Book writing software for writing a novel in Danish

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

Danish quotes »outward«. The guillemets point away from the text, which is the reverse of the French convention and something no English-first tool will ever guess. Most software gives you the curly pair, because its smart-quote rule was written once and never asked what language the book was in. Galley asks, and a Danish book gets the Danish pair as you type.

Hyphenation is the second thing. Danish compounds are long and a justified page without hyphenation shows it. Galley carries Danish patterns and applies them in the print PDF when you justify.

Third is the font licence. Galley embeds the face inside your PDF and your EPUB, which is redistribution, so every face on the shelf is one you may sell the book with.

Everything else is the same app: a true book page at your trim, the story bible beside the manuscript, a print-ready PDF and a valid EPUB.

How Danish gets typeset

Hyphenation follows Danish rules, in the justified print PDF only.

Æ ø å go all the way through, including into the download filename.

Sorting is Danish, and this is not cosmetic: æ ø å sort after z, so a cast list sorted the English way puts three letters in the wrong place.

Italics work. The italic in each of these faces was drawn, not computed.

The typefaces you get for Danish

Fifteen faces, all under the SIL Open Font License.

EB Garamond is the safe first choice for a novel.

Spectral was drawn for long-form reading and sets an even page.

Libre Caslon Text is Caslon, which Danish and Norwegian printers set for two centuries.

The rest of the shelf: Crimson Pro, Cormorant, Lora, Libre Baskerville, Literata, Source Serif 4, Alegreya, Vollkorn, Cardo, Gentium Book Plus, Newsreader and Charis SIL. The typeface documentation lists every face by language.

Exports for a Danish novel

• Print-ready PDF at your trim, mirrored margins, real gutter, font embedded.
• EPUB 3 with your cover, tagged da.
• Store-ready EPUBs for Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books.
• Word and Markdown for a redaktør or an archive.
• Manuscript format, double-spaced.
• A proofreading PDF two pages to a sheet, and a large print PDF.
• A watermarked copy per beta reader.

The KDP preflight checks the file first.

Danish punctuation

The quote pair you get automatically. A great deal of Danish fiction skips quoting entirely and opens speech with a dash at the head of the line, which is a character you type and which survives unchanged.

The dialogue punctuation rules and dashes, hyphens and ellipses sheets cover the general cases.

How long a Danish novel is

Danish publishers quote length in words and in printed sheets, where an ark is sixteen pages. Danish fiction sits broadly where English does for adult literary work, and Danish runs slightly longer than English at the same story length.

The word count to page count converter and novel word counts by genre do the sums.

Trim sizes for a Danish book

Six standards, from mass market at 4.25×6.87 inches to Royal at 6.14×9.21. Danish trade fiction is commonly issued around 13.5×21cm, which falls between the Digest at 5.5×8.5 inches and Royal.

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. A Danish ISBN comes from the Danish ISBN office at the Royal Library, and it is free.

Translating into or out of Danish

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, with the editor split so the original sits read-only beside what you write.

There are pages on writing a novel in Swedish, writing a novel in Norwegian and writing a novel in German.

No machine touches the prose. Galley has no AI anywhere near your writing.

Self-publishing and traditional publishing in Danish

Self-publishing. Amazon takes Danish in all three formats. Denmark has no Amazon store of its own, so a Danish self-publisher usually reaches Danish readers through Saxo and the library system instead, and the same print PDF and EPUB serve both.

Traditional publishing. The Danish trade is small and reads submissions directly. The submission package assembles the synopsis, the bio and the opening chapters. Statens Kunstfond grants are a real part of how Danish literary fiction gets written, and they want a sample.

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.
• From manuscript to published book is the whole route.