Three books I've found excellent for step-by-step guidance are:
The Weekend Novelist, by Robert J Ray (I have the older version, but it has recently been reissued).
There's also a version of this for crime novelists called, The Weekend Novelist Writes A Mystery, by the same author with Jack Remick.
Novel Writing: 16 Steps To Success, by Evan Marshall. I think I've seen this under another name (something like, The Marshall Plan for Writing Success)
But the book I found most inspiring when I first started novel writing was a slim volume called One Way To Write Your Novel: A step-by-step method for putting your unwritten novel on the road to publication, by Dick Perry, 1983. It's a Writer's Digest book, although not one of the better known ones. If it's not still on their list, you will probably be able to get it as a used book from Amazon or Abe Books. It really simplifies the whole process for you. Just to give you a taste of what it contains, the chapter headings are:
1 Watch That First Step - It's a Big One
2 How to Write a Novel in 100 Days
3 Creating an Unforgettable Character
4 It Takes Two to Dialogue
5 Where Does Your Novel Happen?
6 Description in Small Doses
7 Four Ways to Put Pizzazz in Your Novel
8 Is Sex Necessary?
9 Everyone Laughed When I Sat Down at the Typewriter [That's how old it is, before computers were common]
10 Having Something to Say - and Letting Your Characters Say It
11 The Way It Was - Exactly
12 Plotting: First, Last, and Middle Chapters
13 Your Plotting Notebook for a Novel
14 First, But Hardly Final Draft
15 The Second Draft - Chapter by Chapter
16 Ouch! The Art of Self-Editing
17 Your Finished Novel - Where to Send It
