Sadly the word processing game has been won by Word. 99% of non-techie authors will use Word (or maybe Scrivener) to write their novel That's because publisher

Sadly the word processing game has been won by Word. 99% of non-techie authors will use Word (or maybe Scrivener) to write their novel That's because publishers rely on Word for workflow because everyone uses Word and they require interoperability. They don't actually like Word any more than the rest of us do -- they mostly rely on Adobe InDesign for typesetting, and getting Word docs into InDesign is a bit painful unless the author is au fait with the publisher's own style sheet -- and if you talk to their electronic/internet publications specialists they'd love to find a usable alternative platform. Unfortunately they need such a platform to be universal, to support workflow-specific tasks such as copy editing (handled today, not terribly well, via Word's change tracking) or checking page proofs (handled today by going over PDFs until your eyeballs bleed), and to work for everyone they do business with. Scrivener is great, and generates very clean HTML/CSS/ePub, but it stops at the point when you hit "Compile" -- it doesn't interoperate with the proofing/production side of workflow. As for the rest ... (Credentials: I write novels for a living and in the past week have been discussing this topic with Hachette's head of digital strategy and one of Penguin Random House's digital production specialists.)