What should be step 1: it's 2017, you want XeLaTeX or LuaTeX, both capable of native unicode handling, using fonts by name, etc. Traditional LaTeX (and I use "traditional" with scorn as we've had XeLaTeX for almost 15 years now), relying on the ancient pdftex engine, might be "easier to google" (let alone remember), but is also not an acceptable thing to recommend to people if all they want to do is control their typesetting.

It's like talking about how hard it is to work with browsers and then telling people the best way to set up IE8, instead of using a modern browser.

Of course it's still you in the typesetting driving seat, it's never going to be as easy as Word, but I'm writing a novella in XeLaTeX right now, not even maths papers, and it's almost child's play to make it do what I want with minimal effort. My entire "complicated setup" is five lines plus one line that's me being completely unreasonable, with XeTeX going "sure, be that way":

  \documentclass[11pt, oneside]{book}
  \usepackage{tocloft}
  \usepackage{fancyhdr}
  \pagestyle{plain}
  \usepackage[b5paper, bindingoffset=0mm, inner=23mm, outer=23mm, top=21mm, bottom=24mm]{geometry}
  \input{quotation-rules.tex}

And that's it, the rest of the document is basically just a giant text file of paragraph after paragraph of normal text, using normal as-per-unicode accented letters saved in UTF8. The doc's certainly interspersed with \part{} and \chapter{} markers because that's how a story works, but there is nothing I couldn't explain to my mom in there: I'm writing a "book" with a table of content, a reasonable looking page header but otherwise plain styling, with some explicit page dimensions (which is no different from using Word for a specific page size).

(the only unreasonable demand being that "\input" line, which imports a set of rules for using "Palatino Linotype" as main font, but then pulling the punctuation glyphs from "Sylfaen". So stuff like full stops, apostrophes, commas, double quotes, etc. And even for something seemingly as complex as that, is just a few more lines using modern XeLaTeX)