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Ask HN: What tool/app do you use for writing a non-fiction book?

by lukasfischer on 4/6/22, 6:59 PM with 1 comments

I used Scrivener, Google Docs, LeanPub (online editor) but I’m not happy with all of them. I especially need a way to document research and rearranging chapters. Scrivener is awesome for that, but it’s mobile app and cloud sync is so crappy. And the final book generation (pdf, epub, etc.) is really clunky. I discovered leanpub a couple of months ago and it’s simplicity and fast generation is cool, but the online editor is not available on mobile and the asset management is way too simple.

  • by chipotle_coyote on 4/6/22, 9:43 PM

    This isn't an easy problem to solve because all writers are idiosyncratic. :)

    I largely moved from Scrivener to Ulysses, which is Markdown-centric, maintains feature parity between the Mac app and the iPad/iPhone apps, and has pretty rock-solid syncing. But it doesn't have Scrivener's "import anything into your project" approach to saving research material -- it doesn't have anything I would describe as "asset management," period, although documents can embed images -- and is, if anything, even more opinionated about How To Do Things, and you may not share its opinions. And, it's Apple-only, which could be a dealbreaker depending on your ecosystem.