Almost every writing tool sold in the last five years is sold to self-publishers. The pitch is a finished paperback, and the demo ends with a KDP upload. If you are querying agents, none of that is your problem. Your book does not need a trim size yet. It needs to arrive looking like every other manuscript on that agent’s desk, and to survive being passed around in Word for two years.

Galley does the self-publishing half too. This is the other half.

Standard manuscript format, without the fiddling

The convention is old and boring and it matters. Times New Roman at 12pt. Double-spaced. One-inch margins on US Letter. Half-inch first-line indents. Scene breaks marked with a hash rather than a decorative glyph. Chapters opening about a third of the way down the page. Contact details top left, an approximate word count top right, rounded so it does not look like you counted.

That is Shunn’s format, which is what “standard manuscript format” means in practice, and Galley exports straight into it. Your book keeps its real typeface and its real page while you write. The submission copy is generated, so you are never reformatting your own novel back into Courier-adjacent respectability by hand. If your book lives somewhere else, the Shunn manuscript format generator applies the same specification to a file you already have, in the browser.

Two versions come out of it. The full manuscript is the whole book with a running header on every page, Surname / Title / page, which is what an editor who is about to line-edit you wants. The submission package is the query version: a cover page, your synopsis, your author bio, and the opening chapters, in the order agents ask for them.

Revision before you query, not after

The reason a manuscript gets rejected in paragraph three is rarely the plot. By chapter fourteen you cannot see your own prose any more, and the checks in Galley are the ones your eye stopped running.

Filler words counted per thousand, with the chapter each one peaks in. The character called Jeanie forty-one times and Jeany once. British and American spelling drift, straight quotes that escaped, hyphenation gone inconsistent, all swept in one pass that leaves dialogue alone, because a character who says “colour” is a character and not a typo.

A style sheet lives beside the manuscript in the story bible, which is the document a copyeditor will ask you for anyway. Writing it while you draft is much easier than reconstructing it from a finished book.

Beta readers, and knowing whose copy leaked

Beta drafts export one file per reader, with that reader’s name watermarked on every page. It sounds paranoid until a PDF of an unpublished manuscript turns up somewhere, and then it is the only thing that tells you where it came from.

There is a proofreading PDF too, two pages to a sheet, if your reader is the kind who prints it and attacks it with a pen.

The Word round trip, including the notes

Publishing runs on Word and I do not expect that to change. Export a DOCX, send it, get it back covered in track changes and margin comments.

Most tools import the edits and drop the comments, because comments are not content. That is usually the half you paid for. Galley reads the comments out of the package and anchors each one to the prose it was pointing at, so an editorial letter’s worth of marginalia arrives attached to the sentences rather than as a list you have to re-find.

Keeping the version you actually sent

Query rounds go on for a long time and the book keeps changing. Draft milestones let you mark a version and name it, so “the draft I sent to the agent in March” stays a thing you can open in November when she finally replies and asks whether anything has changed.

Underneath that, every chapter keeps daily snapshots you can compare against and restore, and deleted work waits thirty days in the bin.

The AI question, which agents are now asking

Nothing in Galley writes, rewrites, suggests or completes a sentence. Nothing trains on your book. The tools count, check and typeset.

I built it that way because I wanted it that way, and it has turned out to matter commercially: publishing contracts and agent submission forms increasingly ask you to warrant that the work is your own. Being able to answer that without qualification is worth something. The full position is here.

Where Galley is the wrong tool

If your plotting happens on a corkboard with index cards and coloured string, Scrivener takes that seriously and I do not. Its compile is also more configurable than my export menu, and if you have already built a compile format you love, you will find mine opinionated.

If you write in the document with a co-author in real time, Google Docs is where that happens.

And if the querying does not work out

Plenty of writers query for a year and then publish the book themselves. In Galley that is not a migration. It is the same book, and the print PDF and EPUB are in the same menu as the manuscript export. That path is written up here.

Galley for querying writers · Is Galley for you? · Exports and the toolkit · Preview and export