A Product Marketing Blog

The world of creating software has seen a lot of changes over the last couple of years. Not long ago, most book writing software such as Scrivener or Ulysses was built on desktop. These founders had little choice as the internet was yet to be explored.

As the internet matured, online creators were enabled. They adopted easy-to-use coding languages and tools for building online software. This led to the realization that they could build companies online without a huge investment.

The online software world exploded for thousands of industries, yet many industries still found difficulty with placing a foothold in it. One such industry included the professional writing industry. That’s why I founded Squibler, a writing software that finally cracks the code.

Why a Writing Software Hasn’t Found its Foothold

As I’ve interviewed writers and authors, the answer was clear. The majority of professional writers are over the age of thirty. Most over forty. They expressed their hesitancy to try new writing software as they aren’t technology enthusiasts.

One ghostwriter noted, “I live in Microsoft Word. And I’m old. I have no desire to learn more software.”

Even though she was only forty-three years old, she couldn’t bear learning another software program especially with her three kids running around.

The problem isn’t that she didn’t want to learn another writing software, but the writing software alternatives to Microsoft Word weren’t easy to learn. For example, the number one book writing software outside of Microsoft Word is Scrivener. And the number one complaint about Scrivener is that the learning curve is too high.

This Amazon review comparing Scrivener to Adobe is particularly interesting. The reason is Canva, a design tool now valued at over a billion dollars, aimed to be the easier version of Adobe for designers. It accomplished this through the effective use of personalization with onboarding and templates. Personalization keeps users engaged, delighted, increases word-of-mouth referrals and much more.

The stats around what makes a SaaS company successful say personalization is at the forefront. It creates a deeper relationship with your customers and increases activation and retention rates which directly lead to more revenue.

Improving activation—which takes place when users first experience the value you promised—by only 25% can result in a 34.30% lift in monthly recurring revenue (MRR).

For users who aren’t technology-savvy, this increase in activation through personalization has a much more valuable outcome. If you’re already scared to try a new book writing software, then there’s only one way to get you to adopt it. It’s an onboarding experience that provides a feeling that every step is personalized to your exact needs and gets you your first win fast.

Based on how the writing software personalizes this journey, you may receive a drip campaign that incorporates relevant articles, tutorials, webinars, and case studies. This will help onboard new trial users deep into understanding your software and community.

Personalizing a Writing Software with Onboarding

It’s hard to know what a personalized writing experience looks like until you see it done by others. For example, Wix has one of the best-personalized new-trial journeys to provide you the exact website template and educational content you need to become a successful customer.

Not every software can do this. You need potential users who have a large enough anticipation of investment to where they’re willing to answer a few questions. The wanting to create a website is filled with a large anticipation of investment which makes this work. The good news? So is writing a book.

After you enter your email in Wix’s website form, you get a prompt to follow a couple of steps to identify what type of website creator you are. I’ll show you how this can be done for a book writing software.

After you click, “Let’s Do It,” you’ll see this screen below.

For a book writing software, we could shorten the text to “I want to” then list these options:

• “write a book”
• “write a short story”
• “write a screenplay”
• “practice my writing”

Each time you provide an answer, Wix offers you the ability to provide another one. By the end, you’ve given them four important facts about yourself to help them market to you better.

For a book writing software, the second line of text could read “It should be” then have these options if you previously selected “write a book”

• A fiction novel
• Non-fiction book

The next word could read, “about”. If you selected “A fiction novel”, it will give you these options:

• Fantasy
• Romance
• Thriller
• Children’s Story
• Mystery

The next phrase could say, “I’d like to write” then give you these options:

• 15 minutes a day
• 30 minutes a day
• 60 minutes or more a day

The lasts few words could say, “toward publishing it.”

For example, let’s say I now know you want to write a fantasy fiction novel and devote 30 minutes a day to it. This tells me that you probably have a part-time or full-time job because you didn’t select “60 minutes or more.”

Moreover, I know to show you all the fantasy fiction novel templates right away to ease you into the software. When you’re done using the software for the day, I can then remind you every 24 hours that you committed 30 minutes to write your book.

If a writer had chosen “practice my writing” we could have just as easily personalized their onboarding experience by asking if it’s “storytelling skills,” “copywriting skills,” or “academic writing skills” they’re looking to improve.

Personalizing a Writing Software with Templates

B2C SaaS companies use templates because they’re one of the highest converting features to getting users to opt-in to a paid subscription. The reason is templates provide immediate value to the user. It gives them the thought “I can do this. Investing time in this software will bring me results.”

Many writers rather start with a blank editor. However, a high percentage of these trial users get motivated to implement a template when they realize it’s easier to do than writing from a blank slate. Rather than go back to the template’s page outside of the editor, it can be provided within. On the left-hand side, we can include a layout of writing templates to select similar to Canva.

If the user feels the templates take up too much screen space, they can click the back button you see the red arrow pointing to. This gives the writer full visualization of their writing area, which is critical to keeping a minimalist design which many writers enjoy.

To understand how valuable templates are inside the editor, let’s explore. For example, with Canva, many designers work on several templates a day. For writers working on a book or a screenplay, it may be one every six months. For that reason, an entire book or screenplay template may not provide value by being easily accessible in the editor.

This bring us to these two questions:

What does a writer make many iterations on that would need to be easily accessible within the editor? Something that personalizes the experience. Maybe the answer is hard to find because it’s not something that gets published per se.

Writers constantly need inspiration for the most critical part of creating a successful book or screenplay – the outlining. In fact, according to a recent poll I conducted, 50 percent of book writers use images from the web for inspiration. For characters and settings, they search Google and Pinterest for these images. For text, they use name and description generators.

“Fantasy name generator” gets searched over 400,000 times globally a month. That’s only search volume, too.

To use templatized inspiration as a way to help writers brainstorm, it could be a feature that resembles the one below from video marketing tool, Lumen5. This feature helps you pull the right media for the inspiration you need.

There are two primary questions we need to answer to make a media searching feature possible for writers:

1. How does the media searching feature work in relation to a note and summary section?

We ask this question because the note and summary section are where writers brainstorm. In parallel, these are the primary areas where they’ll input the results from the media search feature whether images, text and even audio.

2. How do we limit the search media feature to not overwhelm the writer while still providing enough value to increase overall retention of our product?

This feature could be a winner. However, if it’s implemented with too many whistles and bells, it may scare off a lot of writers. There’s a perfect balance here, and it will take some work to find it.

Personalizing a Writing Software with Goals

The closest activity and learning curve comparison to writing a book is learning a new language. Duolingo is the number one language learning tool. It got there because of it’s focus on gamification to keep users coming back to learn a new language.

How it works is if you come back to use Duolingo the following day, they’ll reward you with experience to access new levels and add another +1 to your streak. The higher your streak, the harder it is to break. Just like any habit. It works when you work it.

As Jeroen from Salesflare notes, the team also introduced “weekend amulets”, “streak repair”, “streak freeze.” These features helped people believe they can make up for their failures. Introducing the amulet alone was responsible for a 4% increase in 14-day retention.

They continued to find ways to increase retention with the introduction of the in-app coach called “Duo.” Duo is Duolingo’s owl mascot. Not everyone fell in love, but it moved the needle.

To be exact, it improved 14-day retention by 7.2%. Part of this can be attributed to the idea that people perform more consistently with social pressure. “Duo” as the mascot that’s always there provides that pressure.

For a writing software, it’s almost as simple as copying what Duolingo did right and then personalizing it to the intention of a new trial user for the writing software.

If someone uses the writing software with the intent to only edit, then the gamification needs to change. If someone uses the writing software with the intention to only practice with writing prompts, then again, it needs to change.

Because there are so many different intentions among writers, the analytics and data science behind the personalization of gamification in creating a writing habit has to be extremely segmented.

Personalizing a Writing Software with Practice

More writers rather practice their writing to improve it than write a book. The reason is it’s easier to practice writing than to set a lofty goal to be completed like writing a screenplay, especially when that goal may take more than a year to accomplish.

There are many ways to practice your writing online. Most of them are fragmented, and almost all of them have these two common themes:

1. You can’t save your work
2. If there’s a writing prompt, there’s no editor to type

There’s one example that stands apart from the crowd. That’s The Most Dangerous Writing App. This app allows you to use an editor to type. The catch-22 is there’s no writing prompt and you can’t save your work. You have to think of the words on your own.

The Most Dangerous Writing App

This writing software is widely used by teachers and students. Moreover, they have several hundred high-quality sites linking to it. This goes to show the value this writing software has provided since launching.

Random First Line Prompts

This is one of my favorite writing exercise tools. The reason is when you use it, you get prompted to write based on an opening sentence.

The con is there’s no editor so you need to copy and paste this line into a Google Doc or a writing software such as Squibler. There you can continue the story and save your work.

Random First Line of Dialogue

The aim of this writing tool is to help with dialogue writing. This can be useful for scriptwriting and screenwriting, as well as narrative writing.

Again, the con is there’s no editor so you need to copy and paste this line into a Google Doc or a writing software such as Squibler.

Personalizing a Writing Software with Layout

Many writers want to start with a blank editor with the option to customize along. For example, if the writer is writing a short story without chapters and scenes, they don’t want a list of chapter and scene features to be present. Or, if the writer doesn’t like commenting, then they don’t need the comment option taking up a great deal of space.

One way to solve this is to have templates auto-check and uncheck particular features in the editor. For example, if I choose a book template rather than a screenplay template, the editor will adjust accordingly. This way, I always get an editor that’s personalized to me.

Here’s a screenshot from Google Docs of what checking a certain feature may look like.

The question we need to ask –

How much does personalization matter within the editor (outside of notes and summaries)?

I ask this because the reason is people don’t often need to adjust from writing a screenplay to writing a book, to say the least. It’s like changing your mind from learning Spanish to French.

If personalization for the editor’s layout features only solves a one-time problem, and that problem for a trial user is every six months, then it’s not valuable.

For example, when people use Canva there often using many different templates throughout a single week. This makes the tool’s personalization with in-canvas templates exceptionally useful.

To that end, the writing software editor must be geared to those who want to practice their writing if it’s to hold high value.

The reason for this is many book writers and screenplay writers enjoy practicing their writing. When they practice writing, they often prefer a different editor than when writing their book. Moreover, people who practice writing, use tools like The Most Dangerous Writing App or Random First Line Prompt.

If this is true, then the question we need to answer is –

How do we personalize an editor to cater to those who want to practice their writing, write books, and screenplays?

The possible answer lies within this check-mark personalization. That if someone goes through the onboarding process and selects, “Practice My Writing,” we’ll show them an editor that people prefer to use when practicing.

This editor may have an option to use a dialogue generator, random line generator, and even a timed writing feature – where if you don’t write fast enough, it erases your work.

A better UX and UI check mark system could look similar to the one below taken from Grammarly. For example, if my intent is to write better dialogue for a certain audience with a particular style and emotion, then the editor will generate the right dialogue phrases to continue with.

On the other hand, if a user decides to write a book, then what they see is an option like the one below where it check marks or turns on the type of book outline they’d prefer.

If they were writing a romance fiction novel, then it’d turn on the “Romance Fiction Novel” editor. There’d be an option to turn this off to use the regular editor as well.

As a reader, know that most of what I’m writing here is theory based on expected user behavior and research I’ve done to date. Many of these assumptions may prove correct; however, many may never see the light of day as they get invalidated through further analysis.

Personalizing a Writing Software with Community

The ultimate product validation is if you can build a vibrant community around it. That means users who come back and engage with other users to learn, provide value, and entertain.

Do we create this community inside a Facebook Group or a forum?

The answer can be both.

But is it the best answer?

That answer is no because there are community-based software platforms for readers and writers with over 70 million users. Case in point, Wattpad.

However, we’re not Wattpad. To do be like them, we’d need to create marketing messages in the onboarding flow geared to both readers and writers. That means we’d have to take personalization to an extreme. That simply won’t happen for a while – or possibly never – as the product would become far too complex.

The good news is we’re fortunate that writers love to read. That means the chances of them engaging with someone else’s work by reading or commenting is relatively high.

How high?

We will have to continue implementing and testing to find out.

If the community is viable, how do we include it without overwhelming the writers and readers who use our product?

Maybe it’s an “on button” on top of the dashboard that looks like the one below. This button will enable someone to disappear the template page in exchange for a community feed right on the dashboard.

The reason is that most templates will be used for time-consuming projects like writing a book or a screenplay. As a result, they won’t be used often. They’ll help with onboarding, but afterward, they may only make the product more complex for the user. Because after they use the template, they may not need to see more book templates, especially if they’re working on the same fantasy fiction novel for the next six months.

The good news is even if the community feed gets switched on, you could always have an option on the left-hand side to start writing similar to Canva’s layout. And below – just like Canva -, you can access all your work and educational content around the writing software and writing industry.

The deeper question is –

How do you create a community feed worth paying attention to?

That question is a beast in its entirety. For the most part, it revolves around regression analysis. In other words, the feed will show you a post based on a number of variables whether comments on the post, category of the post, and even scroll-depth of readers.

Patience to See it Through

There’s a lot of work that goes into designing a writing software for every writer. That work is only made valuable through listening to users, customers, and doing significant amounts of research on the writing industry in its entirety. That’s why the best way to see it through is by using patience.

I’ve written five books with over 80,000 readers delving into them. The common theme among all these books? I started with a book outline.

Now many people detest book outlines because they believe it hinders creativity and doesn’t help them become a better writer. They have similar feelings toward book writing software. Because they rather rely purely on their imagination when connecting all the dots as they type along.

For full-time authors, this strategy is easier as they only have to think about their book. For the rest of us juggling a full-time job with writing a book, it’s important we have more structure so we don’t we forget these dots when we come back later to connect them. That’s how we become better writers.

It’s painful to skip over a book outline. For example, I wrote a 50,000-word rough draft for the first half of my fantasy book. I didn’t outline any of it. Because I was working a full-time job, I had to let go of completing the rough draft for a couple of months to focus on work-related tasks. The problem is when I came back to the rough draft, I’d forgotten why I had structured the book the way I did.

I didn’t remember the importance of many of the characters. The plot didn’t make sense anymore. Neither did the settings. Moreover, I had to re-read all 50,000 words to get a strong understanding of the book before I started writing again.

To date, I have yet to finish writing that book. However, I’ve written five other books ranging from one hundred pages to five hundred pages. All those completed books had an outline.

To understand the importance of creating the right book outline and how to implement it, let’s dive in.

Outline Your Book To Become a Better Writer

There are many reasons to outline your book:

• Write your book faster
• You can come back to your book later with ease
• You can create a better ecosystem for your book’s story without losing track of all the pieces
• If using a writing software to outline such as Squibler, you’ll have a place to store all your notes and documents to access them faster
• It helps an editor understand your story faster, which helps them edit faster (this may save you a lot of money)
• It gives you the confidence that your book is structured in a way that readers will enjoy it

Even with all these benefits to using an outline, it doesn’t guarantee your book will be a success. However, it will help you get there. Before you dive into defining the characters and settings of your book, you need to start with the most important and often overlooked factor of an outline.

A Book Outline Starts with Purpose

If you don’t have a strong purpose behind writing your book, the chances are you won’t complete it. The reason is writing a book takes a tremendous amount of effort. This includes hundreds of hours sitting at a desk and typing, many hours collaborating with your editor and book designer, and then hundreds of hours – maybe thousands – marketing your book.

Most people draw a blank face at the question of purpose. Little do they know, there’s a scientific way to find your purpose behind writing a book. It begins with testing and experimenting around what you love to do and what you love to write. This is the first critical step if you want to become a better writer.

The reason for experimenting around what you love to do is when we write, we draw from experiences. Ideally, these are experiences that have a strong meaning to us. What you love to write may be different than what you love to do. For example, I love running but I don’t write books about running.

It takes experimenting to know what you should write about. By experimenting, you’re creating MVPs of your book. For example, a good way to know whether you truly want to write a fantasy novel is by answer fantasy writing prompts.

To give you a head start, I recommend applying the Hedgehog Concept to decide what to write about. This concept is based on an ancient Greek parable by poet Archilochus that states,

“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

See, the fox tries many ways to catch the hedgehog as its food. It runs around, jumps, sneaks up and even plays dead. However, it loses because it can’t get through the hedgehog’s spines. The fox never understands that the hedgehog survives because it does one thing exceptionally well: defends itself.

This idea hit mainstream popularity when famous author and researcher, Jim Collins, expanded upon it in his classic 2001 book, Good to Great. Collins argued that companies succeed if they can identify what they can do best and grab onto it by devoting all energy and resources to pursue it.

These are the companies that survive in the long run. But there’s a lot that goes into pursuing what you can be the best at. Jim Collins noted that you need passion and understanding of the economic engine that will drive it.

If you replace the word “companies” with “writers,” you’ll understand exactly how this applies to you.

So how does this idea play into being an exceptional book writer?

You need to find the middle ground in your writing among passion, your ability to become the best, and making money. I’ve been writing almost every day for seven years. The only way to make that possible is to first believe that there’s a balance, then find it.

The belief came when I founded an online publication and realized I enjoyed the process of writing. Finding the balance came when I started working for a software company and discovered my passion for writing about technology tools.

Now, it’s up to you to find that balance. It starts with MVPing your writing subject whether with writing prompts or blog posts. Start small, then work your way up.

A Book Outline Needs Mindmapping

Many people brainstorm ideas, yet they get stuck or distracted in the process. The reason is they don’t use scientifically proven ways to brainstorm. Instead, they try different strategies like staring at the ceiling, browsing the web, or typing on a blank document whatever comes to their head. If only they knew that there’s a ten times faster process for coming with book outline ideas.

Rather than explain the process, I’ll let serial entrepreneur, Pat Flynn show you how to do it in this YouTube video:

Another way is to take the method Pat Flynn showed you, then combine it with software meant for brainstorming. One such software is called Scapple. It allows you to create notes simply by double-clicking, then connect them by dragging and dropping each note onto each other.

Scapple takes only a minute to learn and you’re ready to begin brainstorming. I use this software almost every day whether that’s for creating a book outline or writing a blog post.

A Book Outline Needs Book Writing Software

In the past, people would outline their books on notecards and sticky notes. This is an effective way to connect your ideas but far from the best. Today, there’s software with features dedicated to helping write your ideal outline. These software enable you to create notes and summaries for each book, chapter, and scene. Moreover, they provide you a way to easily search through these notes as well.

Scrivener

In Scrivener’s case, they take it one step forward by providing you book templates you can insert directly into their editor.

Scrivener is one of the top tools for outlining your book, but if you’re looking for software that’s more accessible and online, then you want to use Squibler.

Squibler

This book writing software has a number of features to outline your book better including notes and summaries for each chapter. The learning curve is seconds so you can feel like an expert fast at creating a book outline.

We just covered finding purpose when creating your book outline, how to brainstorm ideas for it and the software that can help you tie it together. Now let’s jump into what ideas you should brainstorm around such as characters, settings, and more.

Outline Your Book Characters

Outlining your book characters is by far one of the most favorite parts for aspiring authors and current authors. Because the stories around and characteristics of your characters are what provide the most emotional attachment to your book.

You can have the best setting and world-building skills, but without well-written characters, you’ll lose your reader. In this section, I’ll walk you through how you can outline your characters.

To help you brainstorm the name of your characters for your book outline, you should take into consideration these factors:

• The historical period of the story (e.g. Victorian English vs ancient Egypt)
• The subgenre niche of this story (e.g. Paranormal Romance vs Chick Literature)
• The gender of this character
• The social status of the character (e.g. upper class, middle class, working class)
• Be regional specific (e.g. Scandinavian vs Indian vs Italian)
• The ethnic background of this character
• It should be memorable if you want the character to be memorable
• It should fit the context of the story

To help you brainstorm the other details around your characters for your book outline, you should account for these factors:

Appearance

• Tall
• Short
• Slender
• Overweight
• Dark tanned skin
• Pale skin

Mannerisms and other characteristics

• Twitching
• Fidgeting
• Obsessive cleaning
• Messy
• Constantly twirling a ring or bracelet
• Obvious health problems
• Disabled
• Introspective
• Chatty and extroverted

Character Background

• Are their parents still living?
• What is their relationship with them?
• Do they live close by?
• Do their parents need care or nursing?
• Siblings
• Twin brother or sister
• Half-brother or sister
• Stepfamily
• Stepparents

Features

• Straight hair
• Curled hair
• Tattoos
• Body scars
• Body piercing
• Facial hair
• Elaborate make-up

Hometown

• Small village
• Busy city
• International traveler
• Nomad
• Foster care

Hobbies

• Do they collect things?
• Have stuffed toys in the bedroom?
• Visit art galleries and museums?
• Loves vintage cars
• Sings jazz every weekend
• Do they have pets at home?

Education

• What are their academic accomplishments?
• Are they using those qualifications?
• What’s their dream profession or lifestyle?
• What is stopping them from getting it?

Emotional Barriers and Limiting Beliefs

• Past traumatic event
• Personal experience
• Loss of a family member
• Rejection
• Betrayal by a lover
• Betrayal by a trusted friend

Current Home

• Country
• Region
• Apartment
• Condo
• Hotel
• Rented property
• Owns the property
• Shared accommodation
• Lives alone

Skills and Abilities

• Sporty
• Athletic
• Technical
• Computer geek
• Cooking
• Business and money
• Weapons

Outline Your Book Settings

When outlining your book, here are details to keep in mind when describing or brainstorming your setting(s) to make them more real to the reader:

• Landmarks
• Landscape
• Creating a sense of place
• Should instantly take a reader inside that story world.
• Specific relevant detail (e.g. blood on snow. Cherry blossom in the wind)
• Use the interior description to give an insight into the personality of the person who lives in that setting
• Include details that readers will recognize and associate with
• Use meticulous research to add telling details if you don’t know the location or visit the area in person

One of the other factors that can affect settings includes the timing around the setting. Here are timing factors to keep in mind for your book outline:

• What is the climate like?
• Holiday (e.g. Christmas, New Year)
• Spring symbolizes new beginnings and growth
• Summer symbolizes sunshine and long days
• Autumn symbolizes rich colors and reflections

Your Book Outline’s Story Structure

There are many ways to outline your book’s story structure. Below is an example that will give you an excellent starting point. This is only one way – and a common way – you can do it out of the many possibilities:

Act One (the first 25% of your novel)

• Set-up the story in the normal world. This establishes a baseline.
• Present the reader with an opening image and hook
• Create a bond between the reader and the character by making them feel sympathy or empathy towards this likable character and their situation.
• Reveal the character’s desire to the reader. What do they want?
• Some dramatic inciting incident disrupts the normal world of the main character
• This causes them to leave that normal world in response to this new situation
• At the end of Act One is a turning point with a major plot twist, revelation or clue that makes them change their plans and initiates the next phase of the story

Act Two (25% to the Midpoint)

• The characters leave the ordinary world behind and start work on their new goal
• Complications arise, stakes grow higher and challenges increase
• Allies and enemies are introduced.
• Act Two ends at the critical midpoint of no return with a major plot twist
• The character cannot go back – they have to proceed

Act Three (50% to 75% of your novel)

• More complications, challenges, and barriers
• A time factor may be introduced
• The challenges and enemies seem unbeatable
• Apparent failure, dejection, and reversal
• Leading to a crisis decision

Act Four (last 25% to 50% of your novel)

• The final showdown
• The main character must come back from this reversal and come up with a new plan of action
• The story builds to a final dramatic climax where the main character resolves their issues, faces the past and triumphs against adversity
• The final confrontation is even harder than they had imagined
• The final scenes show the character return to his normal life, transformed

Your Book Outline’s Character Arc

A character arc is the transformation or inner journey of a character over the course of a story. Here are a few thoughts to keep in mind when outlining your character arc:

• At the end of the story, does the reader see how the main characters have changed from the characters they were at the start of the book because of their romantic relationship?
• Character change = interest and engagement
• Use symbolism to demonstrate the change from the first pages to the last
• What is their short-term goal when the story starts – a simple external goal with a clear endpoint and preferably linked to a chance to achieve their longing or need –they must do this to make a big change in their life?
• What are the stakes? What happens if they do not achieve this goal? Why now?
• What is their long-term goal or longing- that deeply held desire which they have not found the courage to go after yet?
• What is their need? The thing that is missing in their life which will make it complete?
• What is their wound – the unhealing source of continuing pain? This has led to the identity mask that they show to the world – which will be chipped away during the story journey.
• What is the one overpowering dilemma in this story? And who does it belong to? The dilemma is the choice between staying in the past or moving forward and taking the risk – and it belongs to the person who changes most.

Book Outline Templates

These book writing templates will give you a head start when writing your book. Please keep in mind that these are only templates and won’t replace your creativity, but enable it.

For Scrivener book templates, note that you’ll need to download them in a .zip file. From here, you must copy and paste the extracted template file into the folder on your system where Scrivener templates are stored, or import the template through Scrivener. Please visit this post about Scrivener templates to get a more in-depth explanation on how to use them.

Scrivener Novel Templates:

1. Mystery Novel Scrivener Template

2. 4 Part Novel Template

3. No Nonsense Novel Template

4. 30 Chapter Template

Story Structured Scrivener Fiction Novel Templates:

1. The Hero’s Journey Template

2. Seven Point Plot Structure

3. The Snowflake Method Scrivener Template

4. The Great American Novel Template

Airtable Template

If you’re looking to use a template that’s not based on a book writing software, then I highly recommend using Airtable to create it. Plus, this organization software already has a novel template you can copy and paste below.

I use Airtable to track all my writing whether blogs posts or books. It’s a hundred times better than Excel or Google Sheets when it comes to organizing your thoughts. The reason is it offers flexibility with cells such as enabling you to include images, assign tasks, and more.

Implement Your Book Outline Today

Getting started with a book outline is as easy as brainstorming. Sure, there are many structured ways to go about the process, but the most important part is starting.

When starting, there’s no reason to rush into trying every book writing software that helps you outline. Nor should you read through every outline template. Instead, get clear on why you want to write a book, then jot a few ideas down around it. Next, practice writing around those ideas. If they stick, then you’re ready to write your book.

Now that you have clarity, it’s time to pick up the helpful resources that will give you structure. By dipping your toes into brainstorming and setting a strong foundation for your book with purpose, you’ll be more likely to finish it. Your book outline? It’s just one more helping hand to ensure you cross that finish line. Good luck.

Millions of people use book writing software whether Word, Google Docs, or Squibler. At the same time, many people believe that book writing software only hinders the process of writing a book worth reading.

The funny part is most of these people who claim book writing software doesn’t help you write better books faster have forgotten that Word and Google Docs are still software.

What they mean to refer to when they say, “book writing software doesn’t help you” is software that’s purely dedicated to helping you write a book including Scrivener and Squibler. As the founder of Squibler, I’ve often questioned whether these negative opinions about writing software hold weight.

To understand these opinions, let’s dive into the different writing software that exists on the market today.

Types of Book Writing Software

Here are a few of the most well-known writing software to help you write and publish your book.

• Reedsy, a marketplace for book freelancer (editors, designer, etc) along with software to write your book
• Squibler, a minimalist and personalized writing software
• Ulysses, a minimalist mobile and desktop writing app
• Scrivener, a desktop writing software catered to every writer

Does a Book Writing Software Create Better Books?

By the nature of writing a book, it’s a time-consuming process that relies on creativity and ideation all the way through to make it successful.

What is a successful book, though?

The success of a book is often determined by the number of readers and how much those readers enjoy the book. That comes down to the power of storytelling no matter if the book is fiction or non-fiction. Even though book writing software can’t guarantee you’ll become a best-selling author, it can help you tell a better story.

Moreover, writing software will often have features to fix your grammar and style. The best software will aim to help you create a toe-curling or bead-sweating story. However, a writing software won’t create a better book if you don’t have that creative juice or persistence to see it all the way through.

Now, let’s say you have the persistence and the creativity to write a book. The good news is a book writing software will help you keep that persistence and enable that creativity. The reason is it will provide a section to brainstorm whether that be notes or a summary like in the example below.

In notes, I can list character names, settings, and even sub-plots. The choices are endless. Moreover, book writing software can also provide a library of images and other types of media for inspiration. You’ll no longer have to search through Google and Pinterest to find the perfect picture of a person or setting to inspire your descriptive writing.

The last part is it can give you a head start on research. See, there are many ways to write a book whether you’re writing a novel or a non-fiction book. A book writing software can provide the templates and outlines for these works so you can focus on the most creative aspects. For example, Scrivener provides many templates to choose from in their onboarding process.

These templates are more than providing an outline, though. They’ll help you set deadlines. For example, if you’re writing a book for NaNoWriMo (national novel writing month), then you’ll want a timer set for 30 days because that’s how long you have to write your book. In parallel, many writing software will enable you to track your progress and remind you to keep to the deadline you set.

Does a Book Writing Software Help You Write Better?

As noted in the last section, many book writing software does provide grammar and style corrections. But sometimes that’s not enough. What writers need to become better at storytelling is feedback.

That’s why there are communities that can provide feedback on your work. For example, Reedsy has a huge editor community you can work with. It makes their writing software personable.

For other software, they have more heavy-duty stylized editing specific for storytelling. For example, ProWritingAid is one of the best tools for keeping your writing concise for readers.

It provides the perfect suggestions for novelists to craft better stories. Many people would think Grammarly would be a better fit here, but ProWritingAid specializes in storytelling rather than general grammar.

Another way book writing software can help you become a better writer is by providing writing prompts. There are thousands of writing prompts online, but few attached to an editor. I built-out a writing prompt page attached site to our Squibler software. This way when writers feel inspired by a prompt, they can get write their answer in a structured manner in seconds.

People may argue that all this “structure” isn’t healthy for writing. That writing is too creative for outlines, notes, and summaries. As someone who’s written five books and started eight, I know the difference between the completed ones is that I kept everything organized along the way. The books I never finished were the least structured. Sometimes that meant having chapters in notes spread in countless Google Docs in random folders that I’d forget the name of.

When you do enough research, you’ll realize that there are scientific methods for better inspiration and creativity. The primary method? Externalization into a storage area that is easily searchable. This could be the project section in your writing software like below or the notes and summary in the editor as mentioned earlier.

The reason externalization of your thoughts into categories leads to inspiration and creativity is that 1) you know where you can find your thoughts later 2) it gives you room to think of new thoughts as our brain-space is limited. These are the same reasons many people learn languages by associating words with images in settings – it enables them to categorize their thoughts better so they can free their mind to come up with new ones.

Does a Book Writing Software Help You Focus?

It’s proven that software, when designed well, can improve one’s ability to focus and keep writing.

For example, Duolingo uses gamification tactics from the gaming world that made Duolingo the most downloaded and used education app in the world. There’s no ignoring that gamification works to help people learn and create.

It’s why the writing software, Ulysses, enables you to set goals based on time and word count. It’s like having a personal coach guide you through your writing process.

Another one of my favorite tools when it comes to helping you focus on writing is called The Most Dangerous Writing App. The premise of this writing software is that you’ll lose everything you type if you stop typing. It enables you to base this goal off word count or time limit. For example, if you set a time limit to 5 minutes, and if you stop typing anytime before that 5 minutes is up, you’ll have a short several-second window before all your work is deleted.

Does a Book Writing Software Help You Publish?

Again, the answer is yes, it does help you publish. In the example below, we take a look at Reedsy’s platform. When you finish writing your book, they enable you to format your book’s textual design to your liking in a few seconds while giving you the option to print your book right away. That’s brilliant.

Squibler does something similar. With a more minimalist design, it gives you a one-click export option to download your work. From there, you can upload it directly to Amazon KDP in Kindle format or shoot it over to your friends as a PDF.

Even though these software tools help you publish, they don’t necessarily help you with the book marketing process. Reedsy does provide a number of book marketers to hire to guide you; however, as a marketer and a writer, I know that this is the hardest step of the process. In fact, marketing your book may be harder than writing it.

That’s why entrusting your book with a marketer may not prove the best step for you. It may be better to learn how to market your book on your own.

The reason is marketing today has changed.

A New York Times profile about your book may not move the needle with sales. Instead, it’s the social media share from the influencer in your niche on Twitter or Instagram. One of my favorite books on this topic of creating and marketing a book that stands the test of time is called Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday. I highly recommend you read it.

It shows you that most books take a while to catch on to the mainstream public. The reason is book marketing to hundreds of thousands of sales doesn’t happen overnight unless you have an email list with a million people and a track record of books that have had similar success.

To that end, the book marketing process will remain in your hands for the foreseeable future.

Old Software vs. New Software

In the old software book writing space, you have products like Google Docs and Microsoft Word. Most people still write their book(s) using these products. They do so because there lacks education around software options to help you with the process.

The truth is these products aren’t meant to help you write and publish your book. They weren’t designed with that at the forefront. Instead, they added features along the way to cater to the author-audience including inserting a table of contents and outline.

As a result, you get an experience that isn’t catered just to writing a book. The founders of Scrivener, Reedsy, and Squibler know this. That’s why these writing tools exist – to better your book writing experience. Just remember, these software tools won’t write a book for you. Neither will Duolingo learn a language for you.

What do they give you?

A better starting point. With Duolingo, you’ll still need to practice in-person to become proficient in your chosen language. With writing a book, you’ll still need to work with an editor to ensure you’ve written a quality book. It takes time. And software is only one piece of the puzzle to getting your desired outcome.

Should You Use a Book Writing Software?

The answer is yes. By using a book writing software, it will enable you to tackle the hard problems faster. Moreover, many book writing software is free to try such as Squibler. So in a matter of minutes, you can see whether most of these software tools are worth using for your particular book.

Just keep in mind what I wrote earlier – writing a book takes persistence and creativity all the way through. If you don’t have the ability to keep those characteristics present, then writing a book isn’t for you. In that case, writing software won’t help you. Because it’s only meant to magnify what’s working.

On the other hand, if you have these author-like characteristics, then I’m excited for you to write and publish your book. It’s one of the best decisions you’ll make.

When I first embarked on creating the best book writing software, I knew little about software development.

To mitigate my lack of experience, I had a technical co-founder, Dhaval who specialized in data, engineering, and artificial intelligence.

The problem was this began as a side project when Dhaval was working full-time at Lifelock and I was running a 30+ person agency. Dhaval couldn’t devote as much time as needed to ensure every piece was coded right. And I was no help unless I left my agency and spent the next six months learning how to code.

Without time, we did what many first-time founders mistakenly do, we hired an agency to create the book writing software. However, we weren’t first-time founders (this was my third company) so we approached it by asking the agency to build the bare minimum.

We didn’t care if the agency didn’t build enough to get people to pay for the product. What we wanted – something tangible that could acquire users.

From there, if we got enough users, we could jump ship from our current jobs and work full-time on our book writing software, Squibler. And that’s exactly what happened.

Designing a Book Writing Software

With little idea of how a book writing software should be designed, the team, including myself almost made mistakes that would’ve cost us tens of thousands of dollars down the line. What saved us was our lack of ego. We avoided implementing anything we weren’t a hundred percent sure should be there.

The initial designs for the software were a copy of Scrivener’s primary features. However, the designs were lackluster. It looked like a desktop product that was thrown up online as Scrivener is a desktop app. Rather than continue with that version for development, we brought on a UX/UI consultant and another team member who specialized in product design.

After they got through the initial designs of the book writing software with everyone’s feedback, it didn’t look comparable to the first version. It was a hundred times better and gave us the momentum to do the hard work over the coming months. We were now headed in the right direction.

Creating a Writing Software MVP

Working with an agency to develop software is painful. They do almost everything wrong the first time around. Your specs need to be detailed with every design; otherwise, they’ll improvise or simply won’t do the work.

After struggling back and forth with the agency, we finally had something working. A place to store projects and create them.

We also had a book writing editor for when you create a project. If you wanted to – you could even export your writing into a PDF, Doc, or Kindle format. We added a few features to the book writing editor such as the ability to drag and drop scenes or chapters. For those chapters, you could create a summary and add notes.

My favorite part was it allowed you to read your entire book in one sitting without previewing it. This way you could read your book as you typed it out.

Just to get to this point in software development, it cost us a significant amount of money – a little over $20,000. The good news: it was a fixed cost so we wouldn’t need to spend that money again. The better news: It placed us in a position to begin marketing the book writing software. This required an entirely different learning curve.

Marketing a Book Writing Software

As I led the marketing efforts for Squibler, I made a ton of mistakes early on. The first ten strategies I implemented didn’t move the needle. I tried everything from cold email, LinkedIn automation, and Quora writing. Rather than keep trying tactics I thought would work, I studied what successful companies in the writing industry did to generate traffic and customers. These companies include Now Novel, Self-Publishing School, and Reedsy.

It turns out that the common theme was they all focused on content marketing and SEO. The good news is I knew how to produce good content. The bad news is SEO was my weakest marketing skill; moreover, it’d take time to see results. I wouldn’t let this deter me.

So over the next several months, I created a content marketing team and studied SEO non-stop. Every day, I spent hours in Ahrefs studying sites and keywords until I became an expert in everything from content optimization to backlinking. When I felt confident enough, I began hiring writers to write original blog posts on our website. As of writing this, we have sixty-eight posts published with another twenty in the queue.

Over time, we began seeing an increase in organic keyword rankings and traffic.

After a couple of months of producing content, then seeing these results, I knew we were headed in the right direction. The momentum was back.

Scaling a Content Creation Team

When it comes to content marketing, it costs a significant amount of money to produce well-written blog posts. This meant what was working would also lighten our pockets for a while.

I’m convinced that spending money on content marketing and software, then waiting months – often years – for a return is the reason more people don’t enter the writing software market. For example, in the last three months, we’ve spent over $5,000 on content, then waited two months for our content to start ranking.

The good news is content marketing to a certain extent is a fixed cost. You do need to spend money on constantly acquiring backlinks to help distribute your content. But that’s about it.

When I realized that content marketing would cost a significant amount of money, I knew the process had to be dialed-in. I went ahead and learned everything there was about creating an optimized blog post, then put several pages of writing guidelines together for our writing staff.

Here are some of the topics the writing guidelines covered:

• Internal linking
• External linking
• Grammar usage and tonality
• Paragraph length
• Categorization of posts
• Optimization of images
• Keyword optimization in the URL structure, title, headlines, and paragraphs
• Promotion of Squibler

To keep track of all their writing and optimizations, I put together a process flow in Airtable. I highly recommend using this software to optimize your process flows as well.

Balancing Time

Because the book writing software is a freemium product, it put us in an awkward stage of not having much revenue to invest back into the company.

To deal with this hurdle, I used the new marketing skills I’m learning to scale my book writing software, Squibler to consult companies on their content marketing efforts. This way, I’m forced to get better faster with the particular marketing skills I need the most. Moreover, I have money to invest back into the company whether that be in marketing, development, or experimental efforts.

Beta Testing Your Own Software

Not only am I consulting on content marketing for companies to fund Squibler, but I’m also ghostwriting a book for a CEO of a company that’s at 40 million annual revenue rate.

By ghostwriting a book, I can plug it into Squibler and dogfood my own book writing software as a beta tester. This way I’m not only relying on the users’ feedback, which can be minimal in the early days when you don’t have many of them.

And by beta testing my own product, I get to understand fast where the glitches are and if they’re worth fixing with new investment in development.

Hiring Remote Freelancers

As of writing, we have over ten freelancers working on Squibler. No one in the company works in the same city (at least from what I know). It’s crazy to think that even my co-founder doesn’t live in the same city as me, but that’s okay. We figured out how to make it work by being proactive and empathetic with communication whether using Zoom, Slack, Upwork, or Facebook Messenger.

By hiring remote freelancers, we can work with most skillful workers while keeping our fixed costs low. This is critical for an early-stage software company that has yet to get to a sustainable revenue point where we can hire full-time.

Onwards

Much of what you do when building a software company is a fixed cost. For marketing and ranking keywords, it takes the patience to wait for Google to recognize your optimized content in order to rank it to how it best sees fit.

With software development, it takes the patience to optimize it through acquisition. This means getting enough data points from visitors to ensure every step of the funnel is streamlined.

In the meantime, the best strategy is to find more steps like these ones that will produce long-term results. Sure, they may not create a huge uplift in the short-run. And that’s okay. We’re building Squibler with a strong foundation to last for as long as it can, which gives the work we’re doing more momentum and purpose.

Onwards!