Book writing software for writing a novel in Chinese

Why Galley is the right book writing software for a novel in Chinese

Chinese is two settings in Galley, not one, and the difference is not cosmetic. Simplified and Traditional get different faces, different EPUB tags, and different answers from Amazon. Set the book to the one you write in and everything downstream follows.

The typesetting problems are the ones every English-built tool fails.

Counting. Chinese writes no spaces between words, so splitting on whitespace counts a paragraph as one word. Galley counts characters and carries that unit through every number on screen, including the reading time and the page-count projection.

Line breaking. A breaker that only breaks on spaces sets an entire Chinese paragraph as one line running off the page. Galley breaks by the line-start and line-end prohibitions, so a closing bracket never opens a line, an opening bracket never ends one, and 。and ，may hang in the margin.

Quote substitution is off. 「」 and “ ” are characters you type in a Chinese book, and a smart-quote rule turning a straight quote into a curly Latin pair here would be doing damage.

Chapter headings are Chinese. 第一章, not “Chapter One”.

The language tag matters. Han characters are unified in Unicode, so a browser that does not know whether it is holding Chinese or Japanese may set your novel in Japanese letterforms. The EPUB is tagged, and so are the read-through and the beta-reader link.

Two things Galley does not do. It sets Chinese horizontally; vertical writing is not built. And it does not set 着重号, the emphasis dots. Japanese bōten is built and Chinese emphasis is deliberately not claimed, because adding it is a decision, not a detail.

The typefaces you get for Chinese

One face per variant, both under the SIL Open Font License, which is what lets Galley embed them in a file you sell.

Noto Serif SC for Simplified Chinese.

Noto Serif TC for Traditional Chinese.

One face is a thin shelf, and it is the honest state of free Chinese book type, not a decision anyone made here. Both are embedded in your print PDF and EPUB. In the editor itself, Chinese falls back to a system Song stack, because these faces run to tens of megabytes and serving them on every page load would make the editor unusable. What you see while writing is a system face; what gets printed is the one you picked.

What you will not find here: Founder’s Songti, Hanyi and the rest of the commercial Chinese foundries. All of them license per title and none permits embedding in a file you sell. The typeface documentation lists every face by language.

Exports for a Chinese novel

• Print-ready PDF at your trim, mirrored margins, real gutter, font embedded, prohibition rules applied at the line ends.
• EPUB 3 with your cover, tagged zh or zh-Hant as you set it.
• Store-ready EPUBs for Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books.
• Word and Markdown for an editor or an archive.
• Manuscript format, double-spaced, set in the book’s own face and counting in the book’s own unit.
• A proofreading PDF two pages to a sheet, and a large print PDF.
• A watermarked copy per beta reader.

The KDP preflight’s page estimate divides by characters per page instead of words per page, which matters: using the English divisor reports a Chinese book as roughly two and a half times longer than it is.

The Latin-Chinese mixed line

A Chinese line with a Latin word in it wants a quarter-em on each side of the Latin run, and Galley inserts it at typeset time. The gap folds into the preceding character’s width, so a line that breaks at that point does not carry a stray space onto the next line, and an underline or a strike stops at the last character instead of running into it.

How long a Chinese novel is

In characters. Chinese publishing quotes 字数, and Galley counts characters live, per chapter and per book, which is the number an editor will ask for directly.

Use the app’s own page-count projection instead of the word count to page count converter, which works in words.

Trim sizes for a Chinese book

Six standards, from mass market at 4.25×6.87 inches to Royal at 6.14×9.21. Chinese trade fiction is commonly issued around 32开 or 16开, which land near the small trade at 5×8 inches and Royal. Ask your printer what they set. The spine width calculator and the trim size comparison would be helpful here.

Metadata and the copyright page

The copyright page writes itself from the metadata you filled in. Every field detects its own script, so a Chinese title and a Latin ISBN both come out right, and the download filename keeps its Chinese.

Publishing inside mainland China requires a 书号 through a licensed publisher, not an ISBN you can buy, which is the fact that shapes a domestic edition. Taiwan and Hong Kong work differently.

Translating into or out of Chinese

A translation in Galley is its own book: its own language, its own typeface shelf, its own ISBN, its own cover, still linked to the original. A Traditional edition of a Simplified novel is exactly that case, and it gets its own face and its own tag, so it is not the same file with different characters in it.

There are pages on writing a novel in Japanese, writing a novel in Korean and writing a novel in Uyghur.

No machine touches the prose. Galley has no AI anywhere near your writing, which includes not offering to translate it or to convert it between variants.

Self-publishing and traditional publishing in Chinese

Self-publishing. Amazon takes Traditional Chinese as a Kindle ebook and does not list Simplified at all, and it prints neither. So the print PDF goes to a printer in Taiwan, Hong Kong or elsewhere, or to IngramSpark, and the EPUB goes to Google Play, Apple Books, Kobo or a regional store.

Traditional publishing. The mainland, Taiwanese and Hong Kong trades are separate markets with separate rights and separate rules. The submission package assembles the synopsis, the bio and the opening chapters.

The same book exports both. The longer arguments are in Galley for self-publishing and Galley for traditional publishing.

Where to go next

• Writing software for novelists who don’t write in English covers every script Galley sets.
• Book design and typefaces lists every face by language.
• Series and translations covers the full language list.
• EPUB vs print PDF explains what each format can do.