Book writing software for writing a novel in Dutch

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

The thing that goes wrong in Dutch is the same thing that goes wrong in German, scaled down. Dutch builds long compounds, and a long compound in a justified line with no hyphenation opens a hole you can see from across the room. Galley carries Dutch hyphenation patterns and applies them in the print PDF when you justify.

The second thing is the font, and it is the one most tools never mention. Galley embeds the face inside your PDF and your EPUB, which is redistribution, so every face on the shelf is licensed for you to sell the book with. A tool that hands you a proprietary serif and stays silent has given you a problem to find later.

The third is that Dutch does not need special handling and does not get punished for it. All fifteen faces set Dutch, the curly quote pair is correct, and the IJ digraph, the trema and the acute all come through typing, search, sorting and both exports.

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 Dutch gets typeset

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

Diacritics survive everywhere, including into the download filename.

Sorting is Dutch, so a cast list comes out in the order a Dutch reader expects.

Italics work, and all fifteen faces carry a proper italic.

The typefaces you get for Dutch

Fifteen faces, all under the SIL Open Font License.

EB Garamond is the safe first choice for a novel.

Literata was drawn for long-form reading and holds up on paper and screen.

Charis SIL descends from Bitstream Charter, which Matthew Carter drew for low-resolution output and which reads beautifully in print.

The rest of the shelf: Crimson Pro, Cormorant, Lora, Libre Baskerville, Source Serif 4, Spectral, Alegreya, Vollkorn, Cardo, Gentium Book Plus, Newsreader and Libre Caslon Text.

What you will not find here: the Dutch Type Library faces, DTL Documenta and the rest, along with Lexicon and Collis. Dutch type design is among the best in the world and almost none of it is free to embed. The typeface documentation lists every face by language.

Exports for a Dutch novel

• Print-ready PDF at your trim, mirrored margins, real gutter, font embedded.
• EPUB 3 with your cover, tagged nl.
• Store-ready EPUBs for Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books.
• Word and Markdown for a redacteur 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.

Dutch punctuation

Dutch fiction sets speech in the curly double pair, and a good deal of it uses a dash at the head of the line instead. Both are characters you type and both come through unchanged.

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

How long a Dutch novel is

Dutch publishers quote length in words and in pages, and Dutch fiction sits broadly where English does, between 80,000 and 100,000 words for adult literary and commercial work. Dutch runs a little longer than English at the same story length, which shows up in your page count more than in your draft.

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

Trim sizes for a Dutch book

Six standards, from mass market at 4.25×6.87 inches to Royal at 6.14×9.21. Dutch trade fiction is commonly issued around 13.5×21.5cm, which sits 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 Dutch ISBN comes through CB, and listing there is what gets a book into Dutch shops and libraries.

The Netherlands has a fixed book price law, so the price you set is the price everywhere, including on your own site.

Translating into or out of Dutch

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 German, writing a novel in Danish and writing a novel in Swedish.

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

Self-publishing and traditional publishing in Dutch

Self-publishing. Amazon takes Dutch in all three formats, and amazon.nl has grown into a real market. The same print PDF goes to a Dutch printer or to IngramSpark, and the EPUB goes anywhere.

Traditional publishing. The Dutch trade is small, concentrated in Amsterdam, and reads submissions directly more often than the Anglophone one does. 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.
• Book typography basics is the set of rules that makes a page look made.