I tried building a similar project some 10 years ago, when "Zen writing tools" were all the rage
… I tried building a similar project some 10 years ago, when "Zen writing tools" were all the rage. Nobody wanted to pay for it. It wasn't general purpose enough to be usable by the general public. And novelists (who I was targeting) are poor and cheap. 90% of people who say they are "working on a novel" will never finish it to ever even try to sell it. Of those that do finish, 90% of them won't make more than pocket change. For the weirdos who finish and make significant sales, the app they used to write was never a significant problem for them. They usually have an anachronistic approach that has nothing to do with productivity and everything to do with personal taste and comfort (George R. R. Martin famously uses WordStar 4.0 on an MS-DOS system). If you want to make an app for writers, don't make it around the writing process. What aspiring authors need, first and foremost, is training on how to finish a manuacript. After that, everything else is a minor annoyance in comparison. …
Original discussionShow HN: Lunette – A word processor designed around writing, not formatting105 source comments · at import