One Aliventures reader asked me, "Should I try to find good (easy to use/does not cost an arm and a leg) software or just use Microsoft Word to write my book?"

Over the past few years, I've heard several authors express strong dislike for Microsoft Word. It crashed and they lost hours of work, or they found it fiddly to use, or it didn't let them jump around between chapters easily.

Personally, I've no problem with Word. It's not the easiest tool for organising a whole book if you want to jump around a lot between chapters, but when you're getting a manuscript into shape for sending out to other people (e.g. beta readers, editors) or when you want to upload your manuscript to Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing, it's fine.

(For me, at least. You may feel differently.)

So I'd say that, if you're comfortable with Microsoft Word and it's already on your computer, then use that. It's not perfect, but it's not like you're writing your novel in crayon on napkins either. You can easily share files, you can create a table of contents to help you find your way around, you can use formatting, you can do "find" and "replace" as needed.

If Microsoft Word seems to be holding you back, try Scrivener. It's not super-cheap (currently $40 for Windows, $45 for Mac) but it does have a 30-day free trial -- and it only counts the days you actually use. (So if you write one day a week, you can try it out for almost 7 months.)

Currently, I use Scrivener for my novels, Microsoft Word for my blog posts, and Evernote for short pieces of content (mainly the newsletter articles and the Q&As). Evernote is free at the basic level, so you might also want to give that a try if your writing would suit being organised into notes and notebooks.

Different software suits different ways of writing and different types of project, but ultimately, what matters is that you get words down on the page. If you're happy with using Word to write your book, there's no reason to switch.

To get the most out of Word, it's worth spending a little bit of time learning:

How to use Styles. They're straightforward, they'll save you a ton of time (if you normally set up chapter titles etc. by setting the font style for each one individually) and they're essential if you want to format your manuscript for Kindle.

How to insert a Table of Contents. This is particularly handy for non-fiction books, but also for novels: it lets you easily spot places where chapter headings have gone awry. With fiction, you can include useful information like your POV character's name, and the time/date, in the chapter heading while drafting.

You can find plenty of "how to" articles for both Styles and Tables of Contents online. If you're a Writers' Huddle member (www.writershuddle.com), check out the MS Word mini-course which deals with these and more.