I use LaTeX. I needed to learn a lot about it to use it, but it’s the only thing that can set letters, paragraphs and book structure properly.

I handwrite all my first drafts, then type them into stimuwrite. The features are really basic but I have autism + a generally drifty mind, and stimuwrite helps me focus while editing.

I’ve been using Obsidian lately. Proprietary with an open plugin ecosystem. Works well, makes it easy for me to integrate with other notes and such, but I haven’t figured out a good workflow for exporting work for submission. That said, it’s all markdown and there are lots of plugins for stuff like that, so it’s probably mostly just that I haven’t tried very hard.

In the past I’ve used Google Docs (proprietary), Scrivener (proprietary), Manuskript (open), Zim (open), and probably a few I’m forgetting. Really it just comes down to what you’re looking for out of the software, there are lots of options.

The biggest thing to keep in mind from a self-hosting perspective is local storage and easy backups under your own control. I use syncthing to keep my whole Obsidian vault synced across a few devices; for some software that’s easier or harder due to file formats and accessibility.

I don’t write novels, but lately found apostrophe (gnome) and ghostwriter (KDE) which are intended to write using markdown, and have a UI intended to allow you to focus on writing. You can later use git to manage versions and backups (in a remote repository).

If you want something more focused on relationships, and regarding the answer from another user suggesting Obsidian, you might use also logseq, but I didn’t use it yet (but hear a lot of positive vibes around it).

I don’t write, but the Neorg project seems to be getting some attention from writers

https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview it’s proprietary, but it has a lot of features geared towards writing novels/screenplays/etc

I have just started, and decided to use Mkdocs for my personal notes, journaling, and a budding novel that kept buzzing around in my head and wants out. In the moment I just throw titles, links, citations and bits of text in a document, later I hope to be able to sort through the mess and separate into chapters. Let’s see. I’ve connected it to a git repository on codeberg for backup. I did this because I like to write in Markup and decided to use the same setup to create a static page for my business (with My Webapp on Yunohost to serve). Then I just kept the same for my notes. I like super simple folder based setups without too many bells and whistles cause I find them distracting. Focuswriter on the other hand was too basic without the ability to create links between files.

It may be overkill for most—it’s not the easiest thing to set up and it’s got a high learning curve—but for heavy research and world-building I’ve found Semantic MediaWiki revolutionary.

You can create auto-generated and auto-updating maps, timelines, tables, etc., and make live queries that pull information from all relevant pages. (For instance, if you write pages for a bunch of events and annotate them with dates, locations, and which characters are involved, you can create a map and itinerary for each character and a list of all the characters they’ve met or interacted with. If two characters meet in a particular place, you can generate a list of the most recent events that happened to each character, recent events at that location, past events where both characters were present, people and places they know in common, etc. And if you decide to shuffle events around, everything updates accordingly.) It’s almost insanely powerful, and of course it’s FOSS.

Im not writing books, but check out bookstack

Check affine.pro it’s really flexible. Some features might seem overkill. But I think that the flexibility might pay off in some situations (e.g. adding drawings, having character profiles in separate docs, add location maps, etc.)

It’s a local-first alternative to Notion. Just a few months ago they added export to pdf (there’s markdown too, of course) https://github.com/toeverything/AFFiNE/pull/2604

Markdown (there are plenty of editors to chose from) + Pandoc (to generate the output in multiple formats), would be my recommendation.

I don’t write books but I’ve helped written a couple textbooks which used LaTeX. I personally use TeXstudio, but there’s many clients out there. If you appreciate beautiful typesetting, you’ll likely enjoy TeX despite its learning curve.

Obsidian is really good for me for writing. Though I enjoy writing in markdown/plain text. I use italics for comments and bold for changes to make. It’s proprietary, but there’s a community plugin downloader built right in, with lots of open source support. I have my own database set up for syncing using the Self-hosted Livesync plugin and it works really well. There are other plugins specifically for writers as well.

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I take the approach of doing content first and styling second. For content I don’t need anything more sophisticated than a plain text editor. I like it because it removes decisions that I really don’t need to be making at that point.