Galley for Traditional Publishing
If you are querying rather than uploading, the file that matters is a double-spaced Word document in standard manuscript format, and the submission package builds one from your book with the synopsis, bio and opening chapters already in it. Beta drafts go out watermarked per reader. An editor's DOCX comes back with their comments attached to the prose they were about, which is normally the part a round trip loses.
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 youâre querying agents, none of thatâs your problem. Your book doesnât need a trim size yet. It needs to arrive looking like every other manuscript on that agentâs 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 plain, and agents expect it. 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 doesnât look like you counted.
Thatâs Shunnâs format, which is what âstandard manuscript formatâ 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 made from it, so you never reformat your own novel 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. The synopsis has its own field on the bookâs Metadata page, separate from the blurb. How to write a synopsis has the rest.
Revision before you query, not after
A manuscript that gets turned down on page one is rarely turned down for the plot. By chapter fourteen you canât see your own prose any more, and the checks in Galley look for the things youâve stopped noticing.
Filler words counted per thousand, with the chapter each one peaks in. The one Lestrad in a book full of Lestrades. British and American spelling drift, straight quotes that escaped, hyphenation gone inconsistent, all in one pass that leaves dialogue alone, because a character in an American book is allowed to say âcolourâ.
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 readerâs name watermarked on every page. Itâs unlikely youâll need it, but if a PDF of your unpublished manuscript turns up somewhere, itâs how youâll know whose copy it was. You can also send a link instead of a file, with a password and an expiry date (the steps).
Thereâs a proofreading PDF too, two pages to a sheet, if your reader is the kind who prints it and reaches for a red pen.
The Word round trip, including the notes
Publishing runs on Word and I donât 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 arenât content. Thatâs 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 letterâs worth of marginalia arrives attached to the sentences rather than as a list youâve 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 âthe draft I sent to the agent in Marchâ 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 itâs turned out to matter: publishing contracts and agent submission forms are starting to ask you to confirm the work is your own, and you can say yes without a footnote. 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 donât. Its compile is also more configurable than my export menu, and if youâve 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 doesnât work out
Plenty of writers query for a year and then publish the book themselves. In Galley thatâs not a migration. Itâs 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? · The Toolkit · Preview and export
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