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With NaNoWriMo only a few days away, I wanted to cover some of the different novel writing software options available out there. One of the most famous programs around is Scrivener so it seems as good a one to start with as any.

Scrivener is an official sponsor of NaNoWriMo so they’re offering three big incentives to give the program a try this year:

• While Scrivener normally offers a free 30 day trial, they’ve extended that exclusively for NaNo participants. Download the program now through this special link and you’ll be able to use the full program for free from now until December 7th. That’s plenty of time to use it for all 30 days of NaNoWriMo and even a week extra to see how you like it.
• For even just signing up for NaNoWriMo, you can get 20% off the regular price of Scrivener when you purchase the program (details here).
• And if you successfully hit 50,000 words and verify as a NaNoWriMo winner? You’ll get an exclusive code for 50% off the total cost of the software at that time.

With all these perks, you’re at least curious so I thought it would be handy to get a real Scrivener user to give you a quick review of what it’s really like to use this software. And while I use Scrivener myself, I’ve only ever used it for non-fiction so asked my friend Brian Lynch to review the software from the perspective of someone using it for fiction.

Here’s Brian’s review and you can check out his website here:

Since I started using Scrivener last year, I’ve used it for a handful of projects: comic book scripts, a short story collection, TV and Movie Screenplays, and novel outlines. A funny thing’s happened during that time: the more I use it, the more I want to chuck everything other writing software out the window.

Scrivener is available for Mac, Windows (up to Win 7 – not 8 just yet), and, unofficially, Linux. It is, in short, your one-stop shop for writing things, regardless of your preferred prose proclivities. Screenplays? Sure. Non-Fiction? Yep. Fiction? Definitely. Poetry and Song Lyrics? Gotcha covered. Scrivener handles all of these with aplomb. It even has a full-screen writing mode, so you resist the distractions of the modern age, and imports a host of text and specialty files to make the work flow transition easier.

But Scrivener’s greatest strength is as an organizational tool. You can tag chapters with topics or character names, so you can find them lickety-split. You can split your chapters into multiple documents within the Scrivener file, so you’ll be able to move them around later. You can import all of your research documents, pictures, songs, and even web pages to Scrivener for reference – and they’ll copy to the file, so you don’t need to have Internet access to get at them later.

Then you’ll be able to compile it all later for PDF, .doc, .docx, .rtf, .fdx, .fcf, .odt, .epub, .mobi, or .html. That’s right – you can compile something you wrote in Scrivener for Word, Open Office, and Final Draft, or take it straight to the Kindle store.

The best part is, if you’re doing NaNo, you can get a nice discount on it if you win… and even if you happen to pay full price, it’s worth every penny. And then some.

So use it for NaNo – and if you’re not, let me know in the comments what you ARE going to be using it for!

One thing I want to add is that it’s worth it to go through the tutorial at some point but don’t let it overwhelm you. What seems like a terrifying number of options is actually very intuitive once you actually start using the program.

Any questions about how the software works? Want to share your own thoughts on using the program? Weight in below.