jump on board. First of all, I couldn’t believe how cheap such a great app was and remains to be. I was more than happy to send in my payment.

I have used Scrivener on every one of my novels and I’ve found that not only is it great for writing each draft, its perfect during the editing process when I’m working with my publisher. I simply import the version that I receive from my editor, split into scene or chapter cards with the ‘split at selection’ feature, then I can mix, match, and move around the text in whatever fashion the editor wants me to rearrange my novel.

It was invaluable for my latest release because not only did I have to do standard editing and clean up of the feel and flow of the novel, but I had to introduce a completely new throughline and weave it into the existing manuscript. Using the index cards, I wrote a synopsis of all scenes old and new and moved them around at will until I had the story ‘just right’. Then I brought it all together into a new draft, exported and submitted it.

BTW the novel received a 4 out of 5 star rating from the premier romance writer/reader magazine in the world, Romantic Times. I couldn’t have accomplished this without Scrivener.

I also use Scrivener when I go to writer’s conferences, using index cards for individual lectures and sessions. As a result, other authors see me using the software and always ask about it. They love it. One author, a Windows XP user, went out and bought a Mac just so that she could buy Scrivener!

I’ve been a Scrivener disciple from the very beginning and will continue to be. Great job!

Author of Ireland in 2050: How we will be Living.

I use Scrivener for academic articles and, now, books. I’ve never come across a tool that meets my needs as completely as Scrivener. I’d recommend it to anyone.

Author of the works listed in the testimonial.

Productivity, workflow, output, delivery, all up since I adopted Scrivener. Two stories in a collection of ghost stories (Ghost Stories from Down Under). Two feature film screenplays (Artemis Longfellow and The Nimrod Sanction) completed. A twenty six episode children’s television series in the works along with a three novel adaptation (The Timethreader Chronicles) in the works. Like other writers, I find Scrivener both indispensable and almost as much fun as I imagined writing to be when I started in this crazy career. Gone are the tedious, rotten years of bum glue and sheer slog. I even have a private life now. Scrivener? Yes!

English professor and author of Embracing Writing: Ways to Teach Reluctant Writers in Any College Course.

As an academic writer, I recommend Scrivener wholeheartedly to my colleagues and my students. The real testimony of the product’s worthiness is that writers use Scrivener, both beginners and expert, and find new uses for it in ways they could not have anticipated. Opening a new writing project can be daunting, but the mechanical problems — for example, getting started and rewriting — are demonstrably less intimidating with Scrivenerand can overcome the psychological barriers. Can an app be inviting you to write? I didn’t think so until Scrivener. I wrote my new book, Embracing Writing, entirely in Scrivener when I responded to that invitation.

Author of The Truth Is the Way: Kierkegaard’s Theologia Viatorum and Associate Professor of Philosophy and Theology at Lincoln Christian University and has published several monographs.

Many thanks for your wonderful software. Scrivener has become an essential part of my research and writing, and I highly recommend it, particularly for academic writing. I used Scrivener to write my book The Truth is the Way: Kierkegaard’s Theologia Viatorum. Scrivener enabled a capacity to condense an enormous amount of research (the draft included some 7,700 sub-documents(!)) into a relatively brief reference-heavy academic work.

Thanks again. Keep up the excellent work.

Artist, producer and live improvisational video montage creator (DVJ), and has worked with DJs such as Pete Tong and Norman Cook.

I’m about to start a new novel and decided to review your tutorials so I could get to grips with the changes as of 1.5. And as I went through the tutorials, I realised how much I wanted to write and tell you what a pleasure it is working with Scrivener.

I don’t know how long I’ve been using your excellent software, but I have now written a novel, two non-fiction books, several scripts and treatments, and quite a few magazine articles and speeches with Scrivener. It’s a great tool, and has become an essential part of my creative practice. I’m uncertain which comes first — my conceptual process, or the Scrivener framework — but the two seem to have merged.

Thanks a million, and keep up the great work.

Author of The Crowded Room: A novella by Jeffrey Dunne, semi-finalist in the 2005 IPPY Awards in the Juvenile and Young Adult Fiction category.

My first book was written on an Olivetti typewriter. Everything that followed was Microsoft Word. I still have a headache from that period. When I first tried Scrivener, working on the sequel to my first novella, I was dubious. Then I saw the full screen mode — gasp! Just words. No formatting concerns. No changing ribbons (first dynasty) or worrying about fonts and indents (second dynasty). I’ve arrived at the third dynasty — where I can integrate notes, images, “folder” scenes and chapters I’m not sure about, and seamlessly re-arrange things. Thank you Scrivener, for opening a whole new world to my writing.

I wanted to tell you how fantastic Scrivener is! I used it when writing my book, PCI Compliance, 2nd edition, last year as it went to publication. I also use it for my monthly column, and any additional writing that is longer than a blog post. I love the way that each project has everything I need to work contained within it. Add some iDisk fun, and i can work ANYWHERE!

Thanks for creating such a fantastic product! 2.0 ROCKS!

David Hirsch and Dan Van Haften used Scrivener to write Abraham Lincoln and the Structure of Reason. The authors reveal for the first time the structure Abraham Lincoln used to compose his most famous speeches and writings. Like Lincoln’s writings, Scrivener itself is based on structure. Nothing makes writing easier than a sound structural framework. Writing the book was a pleasure. Doing it within Scrivener made it easy. First the authors discovered the Euclidean source of Lincoln’s oratorical greatness. Then they discovered how Lincoln at times “misused” his powerful logical tools. Also revealed is a profound Lincoln connection to Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence, a connection stronger than ever before realized. More discoveries relating to Isaac Newton and Aristotle, and to the legal system itself. As one discovery led to another, Scrivener easily adapted and responded to the needs of the authors. It is hard to imagine doing this project without Scrivener. The only thing that would have made the project even more pleasurable would be the newly released Scrivener 2.0.

Author of the best-selling Nic Costa series of novels including The Seventh Sacrament and The Lizard’s Bite and former technology columnist for the Sunday Times.

I’ve been trying so-called “writers’ software” for more than twenty years and always stumbling back to Word. Until Scrivener. Good software is like good writing, invisible to the user. The focus, simplicity and clarity is astonishing, and the absence of hype and jargon just as welcome too. The more I use it, the more I realise it can replace every other application I’ve adopted over the years for writing books that are often lengthy and involve substantial amounts of detailed research.

The seventh book in the Nic Costa series will be delivered from within Scrivener, and the eighth will begin as an outline there too. Finally a true word processor for authors has arrived.

As both a content marketer and a hobbyist writer, I spend a lot of time writing in all sorts of different tools. And nothing comes close to challenging Scrivener for being the best, most comprehensive writing app available. If you’re working on a big project, a lot of small projects, or you (like me) really like organizational features, Scrivener is a no-brainer.

Author of the Templar Series and the founder of Medieval Murderers. Chairman of the Crime Writers’ Association 2004/5, he is the present UK Chairman of International Thriller Writers.

How do I begin talking about Scrivener? I loaded a trial in August and ten days later had to buy the full licence. In five months I’ve written a novel, a radio play (my first), two short stories, outlines for two more, and now I’ve begun plotting another novel. I have never before found anything that is anything like so productive for an author. Scrivener has all the tools I could need, but without restricting my style and forcing me to work in a specific way. I just use the tools I want — and then the whole thing is there in front of me . I am so delighted with it, I’ve recommended it to all my friends who write. Scrivener for me is now the primary reason for owning an Apple computer. As a writer, it really is that good. It makes my machine sing for me. Fantastic software.

Graduate of Yale Law School, author of The Legal Mind and is currently the Chief Campus Counsel for the University of California.

For years, I wanted to write a book for a general audience about how the law really works, especially how the legal system thinks about and deals with deception, forgetting, and ambiguity. These are fascinating topics, but also knotty ones, and for the longest time I couldn’t get started because I didn’t know where to begin. Then I found Scrivener. One year later, my book The Legal Mind is published and recently ranked Number 7 on Amazon’s bestseller list in the One L: Legal Profession category.

With its flexible writing environment, Scrivener didn’t force me to begin at the beginning. I could write where I wanted to write, and when I got stuck, I could switch to another part of the book and then come right back to where I left off.

Scrivener’s binder was a key ingredient to my success. It served as an outliner when I was getting started and a table of contents when I finished. In between, it allowed me to easily reorganize the material as I figured out what I wanted to say and how.

Scrivener has received a lot of accolades as a tool for writing novels, but I can attest that it works great for non-fiction. For my book, I did everything in Scrivener from outlining, researching, and drafting to revising and outputting a near-final product that only required minor tweaking to get ready for publication. Without Scrivener, The Legal Mind would have been forever locked in my imagination. Because of Scrivener, The Legal Mind is a reality.

I am addicted to Scrivener! This software is the reason I switched from a PC to a Mac and I am thrilled with how it has changed the way I write my novels. I love the orderliness and the simplicity of having every single prior draft, research and notes just a quick click away. I love how easy it is to scroll through the entire document, and I don’t know how anyone can write a novel without that beautiful “document notes” section right there like a scratchpad! Scrivener is quite possibly the closest there has ever been to a perfect piece of software. I tell all my writer friends about it because once you go Scrivener you don’t go back!

I’ve used a lot of different writing software, but none of them feel as polished as Scrivener. It made the writing process so much smoother and simpler — going back to anything else would feel like I was chipping the words out of stone with a hammer and chisel. It has become one of my very few absolutely-must-have pieces of software.

Award-winning author of One, The Unblemished and Blonde on a Stick.

Word is dead to me now. Scrivener has helped me to organise and streamline and plan and execute while also making the whole slog of novel writing an absolute joy. In such a short time it has become an essential piece of software. I don’t know how I would manage without it.

Author of Drawing Cartoons.

Being a total word processor slut, I’ve used and abused most Mac writing programs in my time. Over the course of 16 books, I’ve gone from the early versions of Write and Word 5.3 to more advanced, fully featured apps. Now I’ve abandoned them all in favour of Scrivener. From first firing it up, it was obvious that considerable thought and intelligence had gone into producing a program which works exactly the way I work. I was flattered to bits. When I begin a book, I used to buy a wallet file and all the research, drafts, notes and sketches would go in there, sorted by chapter. My latest book, Drawing Cartoons, was a complex project but instead of the wallet file, everything went into Scrivener. It worked like a dream. And I love the way you can use those parts of the program which are useful to you NOW and the rest just stays out of the way.

Scrivener saved my business novel, Rolling Rocks Downhill, from the scrapheap. I’ve been using MS Word since 1989, and I happily used it to write the first three (rather weak) drafts of my book. But then I got stuck. I knew I needed to restructure but, honestly, I couldn’t find the structure of what I’d written hidden amongst the 100K words. I guess I got lucky because I stumbled across Scrivener when the Windows beta came out and, since I liked playing around with new software and I had nothing to lose, I installed it, watched the tutorial videos, then imported my manuscript. I spent a weekend chopping the document into chapters, naming them, adding description, and a bit of colour coding, and the next thing I knew I’d bought a MacBook just so I could continue rewriting, without relying on beta software. I’m glad I did. Scrivener works the way my mind works and my book wouldn’t be here without.

Editor, academic, photographer and author of Cains: The Story of Liverpool in a Pint.

I like trying out new software and I download a lot of new things. Most don’t last and even fewer get my money. If you’re a writer and you use a Mac, Scrivener… is one of the best software bargains out there.

Author of Singularity Sky, Saturn’s Children and Accelerando.

Scrivener is a Swiss Army Knife for novelists. It’s not just a word processor, or an outliner, or a note-keeper; it’s all of the above, and more.

Author of Gerald and the Amulet of Zonrach.

I’m a long time user of MS Word and wrote my first novel using that software. I have also edited my second novel with Word. When I signed the publishing contract for my debut novel, Gerald and the Amulet of Zonrach, I treated myself to Scrivener and I wish I had made the change a long time ago.

I have since reedited Jaguar, in Scrivener, which needed a lot of research to make it authentic. I love the fact that I can drag PDFs into Scrivener so that I don’t have to keep switching applications just to clarify a fact. The double pane format is a boon to me and it has become even more important with my third novel, Wilfred. I had to do a lot of research for the setting for this novel as it is set in Anglo Saxon, England during the 8th century. The only way I could create a realistic setting for my character was to put all my research in one place and Scrivener has made it very easy. I also had to create a lot of characters who needed realistic Saxon names. There again Scrivener made it easy for me. I never lose track of a character and have to wade through the MS to refresh my memory about features. I am currently writing the first draft of the next in the Gerald series in Scrivener.

All in all this is a fantastic tool if used in the way it was designed. It is perfect for writing those drafts required to get the MS ready for submission. Don’t forget you can also add a text document in there for your query and your synopsis, there is no need to have several Word documents open anymore. You don’t even have to export it to Word anymore as most agents and publishers want the query, synopsis and first few chapters pasted into the body of the email. Just copy and paste from Scrivener and you are good to go.

Author of Love, Sex, Fleas, God: Confessions of a Stay-at-Home Dad.

I began writing my book as a single MS Word document and very quickly got into trouble. Spanning fifty years and having a complicated timeline, my draft began to tie itself in knots. Me being me, I persisted with a bad idea and, consequently, sank into even deeper trouble. While I was casting around for mind-mapping software—in the hope that I could draw myself some pictures—I stumbled across Scrivener.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. I copied my existing text into Scrivener, pulled it apart, made liberal use of the fantastic corkboard and, finally, I could ‘see’. Without Scrivener I would still be staring at a gridlock of unhappy words and eating too many biscuits. Not only was Scrivener great for my writing, it was good for my health too.

Author of The B.S. of A. — A Primer in Politics for the Incredibly Disenchanted and In the Event of My Untimely Demise.

Scrivener was essential in helping me organize the copious amounts of information I’d gathered about the nonsense going on in Washington. It made the process of writing a book about political malfeasance and partisan machinations much, much easier.

Journalist and author of Big Babies: Or, Why Can’t We Just Grow Up? and Lost Worlds: What Have We Lost and Where Did It Go?

Thank you for the excellent and extraordinary work you’ve done on Scrivener; anyone can write a sodding book but it takes cojones to produce a writer’s toolbench like this. Having played with it for a couple of weeks, it’s now up and running in anger. Score so far: 1 film outline, 1 chapter of the new book, 2 radio scripts, 1 piece for the Observer, 2 Independent on Sunday op-eds, 3 lectures, and on it goes… Scrivener fills the gap between wild promiscuous note-taking (DevonThink), mapping connections and lines of argument (Tinderbox) and producing the final draft (Mellel). My workflow is now complete. Scrivener has done something unforgiveable: removed my last excuse for idling.

Author of Nightworld.

I’ve tried them all. From AppleWorks on an Apple IIe to an endless number of word processors on the Mac, I’ve gotten my fingers on every word processor that’s showed promise—the promise to make it easier to write. Because writing is hard. Really hard. I’ve fallen in love with features in all of these word processors, whether it’s the clean user interface, fullscreen mode, customization for fonts, colors and backgrounds, or even how well their find/replace functions work. As a novelist, I want to surround myself with the best tools I can afford. $45 for a word processor that combines all the best features of other word processors and then adds an incredible number of its own new features? It’s a steal. Using Scrivener, I wrote my latest novel Nightworld more quickly than any of my other books. From the flexibility to work as I work best, to organize scenes, plan plot points, and keep track of characters, no word processor beats Scrivener. The ability to bring in research materials, whether images, PDFs or other documents, means I don’t have to waste time. I’m even able to deliver an e-book to my publisher. There’s only one writing tool that I love more than Scrivener, and that’s my fountain pen. But my fountain pen, I have to admit, does an atrocious job at spell checking. My next book will also be written with Scrivener. So should yours.

Author of 13 Little Blue Envelopes and Suite Scarlett. 

I first heard of Scrivener from some other writers, all of whom said it had changed the way they worked. I was hooked in days. It’s smart, efficient software that allows you to organize material easily and organically. You can see your chapters. You can see your research. You can even see your corkboard. It’s not confusing or glitchy. Finally, someone made good software for writers! And the price is fantastically low so that everyone can afford it, even if you’re just getting into writing. It’s not a crippling investment. (I’d buy it for ten times that or more. Really.) It works and it’s worth it. Get Scrivener and leave the horrors of Word behind forever.

Author of The Successful Mistake.

When people ask me what my best investment in my writing has been, I say Scrivener. It’s saved me so much time, stress, and money, because these days I can do all the formatting by myself. And when it comes to research… a true game-changer. Having interviewed 163 successful business people for my book, The Successful Mistake, there’s a lot of moving pieces to keep organised, but using Scrivener has made the whole process simple. When it comes to writing future books, I couldn’t imagine using anything else.

Award-winning author of You Are The Answer: Discovering and Fulfilling Your Soul’s Purpose.

I’m thrilled! I “accidentally” stumbled upon your application on the chance that someone came up with what I’ve been dreaming of being able to use since I got my first book published a few years ago. Already, Scrivener’s proving to be an absolute dream app for an author like me—writing books, articles, essays, messages, and teleseminars are just one part of my work. And, it’s making what has been enjoyable even more so while making it significantly easier on the poor, battered, overworked and underpaid author ;0) so he’ll have at least a few strands of hair left from not having to spend half of his writing time looking for where he misplaced or mislabeled that little paragraph.

Journalist and co-author of Taking Your iPad to the Max and author of Epiphany Jones.

Scrivener is hands down the best word processor for writers. I’ve co-written two 400-plus page To the Max books with it and Scrivener’s rich outlining features allowed me to keep track of the entire project with ease. I’ve also recently completed a 150,000 word novel with a cast of dozens of characters and locations — all of which would have been much harder to manage without Scrivener’s keyword and corkboard features. Whether you’re writing a non-fiction tech book or a literary novel, Scrivener has the features to facilitate getting your words from thought to page.

Author of The Wayward Irregular – Devil Men, Tobacco Pipes, and The Bacon Devotional.

Scrivener is the gospel. When you’re trying to organize all that chaos floating around your mind, the last thing you want to do is fight with your text editor — there is business to conduct, words to write! When laying out my book, the whole thing was outlined and compiled in Scrivener, this chapter moves here, another moves there, it was all so easy and encouraging. Break up your grand work into as many parts as you need to get a handle on it, and Scrivener will help put it all together for you. Now, everything I write goes in this program — every idea, every note, every concept — it’s all organized and easily accessed when I’m ready for it. Scrivener rides in on a white horse and offers a helping hand through the fog. It’s worth every penny, and perhaps even a few more.

Videographer for Shoot The Piano Player Films.

Longtime user of the awesome Scrivener. As a video production professional, it’s pretty much revolutionised how I go about planning and laying out shoots for clients. It’s also a great solution for getting all the information in one place about a certain client or project. I can see how this software would be fantastic in other industries, but certainly in my industry it’s absolutely amazing!

Bestselling author of Pretty Good Number One.

I wouldn’t say Scrivener makes writing a book easy… it just makes it easier than any other way to go about it. When I was revising my book, I must have rearranged the chapters, parts of chapters, and recipes a dozen times. Doing that in a traditional word processor would have been like eating nails. Plus, Scrivener’s full-screen mode keeps me away from online word games, at least temporarily.

Author and illustrator of Drawing Inspiration: Visual Artists At Work, teacher, Scrivener fan.

Scrivener played a HUGE part in writing my new book, organizing the text, art, and copy/content editing. Drawing Inspiration: Visual Artists At Work is a 400-page, good natured monster of a thing (185 contributors, 465 pieces of art, full-color). The manuscript was initially 620 pages and I essentially whittled off another 200 page book to make page count (a process streamlined by this great app). No way I could have knocked this out as ‘easily’ or as efficiently without Scrivener (which I dearly love) — certainly THE best writing software purchase I ever made. But I won’t qualify — Scrivener is simply a wonderful piece of kit. It seriously facilitated the production of DIVA — the most monumental project of my career. I look forward to 2.0.

Working filmmaker running a video production company.

Scrivener is an indispensable part of my writing process. I use it to plan out future posts on the site, as well as drafting active posts before I publish them online. I find the features perfect for switching and changing parts of my posts, as well as using it as an editorial calendar for future posts and projects!

As well as posts on the site, I find Scrivener is fantastic for helping me collect ideas for future ebooks and my video courses. I can collect ideas over time and then bring them into one cohesive structure when the time comes to create the product! Can’t thank the Scrivener team enough for this awesome software that helps me run my business!

Scrivener is brilliant, one of the best reasons to own a Mac. I’ve written comic books, screenplays, and novels in it, and it’s been invaluable in each format. The corkboard display makes breaking down a plot a breeze, and it helps keep me on track throughout the entire project.

Scrivener is that perfect sort of program. It’s intuitive enough that you can just jump in and use it, but it’s also wildly versatile and features plenty of power under the hood should you care to tinker with it. I wrote thirteen published novels in Word, and after writing my latest two in Scrivener, there’s no way I’m going back!

Author of The Heming Way.

Writing a book means organizing hundreds or thousands of notes; it’s like obsessive-compulsive disorder, except with letters instead of fingernail clippings. For years I’d keep a dozen Word files open at once, slowly driving myself insane as I alternated between them. (This explains the fingernails.) But Scrivener’s logical interface results in far less tedium. It won’t make you a better writer, but it can make you a more efficient one. And that frees up time for your… um… hobbies.

Author of The Liberty Gun, The Destiny Mask and The Affinity Trap.

As a novelist and Mac fan, Scrivener’s my first choice for writing anything longer than a blog post.

Author of Closed Circuit, and Dutchman’s Puzzle.

Over 20 years ago, I started writing my first novel, Closed Circuit. I worked away at it for a while, put it aside, rewrote it a few times, put it aside…. Somehow I was just never inspired to finish it.

Last year a good friend kindly gave me his older Mac Mini just about the time NaNoWriMo came along. I immediately downloaded Scrivener and got to work. What to write? Well, how about a sequel to the unfinished first novel? That seemed do-able, and no sooner did I get started, I fell in love with Scrivener. I managed to write more than 50,000 words and win. Scrivener made the process about as painless as it gets.

After that, I told myself — if you can write this many words in that amount of time, you can surely finish that first book once and for all. So I dug out the manuscript… imported it into Scrivener, and started writing. And once again Scrivener worked its magic. I finished the book. The sequel, Dutchman’s Puzzle, will be published in spring 2011, and I really believe I could not have done that without Scrivener.

Author of Children’s Rights and Moral Parenting.

I can’t imagine writing a journal article or book without Scrivener. I published my first book, Children’s Rights and Moral Parenting, in February of 2015. Scrivener (along with my local coffee shop) was instrumental in my completion of the project. All my notes and articles in one place made referring to my research a breeze. Also, the ability to take snapshots of my writing lessened any anxiety I had about making substantial changes to a chapter. I am constantly recommending Scrivener to all my colleagues.

Co-author, with Joe Mathews, of California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How It Can Be Fixed, University of California Press.

Scrivener helped me do everything a writer needs to do, and particularly a writer in a hurry: Gather up shards of facts and ideas. Fit them together into sentences and paragraphs, building sections and chapters. Tear down what you’ve built and try them another way. Annotate. Rewrite. Through all this construction and rearranging, the sources and footnotes and links follow each shard as it is passed around. At the end a finished manuscript pops out, ready for editors and readers. And best of all, Scrivener is flexible enough to let me write my own way, in full screen or with multiple panels begging me for their attention. I can’t imagine a more perfect tool for my writing-books, articles, reviews, op-eds.

Author of Lucid Dreaming for Beginners: Simple Techniques for Creating Interactive Dreams and more.

I use Scrivener every day — for blogging, for creating huge reports at the day job, and for keeping my personal creative projects, including the next novel, organized and in order. It’s a wonderful bit of work — one of the very few programs that have, as they say, “changed my life.”

Great stuff. Thanks so much for creating and refining it.

Consultant, entrepreneur, and author of the Max Quick series of books and podcast audiobooks.

Scrivener has been nothing short of a revelation — I mean that quite seriously. It has made the process of writing novels an absolute joy: I no longer struggle and fumble with the mechanics of a word processor. The program disappears from your consciousness — it just works, sort of like how the iPhone just works — and that is the mark of brilliant design. And if you write code as well as novels, as I do, you will instantly recognize the atomic nature of ‘scrivenings’ and how they can easily be re-arranged, snapped together, joined or split, searched through and compiled. It makes MS Word look like a clunky, bloated Soviet-era nightmare in comparison. You won’t find yourself scrolling up to the Space Station and down to China any longer. I could not even imagine going back to anything else after using the wonder that is Scrivener. If you’re a novelist, just buy it right now, I swear you will thank me. You’ll probably kiss me, even.

Patent attorney, having written several hundred patent applications many of them are now issued patents, but they do not offer scintillating reading unless you’re particularly taken with computationally-efficient linear equalization in radio receivers, or branch prediction failure mitigation in pipelined processing architectures!

Scrivener for Mac has revolutionized my work as a patent attorney. Over the past two months it has become my primary tool for preparing lengthy, multipart legal documents, including complex patent applications, license agreements, and software development agreements. I can think of no other productivity tool that has so profoundly and positively affected my day-to-day practice, and it’s worth noting that I could not have afforded to incorporate Scrivener so integrally into my daily practice if it was not rock-solid stable. Clients don’t pay attorneys to fuss with buggy software and Scrivener is utterly reliable. As a capping bonus, Scrivener also offers an attractive interface and is fun to use. Well done and keep up the good work.

Author of Red Cell, Cold Shot and The Fall of Moscow Station.

When I started drafting my first novel, I learned quickly that word processors are terrible for writing books. I tried every other writing tool I could find. Scrivener was the best and it wasn’t a close race for second place. Many thanks to Keith Blount and his Literature & Latte Team for creating Scrivener, the app that ended four years of pain and set me free to write. Scrivener is powerful to meet my every need, but simple enough that I don’t have to fight it to get things done. A writer who’s trying to draft a novel without using Scrivener is probably a masochist.

Author of Gods Behaving Badly.

I’m in love! With Scrivener. He — sorry, it — has totally changed my life.

I was first introduced to Scrivener in an e-mail from my long-suffering Brother. I ignored him — sorry, it — completely. As if a piece of crummy software is going to make any difference to my creativity! I pressed delete.

Fortunately, I got a second chance. A writer friend of mine re-introduced me to Scrivener (‘Haven’t we met?’ ‘No, I don’t think so.’ ‘I remember! Your brother introduced us! And you totally snubbed me! But fortunately I don’t bear a grudge, and you can have me for a 30-day free trial, and then for life for a single payment of around £34.’ If only all relationships were so straightforward.)

And now it’s love. Proper head over heels. Scrivener is amazing. He’s — sorry, it’s — everything I could dream of in a word processor. Where to even begin? Everything about him — sorry, it — is incredible. Intuitive. Adaptive. User friendly in ways I couldn’t ever have imagined from my mispent youth with other computer programmes. I never knew I could feel this way about anything I could download legally. I don’t want to nauseate you. I don’t want you tutting ‘get a study’. But I’ve never known multiple functions like this before… Truly, he’s — sorry, it’s — made me into a whole new writer.

Author of Blood Lines series (Pocket Books).

Scrivener saved my brain! I tried writing in MS Word, tried to use various other word processing programs, but I just got more and more frustrated. I read about Scrivener on another author’s blog and immediately downloaded the trial. This was it! The flexibility to organize chapters the way I want to, move sections around, keep all my research material together saved me from going utterly insane. I’ve written all four of my books in Scrivener and will use it forever.

Author of The Time It Takes to Fall.

A writer friend recommended Scrivener months ago, and I didn’t listen. When he told me it was not a word processor but a program specifically for writers, I’m afraid I imagined cheesy brainstorming tools and templates, the sorts of things real working writers don’t have time for and find intrusive. So I ignored him. I continued cobbling together messy folders all over my desktop and wasting precious writing time clicking through old drafts and notes, running searches on multiple documents, and struggling to maintain order among my re-ordered and re-numbered chapters.

It’s hard to describe the experience of discovering Scrivener. Suffice it to say that I wish I could e-mail it to myself five years ago and get back all the hours of my youth I wasted NOT using it. In short: it’s a relief to finally find a piece of software constructed with the ingenuity and elegance writers strive for in their own work.

Just wanted to let you know how amazing Scrivener is. I used it to lay out my latest anthology, WITH GREAT POWER (for Pocket books). I’ve edited seven anthologies to date, and this makes ordering — and reordering — the short stories a joy, whereas having to move a 10,000 word novella in Word is a nightmare. I’ve written a short story in Scrivener, begun a novel, and am now using it for layout and organizing the catalog copy for Pyr Books’ SpringSummer 2010 season. I keep finding new uses for Scrivener, and discovering ways it makes my life easier. Thank you!!!!

Award-winning author of Absolutely Maybe.

Is it indecent to love Scrivener so much? I used to write with a cobbled together system of scraps of paper, multiple Word docs, and a cork bulletin board. Ever since I’ve started using Scrivener life has gotten easier. I spend less time organizing and more time actually writing. Thank you!

Author of The Changing of the Sun, and the novella The Whispers in the Desert, amongst other books.

Because I’m blind I originally switched to Mac for two reasons; the first was the accessibility and the second — because I was a journalist and blogger — was Scrivener. That was five years ago and I’ve written millions of words using the software. In 2012, I retired from journalism with burnout and started writing creatively as a kind of therapy which kept me sane. Scrivener offered an ordered place to get the words down when they came, it allowed me to write scenes on the fly and out of sync, but still retaining the order that my autistic brain demands.

In 2013, I started self-publishing short stories, using Scrivener to create the e-books and marvelling at the ease of it. This year, after a successful Kickstarter campaign, my first novella was self-published along with a novel, the first in a trilogy set in the same universe that will follow in the autumn.

I sing Scrivener’s praises, recommending it to writers, potential authors and editors, because it’s so versatile, from blogging to a series bible, articles to fiction, all I need is Scrivener and a keyboard and I’m a author.

Author of Saga of Kinnie Wagner, The South’s Most Notorious Gunman. 

The organizing power of Scrivener seems endless, which is precisely what I need when researching and writing biographies of early outlaws. Having the ability to select options within the application that conveniently follow my thought process has proven invaluable for recording, organizing, and analyzing notes from a wide variety of original sources. Moreover, creating text in a workflow that promotes, rather than burdens, the writing process is equally productive. For me, Scrivener is a jewel.

Scrivener is invaluable when what you want to write is bigger than your brain. I’ve written two novels, one unfinished novel, one novel in progress, three screenplays, and a complicated collection, using it. I couldn’t have done five of those without it.

USA Today and New York Times bestselling author of The Demonica Series and Eternal Rider amongst many others.

I simply can’t say enough about Scrivener. I use it almost exclusively as a word processor, but it still manages to organize my novels without even trying. I write faster and more efficiently than I ever did with Word, and revisions take half the time. Being able to see my entire book at a glance, with each scene color-coded for POV or plot, has been a game-changer. I also have a tendency to write out of order, so the ability to drag and drop scenes to where I need them in the manuscript is priceless. The freedom to customize and utilize as many or as few features as you want makes me wonder why anyone would continue to use Word when Scrivener is available. Thanks, Scrivener!

Author of the novel Ghost Swamp Blues, and books on writing, On Being Stuck, Writing Begins with the Breath and The Writing Warrior.

I am a software user idiot, and that’s being kind. I don’t like to spend time figuring out programs, and when they’re exceptionally complicated I just shut down and go away. Scrivener does do all sorts of amazingly complicated things, but I don’t have to do amazingly complicated things to figure out how to make it work. Maybe because it’s a Mac-program, designed by folks who understand the importance of ease of use. Who knows. I just know that since I found Scrivener a few years ago, the way I write has been transformed. Scrivener allows me to keep, gather, and view all my research, videos, notes, and the document I’m working on, at the same time. I can write a scene that takes place in a particular region of the country while watching a YouTube video of someone who just traveled there. This allows for an incredible multi-sensory writing experience. Usually, I have to watch a video or documentary, or read a book, and take notes and then remember. Now I can write while integrating those memories. I can write from the direct experience of the place, no matter where I am in the world. Scrivener has helped me be more grounded in my writing, more organized, and ultimately, more alive on the page. I appreciate that it was created by someone who understands the writing process. This is not a program to help you write better. It doesn’t give you plot ideas or character ideas, but it helps you think better and it allows the writing that you are doing to take center stage. You will write more with Scrivener, and you’ll write better, because all your work is right there, and you’re not searching for notebooks from three years ago with that one note you just know you have … anyone else do that? No more. File things in your Scrivener binders and forget about them. They’ll be there at the exact moment your scene calls for it. Happy writing!

Author of Mana Pool and several other stories posted at DeviantART.

Scrivener is without a doubt one powerful sandbox application for all my fiction. I’ve tried others that made me feel restricted in my writing, no kidding. With this app, I can be more creative and organized than ever, right down to planning my scenes in my stories and keep track of my plot lines and research documents. Scrivener also helped me win NaNoWriMo two times, write several short stories, and help me write my debut novel. Compiling my novel to an ebook was very simple, the best conversion software out there. If it was a perfect world, Scrivener could be a standard for all new computers, both Windows and Mac. I will most definitely spread the word and quite possibly move ALL my writing to Scrivener, including my networking research. Thank you for making such a wonder application.

Lives in Hamburg, Germany and writes about business based topics on his linked website. As a drum educator and professional studio drummer he publishes free drum lessons on https://www.sticktricks.de. He published his bestselling Kindle ebook called Laufen Ebook on Amazon.

I have been using Scrivener for 3 years now. Originally I was introduced to Scrivener by Pat Flynn who mentioned Scrivener in his podcast.

Right from the beginning I was really impressed by the possibilities and functions Scrivener offers. Creating a book’s or blogpost’s structure is bliss and filling chapters with content is easy. I also use the corkboard a lot to drag and drop chapters, pictures and content around.

Today I use Scrivener for publishing ebooks and blogposts as well. Since I have a Bachelor Degree in Business Administration I write a lot of entrepreneural stuff and how to create internet based businesses. I also work as a professional drum educator and Scrivener helps me to create great ebooks for my drum students. Last but not least I write a lot about running and I used Scrivener to write the Amazon Kindle bestselling book Laufen Ebook.

Author of Liar, My Sister Rosa and co-author of Team Human.

Scrivener has changed the way I write novels. It has allowed me to become a much more ambitious writer. I can now write non-linear, structurally complicated books like Liar without having to resort to outlining or printing paper out and shuffling it around on the floor and being just one unfortunate door opening away from it being blown into chaos. Scrivener allows me to see the structure as it emerges and made it a piece of cake to move it around when needed. I have no idea how I would have kept track of everything without software that’s designed to allow you to manage such a big and complicated text as a novel. Thank you

Authors of The Day the Sun Disappeared and The Wicked Witch, the Hacker amongst other titles.

We started writing children’s short stories, aimed at six to twelve year-olds, only a few months ago, and have five published by Devine Destinies thanks to Scrivener. It’s unbelievable. We both work on the same manuscript and the software makes it so easy to collaborate. Moving sections between different stories, sharing lists of characters, it’s all so easy. Neither of us are really computer literate, and we’re getting on in years, but the software is very intuitive and easy to pick up. I’m sure there are many more gems to find in the software and we’re looking forward to finding them.

Italian author of Panta rei and other works.

SCRIVENER: THE BEST WRITER TOOL

Any time that I start a new novel, I’m always afraid on how to manage characters, document research, post it, last brilliant thought, poems, places… and the classical CRASH regarding file size.

Since my works are normally around 600-800 pages (where obviously I need to write at least 1400 rough pages) the problem of organisation, info materials, pictures and so on, is a tremendous headache.

When I discovered Scrivener and its superb features, all my writer life changed.

Now, I can get and manage in real time, in just one place, all the material I need to go further and how deeply I want in my job. Sincerely, I think that Scrivener is so important to create good jobs as the sculptor tool could be. I hope Keith earns enough money to internationalise his software. Because all of us are expecting here more dictionaries, thesaurus and all the features that can help writers to feel comfortable with their job.

One more time, thanks to work with what is the most important writers need: No crash dealing with big files 🙂

Good job.

Financial Times columnist.

Scrivener is the best writing software program ever. For about £30 — yes, it really does cost so little — Scrivener answers every requirement anyone who writes long documents has ever dreamt of, plus some that are beyond imagining.

Journalist and author of The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

I know books were written before Scrivener, but I’m not sure how. And I certainly don’t care to find out. This program made it possible for me to think, compose, edit, and effectively use research, all while protecting the good people of Brooklyn from thrown laptops. Its only major shortcoming is that everyone doesn’t use it yet, meaning constantly jarring and injurious returns to Microsoft Word once a chapter was in the world. But other than that, five stars, and my heartfelt admiration. Scrivener is the Bruce Lee of word processors.

Award-winning journalist and author of Murder in the High Himalaya.

Murder in the High Himalaya was a highly complex and detailed book to report combining history, front line reportage, investigative elements and interviews with hundreds of sources. In the early stages of the project it was easy to be overwhelmed with so much material. I scouted around for a way to manage all my research and was intrigued to come across Scrivener. I struggled with the program at first but Keith wrote back personally every time to my queries — which I found most impressive — as I’m heartily sick of being routed through to conference calling centers when I need immediate tech support. Quickly, the program became indispensible in writing Murder in the High Himalaya. I was able to drag and drop chapters, access research with the click of a button and cut material effortlessly. All this enabled me to focus on the narrative at hand which I believe made me so much more creative and industrious and, Murder in the High Himalaya, the best book it could be.

Copywriter and eZine publisher.

I’m a direct response copywriter and have to do a lot of research and organizing to put together a sales piece. I’ve tried all kinds of outliner programs and have the most upgraded standard word processing programs, but only Scrivener seems to do what I need it to do. I can sketch out the pitch in index cards, fill out the related documents with all my research, and then easily jump around in the split screen to reorganize as I write. What’s really important to me is the ability to do this both quickly AND without the fear of crashing. Even though Scrivener is a lot more reasonably priced than other options, it also seems to be a lot more stable. And the auto-save feature is truly in the background (no spinning beach balls!). Great stuff.

 Award-winning author of The Starlight Club novels, The Time Portal series, and many more.

I tried writing my first book using Word, but I lost most of my work when Word crashed. I investigated other writing programs and none satisfied me until I had the good fortune to discover Scrivener. Since using Scrivener I have written 11 complete novels and I am currently working on my 12th book. Scrivener is exactly what I needed then and what I wouldn’t part with now. With Scrivener you can organize your work to suit your particular needs. For example, in my case I list my chapters on the left side of the screen. Also on the left side I created a folder for my characters, another folder for my research. The body of my work is in the center and my notes for each chapter on the right side. Scrivener is the perfect writing program and my books prove my point. If anyone would like to contact me to discuss Scrivener you can email me at corsobooks@yahoo.com

Author of Apology for the Woman Writing, In Gratitude, Only Human, Stranger On A Train and Rainforest. 

I use Scrivener with great pleasure for all my writing: journalism and books, fiction and non-fiction. It lets me work the way I want, keeping my research and notes close by and visible, or out of my way, and enables me to play around with structure easily. The interface and overall concept is elegant and flexible. It offers me multiple ways of seeing my work, but when I need to, I can just write without distraction. Not just useful, but a real pleasure.

Author of The Polaris Uprising and Retrograde.

When I learned about Scrivener, I must confess, my first thought was, “I don’t get it. Why would I use this instead of Word?” But it was only $40 and I’d seen so many other writers rave about it that I decided it was worth a shot. The rest, as they say, is history. I’m not sure how I ever wrote without Scrivener. The flexibility in managing scenes, the ability to consolidate all of my story notes in one place, the dead easy process for formatting and exporting publish-ready PDFs and ebooks, and the CORKBOARD — have I mentioned the corkboard?? I’m still learning all of the ins-and-outs of this Swiss Army Knife of writing tools, but already it is the most valuable one I have in my toolbox. Scrivener has a lifelong fan in me.

New York Times bestselling and award-winning romantic novelist. Her novels include Bet Me and Sizzle.

I love Scrivener. It breaks the mass of information and draft text I need to do a 100,000 word novel into pieces that make sense in storytelling instead of following a rigid, non-intuitive outline. One scene per file means one index card per scene with the crucial information on it so I can work deep in a scene in detail and then with one click see that scene in the context of the entire book. I’ve got my reference photos in the column by the scene at all times, no clicking around on my desktop to find them, and my URLs are there, too, if I need to go back and check my sources. I can move scenes around, double check to make sure I’m distributing my point-of-views evenly, check on the word counts of my acts… it marries the flexibility I need to stay creative with the organization I need to save time and see the book as a whole. It’s simply the best software ever for writing a novel. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Author of five bestselling aviation books; adventure columnist for AOPA Flight Training, a national newsstand magazine; and former Barnes & Noble author of the month. Greg’s book for general audiences, Flying Carpet, has been compared by reviewers to classic road trip books like On the Road, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

After reading a glowing review of Scrivenerlast year, I saw the potential to hugely ease the challenge of collecting and organizing book scenes, notes, and ideas, and moving them around my manuscripts. Well, I downloaded the free trial and dug into it, and must say that I was totally blown away by how effective, intuitive, and productive it is. Think of Scrivener as a corkboard where you can organize and search all your text clips and ideas at will — then compile them from a single window into a final Word (or other word-processing) manuscript when you are done. For me the program’s biggest “Eureka” feature is the ability to readily clip and paste between chapters, seeing and changing each of them separately while at the same time concurrently modifying the whole. I also like the ability to easily compare and combine drafts of the same chapter via a single window. I long ago imported my current book projects and am having a blast making them happen at rates many times faster than what I could do before. And the online forum support has been terrific. Wish I’d had this program to write my first five books! Check out Scrivener if you are a writer and a Mac-head — you’ll immediately be hooked. (Watch the online video to see all the cool stuff it does.) The only downside is that after becoming a hero in my writers group thanks to showing around Scrivener, the PC-Windows users became upset when they realized they couldn’t use it. There is some good news, though. One of my PC-Windows writing compatriots is switching to Mac — just so she can use Scrivener! Many thanks to the L&L folks for so dramatically improving my writing life and efficiency!

Published a broad array of articles on workplace bullying and abrasive behaviours, working with the likes of Caltech, UCLA, USC and many business orientated organisations.

You should know you saved me with this software. I’m getting organized, finally. I am a nonfiction writer/researcher and have tons of stuff on my computer that I need for my latest book and have not been able to get it in any order that’s usable. In no time I figured out the Scrivener system and started plugging in my data. Now, I’m able to work on my research and find my notes and couldn’t be more pleased.

Author of Love Engineered.

I’ve tried several novel writing software tools and they’ve all been rubbish. Then I found Scrivener and after watching the demonstration video I knew it was different. I downloaded the software for trial but purchased it before the 30 days were up, I was so impressed. It’s really helped my writing output increase, and it’s an incredibly powerful tool. My favourite feature is being able to import research files, websites and other media so everything is together in one place. I won’t be using anything else to write with.

New York Times bestselling author of Adrenaline, Panic and Fear.

I have published 12 novels in 25 countries. Tried Scrivener before, couldn’t quite make it work for me, tried it again as I started a new book, now it’s working great and I love it. Thanks for making such brilliant software.

Award-winning author of the New York Times bestseller Girl in Translation and Mambo in Chinatown. 

Like many other authors, I wrote my first book on Word. I had folders full of research files, character sketches, timelines, creative musings, themes, cut scenes, etc. It was a true mess. At any given time, I had about 10 files open simultaneously so I could refer to all of my notes but I wasted much time constantly searching for the right file. In order to try to get a true grasp of my book, I made all kinds of diagrams and outlines, many of which I would promptly lose. The worst was when I did comprehensive edits on the 400-page manuscript and had to cut and move large chunks of text. By the time I’d cut one scene, I had to search all through the manuscript again to find the spot I wanted to place it. If I then changed my mind, it was a big undertaking to put it all back again. Using Word on a book-length manuscript was like wrestling with an elephant.

Then another author told me about Scrivener. By then, I’d sold my debut novel and become a professional writer. I knew what I needed. I actually bought a Mac so that I could use Scrivener because it wasn’t available for PCs at that time. Scrivener took away all of my problems. I started and am finishing my next novel entirely on Scrivener. Scrivener isn’t a piece of writing software, so it doesn’t confine me creatively at all. It just makes everything I need to do as an author much easier. I see an outline on the left side of the page which holds all of my character sketches, outlines, timelines, research, etc. I can easily click from file to file. I can look at the manuscript as text or I can see the scene outline without effort. It’s a piece of cake to move a scene from one place to another, or to move it back again. I can select every scene of one story or character and make sure that it is flowing smoothly. Word is a fine program but Scrivener was designed for people who need to work with book-length manuscripts. I would never write a book without Scrivener again.

New York Times bestselling author of If I Am Missing or Dead and board member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors.

Before I discovered Scrivener I used index cards and thumb tacks to find the narrative arc of a piece. Audio tapes were in one shoe box, my videos were filed somewhere else, the photos I use to capture details were somewhere else still. Now everything’s in one place on my computer, linked and intuitively accessible. For a recent project I moved my scenes around, flowed them into one document, rearranged them, reflowed them, until I found the project’s shape. No cut-and-paste-and-find-where-you-were-going-to-put-it! Scrivener is a tremendous tool that frees my brain up to be creative, and it’s a lot easier to take on the road than a bulletin board full of index cards.

Author of Tell, Don’t Show! 

For years I looked for a reason to switch from paper-and-pen over to software for writers. That looking finally stopped when I found Scrivener. The writing methods and routines that took me years to develop all transferred over to Scrivener perfectly, without so much as a hiccup. Scrivener allowed me to write and publish my bestselling little ebook Tell, Don’t Show! in less than 8 hours from start to finish. I vigorously recommend Scrivener to all my writer friends and students.

Life coach, motivational speaker and author of Starting Again: How to rebuild your life when relationships change or end.

As a new non-fiction writer, Scrivener was an absolute godsend of an app. I love the way you can store everything — copy, quotes, research, planning and notes — in just one place and access them immediately without having to search countless folders and files. It also made the whole process of writing that much more enjoyable to the point that I can’t wait to get started on my next book!

Author of the cult classic horror novel Day by Day Armageddon.

For me Scrivener was the only real choice in novel writing software. All my macabre thoughts multiplexed into one remarkable piece of software. A-10 ‘Warthog’ IR gun camera footage? Iridium phone satellite orbits? My early writings that tie into my current novel? Drag them all into the research category and be done with it!

Truly remarkable — a game changer in novel writing.

Author of The Scarlet Crane.

I’ve just posted a Kindle edition of my first book, The Scarlet Crane (a supernatural thriller), on Amazon. A print edition will be available in the next few weeks. I used Scrivener (Mac) to write the book — as a repository for research notes and scraps of plot ideas, as well as the text itself, through multiple revisions. I began writing immediately after loading Scrivener and was easily able to learn the program’s depths as my needs grew more complex. I’m convinced Scrivener shaved weeks from the time required to complete the book and prepare it for publication. An incredible program with great flexibility and a responsive developer and support staff backing it up. Strongly recommended.

Indie writer, speaker, and broadcaster.

Scrivener gives you the freedom to make a mess, the confidence to know you’ll clean it up, and the semantic relationships to tie it all together in whatever way makes the most sense to you.

Author of the new book Employment Rage/What You’ve Lost and How to Get it Back.

Just wanted to take a moment to let you know that my new book, Employment Rage/What You’ve Lost and How to Get it Back was completely written utilizing Scrivener. After moving from Windows to a Mac, I was told there were wonderful, magical programs only available for the MAC so I searched around. I was impressed by some but Scrivener is in a class by itself.

Those of us who write know that a book grows and develops in a way that is nonlinear. Ideas pop and text needs to be sectioned and a corkboard is an absolute requirement. It is all here — and more. Want some great advice? Buy this program, spend some time with it and see how it helps you to be a better writer. After that? Kiss Word goodbye and enjoy the freedom and the functionality and the ride that only Scrivener can give you.

Author of Hawkspar, The Secret Texts and Talyn.

While there are dozens of reasons to buy a Mac, if you’re a novelist, you only need one. Scrivener. I use it every day, and it’s the only thing that’s had such a positive impact on my writing — making my work both easier and more fun — since I went from the typewriter to a computer back in 1986. The notecarding feature alone is worth the price of admission. But then, so are ten or fifteen other features I could name.

Author of Antisocial and many other titles.

There was a point about one month into my first using Scrivener when I realized just how much it had changed how I worked, how much easier the task had become, and I just started crying in relief. I had no idea how much of the story I was stringing together in my head, trying to keep a whole universe balanced while I worked, not until Scrivener helped me lay it out across a binder. The key for me was being able to compose scene by scene and move them around as needed, to skip whole sections of story or include them only as notes without having to use an additional document or paper notebook to keep the mess straight. Since using Scrivener I write much faster, and now years into use of the program I’m creating custom templates and labels, getting wicked with keywords, and in general writing smarter as well as faster. It helps me professionally as well: I keep my correspondence with my publisher in the binder, right beneath the research notes I use to double-check information during copy edits. I’ve also been able to customize exports of drafts for beta readers and for professional formatting in a way I could never have done with Microsoft Word.

I could write without Scrivener, yes, but I’d never choose to do so. Thanks for making my life so much easier and helping me make my stories stronger.

Provides commercial writing and ghost-writing projects, delivering everything from snappy news articles to full-length books. Clients include T3 Magazine, Fast Car Magazine, Digital Camera Magazine and TechCrunch.

Scrivener has made such an incredible difference to the way that I work that I wouldn’t be without it anymore. Most of my work is factual, and planning out chapters, sections, and keeping all my notes, attachments and references with the manuscript is a godsend. For freelance work it’s even better: One file per customer, so I have everything I’ve ever written for, say T3 Magazine (t3.com) in one place. Much easier than having a thousand individual Word documents kicking about in myriad folders!

Author of Lord Tophet, Shadowbridge (Del Rey/Random House) and many more books and stories.

I’ve been using Scrivener now for a little over over a year and cannot imagine how I wrote novels without it. It is a paradigm shift from word processors equivalent to the shift from clay tablets to typewriters. It allows for a flexibility and organizational structure that’s nonpareil. I (and other writers I’ve pointed in its direction) can only say thank you for making my work not only more productive but more adaptable to experimentation and flow.

Author of Mastering Organizational Knowledge Flow: How to Make Knowledge Sharing Work.

What I really liked about Scrivener was that it helped you so much to concentrate on the job at hand, which is mainly writing. While other text processing tools make you fight with formatting much too early, due to the clear focus of Scrivener for writing it really helped to make my first book project a much easier task, than I had thought it might turn out to be. I especially liked the way you can blank out everything but the actual page you are writing on, the drag and drop of content pieces across chapters and the motivating word and page counts.

Writer and user from the Netherlands.

I just finished my book. In Scrivener. So, it works. Thank you for a great program.

Comics writer and novelist, author of Wasteland, the Alex Rider graphic novels and Stealing Life.

Scrivener is the biggest leap forward in writing software since the venerable days of WordPerfect, and believe me, I’ve tried them all. It adapts to my workflow, rather than imposing one on me, which is vital for working on multiple books in different formats. Scrivener has become my primary writing tool for both comics and prose, and unlike certain other writing programs I actually look forward to working in it all day. My productivity is up, my blood pressure is down, and my credit card didn’t even blink. I look back and wonder how I ever worked without it.

Author of Hell and Eternity – It’s all Greek to me.

Just wanted to say that Scrivener is so awesome! I’m a self-published author and formatting can be an absolute nightmare when it comes to putting your book online. Often times the formatting will get messed up, resulting in an inaccurate Table of Contents (page numbers are off), foot notes on the wrong page, and more things any author does not want. Scrivener simplified the whole process and now I don’t have to spend hours trying to format things “just right”.

Author of Elizabethan fantasy The Alchemist of Souls and The Merchant of Dreams.

I’ve been using Scrivener since 2007 and I don’t know what I’d do without it. Scrivener makes managing a complex, multi-viewpoint narrative a breeze, and the ability to sync over the internet with applications on my iPad and iPhone means I can write anywhere. Add in some of the best ebook export tools around (great for getting review copies out there quickly and professionally), and you have an end-to-end solution for writers of fiction and non-fiction alike.

Author of fourteen novels, including The Clockwork Vampire Chronicles, Theme Planet, Spiral and Serial Killers Incorporated. He runs his own publishing house, Anarchy Books, and is the editor of Ultimate Adventure Magazine.

Scrivener is the perfect wordplay tool for the discerning writer. Not only is it rock-solid stable, it makes the whole composition of novel or screenplay much more fluid, enjoyable and logical — and all with the bonus of writer specific tools such as synopsis cards, easy chapter splitting and logical research access. I use Scrivener to write my novels, screenplays and radioplays, and it is pleasure to use, but much more — I now use it for the construction and editing of ebooks for my publishing company, Anarchy Books. In this regard, Scrivener is the perfect ebook creation tool and I cannot recommend it enough!

Historian, associate professor, author of The Fall of the Soviet Union, 1982-1991.

After three years of working with it, Scrivener is now the software I couldn’t live without. As a historian visiting archives, I constantly use it to take notes from documents. As a writer, Scrivener helps me tremendously to keep my historical narrative crisp and clear. As a cinema specialist, I use it for databases. Needless to say, Microsoft Word appears completely outdated — Scrivener allows me to look and find information very quickly, and to keep everything I need in just one file! The software is so light and it never bogged on my machine, what a relief. As we say in France—”l’essayer, c’est l’adopter” (“to try it is to adopt it”).

Along with Miriam Peskowitz, is the author of The Daring Book For Girls along with the rest of the The Daring Series.

Scrivener is hands-down the best tool I’ve ever used for writing and organizing research. It’s hard to pick my favorite aspect of it, because all of Scrivener is so useful and practical, but I have to say I absolutely love the distraction-free full screen effect. Thanks for making my writing life easier!

Author of Homo Sapiens Berliner Art.

Scrivener has changed the way I write and the way I think about writing — it surely is one of the best tools I have ever used both for fiction and non-fiction. Why? Because it saves time.

PhD MB.ChB (Hons), FRCR, FRCP, FBIR, is the Professor of Radiology at University of Manchester and has published many medical research papers.

I never do this, but I really just wanted to write with an unsolicited testimonial.

I run a large medical research group in advanced imaging sciences. I recently started using Scrivener and it has completely transformed the way that I work. It is without any doubt the best tool I have ever used for the compilation of large review articles. Increasingly I am using it for project management as a kind of self-contained intelligent box file.

Works in television and film production in Los Angeles writing and producing for the likes of 20th Century Fox, Universal and Sony Pictures on projects including Joss Whedon’s Serenity, James Cameron’s Ghosts of the Abyss and ABC’s television series Lost.

I’ve been meaning to send this email for ages. Your program is amazing and has completely changed the way I’m able to write. I’ve used Scrivener over the past year to script a number of documentary and narrative projects, and have been blown away by how easy Scrivener makes it to organize my thoughts. Documentary scripts are, by their very nature, a clutter of disorganized and disparate ideas that are a challenge to wrestle into any sort of cohesive shape under the best of circumstances. Having the ability to easily organize my interview transcripts in the research folder, then being able to drag and drop soundbites into the draft of my script, has quickly become the only way I’m able to work.

For my narrative projects, Scrivener solves my most basic and frequent problem: It allows me to dive in and just start writing, without needing to read and re-read what I’ve written before. Write now, organize later… what a simple and incredible idea.

Thanks so much for all of your hard work on Scrivener. The downside is that I’ve run dry on some of my best excuses to procrastinate, but in the very best sense, it’s just been a real eye-opener to use a tool that is so well suited to the way a writer thinks and works.

New York Times bestselling author.

After year of suffering with Microsoft Word, I’ve finally found a program that makes it easy for me to write the way I want to write! I’ll never go back.

Senior lecturer in Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago. He is author of Boom, Bust, Exodus: The Rust Belt, the Maquilas, and a Tale of Two Cities and writes for The Atlantic.

Scrivener revolutionized my writing life and I’d be a mess without it. Boom, Bust, Exodus is a collection of interwoven storylines from multiple settings in two countries that I collected in over a decade of sociological field research. It was a huge project, and it blew up Word early. When I found Scrivener, I suddenly had a tool that not only helped me to create, but also to play with structure, to add important annotations and crazy ideas to try out, and, crucially, to organize interview transcriptions, timelines, journal and newspaper articles, and government reports—and to have all of it right there, at the ready. I’m a dyed-in-the-wool organizer, and Scrivener helped me tame this beast of a project. I now also use it for structuring presentations, radio interviews, op-eds, and short articles, including this testimonial! It is simple, intuitive, and powerful, and it made my book better than it would have been without it. It’s just so good, and ridiculous value to boot.

The author of some twenty books, including the Young Sherlock Holmes series.

Scrivener has made my writing life so much easier and so much more fun. As I write these words I’m looking at a real cork board attached to my office wall, with real file cards pinned to it, all connected together by lengths of differently coloured wool, and all so that I could keep track of how the plot and the characters flowed through the book I was writing at the time. I’m keeping it there for historical purposes, because I don’t need to do it that way any more. Scrivener can do it for me, and the more features, tricks and techniques I find out about, the more I love it. Moving sections of text around to where they work best used to be a major physical and mental chore—now it’s intuitive and simple. Thanks, Literature and Latte—my productivity and creativity are so much better now that I don’t have to worry about the actual writing process.

Husband and wife authors of The 12 Bottle Bar.

Scrivener is the perfect tool for writing a cookbook — or, in our case, a cocktail book — especially one laced with hundreds of anecdotes, quotes, and sidebars. Working as a team, we found Scrivener to be an invaluable resource for dividing up work and tracking progress — allowing us to work independently from one another, easily merge parts together, and check in completed sections. Shuffling parts from here to there was a breeze, as was discarding sections to the Research folder — and resurrecting them again when needed. We truly can’t imagine writing another book without using Scrivener.

One of the world’s leading authorities on global security, TED speaker, and author of Future Crimes: Everything is Connected, Everyone is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It.

Thanks to Keith Blount, founder of Literature & Latte’s Scrivener, the world’s greatest writing program. Without Scrivener, it would have been nearly impossible to organize the hundreds of cases and thousands of pages of research materials that went into the creation of this book.

Lead writer for Gears of War 3 and a #1 New York Times bestselling novelist.

Just wanted to say that after taking the plunge and using Scrivener in earnest for my current book, it’s proved to be a godsend. Just the ability to shunt scenes around fast is worth the switchover from a regular WP app on its own, let alone the rest of the features. I’m finding more useful things I can tailor to my own needs every day. This is what working writers need – it does the core stuff well, and doesn’t force extra functions down your throat unless you want them. I doubt I’ll be going back to my old software habits. I’d thought it was yet another hobby app at first but this is genuinely for working writers with real deadlines and monster workloads.

Lead writer for Gears of War 3 and a #1 New York Times bestselling novelist.

Just wanted to say that after taking the plunge and using Scrivener in earnest for my current book, it’s proved to be a godsend. Just the ability to shunt scenes around fast is worth the switchover from a regular WP app on its own, let alone the rest of the features. I’m finding more useful things I can tailor to my own needs every day. This is what working writers need – it does the core stuff well, and doesn’t force extra functions down your throat unless you want them. I doubt I’ll be going back to my old software habits. I’d thought it was yet another hobby app at first but this is genuinely for working writers with real deadlines and monster workloads.

Long-listed for the 2004 Booker Prize for his novel Always the Sun and screenwriter for the acclaimed BBC1 show Spooks. More recently a writer for Doctor Who, screenwriter for Luther and scriptwriter for US box office number 1 film Mama.

The last few years have seen the appearance of several OS X applications designed for the use of writers. Many of these applications are very good — but every one is in some way lacking. I’ve tried them all, and none has been more than a temporary home; a good place to stay until something better came along. And guess what — it finally did. Scrivener incorporates and improves the best aspects of its progenitors and, in doing so, exceeds them all. As a writer’s application, Scrivener is damn near perfect; it means outlines, treatments and then first drafts can be put together in the same application.

New York Times bestselling author of Bad Things, Spares, Only Forward and The Straw Men.

Scrivener is where I live. I’m planning the next novel, two screenplays and a couple of short stories with it and it’s amazing how fluid the software makes the process. I genuinely think this is the biggest software advance for writers since the word processor.

Scrivener gives you the freedom to make a mess, the confidence to know you’ll clean it up, and the semantic relationships to tie it all together in whatever way makes the most sense to you.

Host of The Incomparable Podcast and a board member of National Novel Writing Month.

Scrivener is one of the finds of the last ten years.

If there was a list of the top five greatest apps of all time in the Mac App Store, it would start with Scrivener and then there would be four other things.