Wannabe a novelst? Try yWriter
Everyone thinks they have a great novel inside them, but taking it from the deep recesses of your brain to a final, published state is a difficult journey. Your computer might seem the obvious tool to help here, but word processing software isn't geared towards novelists, and in trying to record and organize your notes alongside writing the actual story you can quickly become swamped.
What you need is a dedicated tool that doesn't just give you the tools to write your story, but provides you with the tools you need to organize them too. That program is yWriter; it's completely free, and version 5.1.6.4 has just been released, adding support for exporting your finished novel to ebook format.
yWriter is unique in having been developed by a published author specifically for the task of novel writing, although templates do exist where the program has been adapted for different, albeit similar, uses, such as writing plays. However, its primary aim is to make it possible to plan and write a novel within a single program and document.
The program breaks down novel writing into chapters and scenes, with a series of tabs containing tools to help you plan your story. These tabs let you to create locations, characters and objects, allowing you to build up notes and details about the protagonists and other key parts of your story.
Chapters consist of nothing more than links to scenes -- the basic building blocks of your novel. Each scene contains the actual text of your novel, plus details that help you determine what's going on. Each scene can be linked to the characters, objects and locations you created earlier helping you build up a decent outline of what goes on in that scene without committing you to actually writing it.
The end result is that you can work on your novel piecemeal, breaking it up into manageable chunks and slowly building up the actual text on those scenes you're currently inspired by rather than trying to write the whole story in linear fashion. yWriter even has planning tools built-in, such as for creating deadlines and printing reports about your progress so far.
When your story is finished, yWriter allows you to export the actual story, minus all your notes, in a variety of formats. The latest release, version 5.1.6.4, includes an ebook option, which basically formats your text for reading on an ebook reader using the universal HTML format. You're then able to convert this file into whichever ebook format you like using the open-source Calibre tool.
yWriter is freeware, and was written in Mono. This means that it runs on all three major platforms: Windows (2000 or later), Mac OS X and Linux.