---
title: "Book writing software for a novel in Russian"
description: "Write and typeset a Russian novel: ten book faces with real Cyrillic italics, hyphenation by Russian rules, a print-ready PDF and an EPUB. Including the one thing Amazon will not do for you."
source: https://usegalley.com/book-writing-software-russian
---
# Book writing software for writing a novel in Russian

TL;DR Ten of Galley's book faces carry a full Cyrillic alphabet with a properly drawn italic, the print PDF hyphenates by Russian rules, and the shelf hides the faces that cannot set a word of Russian. Amazon KDP does not publish in Russian at all, so the export matters more here than it does in English.

Русский

## Как написать роман на русском

Galley — это программа для написания и вёрстки романа. Вы пишете сразу на настоящей книжной странице: тот же формат, те же поля, та же гарнитура, что и в готовой книге.

Кириллицу держат десять книжных гарнитур, курсив в них нарисован, а не наклонён программно, переносы расставляются по русским правилам.

На выходе — PDF, готовый для типографии, и EPUB с вшитым шрифтом. Книга печатается ровно так, как вы её видели на экране.

Интерфейс на английском. Книга — на русском.

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

Nothing about Cyrillic is hard for a browser. The letters are separate, they run
left to right, they need no shaping engine. So a Russian novelist gets a long way
into a bad tool before anything goes wrong.

The fonts go wrong first. Most tools hand you a list and let you pick. Five of
the fifteen Latin book faces in Galley cannot set a single word of Russian.
Libre Baskerville is one, and it is a lovely face. Before the shelf was filtered
by language you could pick it, write eighty thousand words, and meet the problem
at export. Now the shelf is filtered. Set the book’s language to Russian and
those five are not offered.

Then the italics. Cyrillic italic is a different set of letterforms. Italic т is
drawn like a Latin m, italic д like a g. A font with no drawn
Cyrillic italic gets faked by the renderer, which tilts the upright letters and
produces something a Russian reader clocks straight away. All ten faces on the
Russian shelf carry a real one.

Hyphenation only bites if you justify. Russian words are long, and Russian
justified without hyphenation opens rivers of white space down the page. Galley
hyphenates Russian by Russian patterns, in the print PDF, when justification is
on.

The rest of the app is the same app: a
[true book page](https://usegalley.com/features/make-the-book) at your trim size, the
[story bible](https://usegalley.com/features/story-bible) beside the manuscript, a print-ready PDF
and a valid EPUB at the end.

## How Russian gets typeset

**Ten faces, one alphabet, real italics.** The Cyrillic coverage in these faces
is the full alphabet. Some Latin fonts carry a handful of Cyrillic letters
because they double as mathematical symbols, which passes a lazy check and is
nowhere near enough to set a book, so coverage here is tested against the whole
alphabet.

**Hyphenation is on the language, not on the app.** 35 of the 54 languages
Galley knows carry hyphenation patterns and Russian is one of them. It applies
in the justified print PDF only.

**Ё is your decision.** Whether to print ё or let it collapse into е is a house
style question that Russian publishers answer differently, and it is not one a
tool should decide for you. The [style sheet](https://usegalley.com/docs/the-story-bible#style-sheet)
in the story bible is where you record the rule you are following, and book-wide
[find and replace](https://usegalley.com/docs/revision#find-replace) is how you enforce it across
every chapter at once.

**Sorting follows the book’s alphabet.** A cast list, a glossary or a set of
references in a Russian book sorts in the Russian alphabet. Sorted by code point
instead, a cast list comes out in an order no Russian reader would recognise.

## The typefaces you get for Russian

Ten of the fifteen book faces carry a full Cyrillic alphabet: Alegreya, Charis
SIL, Cormorant, EB Garamond, Gentium Book Plus, Literata, Lora, Source Serif 4,
Spectral and Vollkorn. Every one is under the
[SIL Open Font License](https://openfontlicense.org/), which is the licence that
lets Galley embed the font inside a PDF or EPUB you sell.

**EB Garamond** is Claude Garamond by way of the Egenolff-Berner specimen, and it
is the safe first choice for a novel.

![Sample sentence in EB Garamond](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/eb-garamond-ru.png)

**Literata** was drawn for Google Play Books, for long-form reading on a screen
and on paper.

![Sample sentence in Literata](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/literata-ru.png)

**Vollkorn** is warmer and a little heavier, and it holds up well at small sizes.

![Sample sentence in Vollkorn](https://usegalley.com/images/specimens/vollkorn-ru.png)

**What you will not find here:** Литературная and Академическая, the two faces
Soviet and Russian book publishing was built on. Both are ParaType’s, and both
would put a per-title licensing bill between you and your own book. The
[typeface documentation](https://usegalley.com/docs/book-design#typeface) lists every face on the
shelf, by language.

## Exports for a Russian novel

Every export is built from the same book, so the language setting follows into
all of them.

- **Print-ready PDF.** Your trim size, mirrored margins, a real gutter, the font
embedded, hyphenated by Russian rules if you justify.

- **EPUB 3**, with your cover, tagged `ru` so a reading device knows what it is
holding.

- **Store-ready EPUBs** tuned per shop for Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books.

- **Word and Markdown**, for an editor who wants to track changes, or an archive.

- **Manuscript format**, double-spaced, the way an editor asks for it.

- **A proofreading PDF** set two pages to a sheet for a red pen, and a
**large print PDF** of the same book.

- **A watermarked copy per beta reader**, as a file or a link with their name on it.

The revision tools work in Russian because they were rewritten to stop assuming
the Latin alphabet. [Overused words](https://usegalley.com/docs/revision#overused-words),
[name consistency](https://usegalley.com/docs/revision#name-consistency) and the
[consistency sweep](https://usegalley.com/docs/revision#consistency-sweep) all tokenise on Unicode
letter properties, so they find Russian words instead of silently finding
nothing.

## Russian punctuation

Russian dialogue is set with a dash at the head of the line. Quoted speech
inside a paragraph takes «ёлочки», with
„лапки“ for a quote inside a quote. Both are characters you type, and both
survive into the print PDF and the EPUB unchanged.

Type a straight double quote in a Russian book and you get « and », because the
quote marks follow the book’s language. That was broken until the day this page
was written: the rule was keyed by script, and Cyrillic covers Russian and
Ukrainian, which quote «», alongside Bulgarian and Serbian, which quote „“. All
four had been getting English curly quotes. Writing the sentence for this page is
how I noticed.

The non-breaking space is the other Russian typographic habit worth keeping: it
holds a one-letter preposition to the word it governs so the line never breaks
between them. The editor’s Invisibles toggle shows non-breaking spaces as
distinct from ordinary ones, so you can see where they are.

The [dialogue punctuation rules](https://usegalley.com/resources/dialogue-punctuation-rules) and the
[dashes, hyphens and ellipses](https://usegalley.com/resources/dashes-hyphens-and-ellipses) sheets
cover the cases that are not script-specific.

## How long a Russian novel is

Russian publishing counts in авторские листы, and one авторский лист is 40,000
characters including spaces. Galley counts your book in words, live, per chapter
and per book, so if you are working to a contract stated in listy you will be
converting. The rough conversion most people use is about 6,000 to 6,500 Russian
words per лист, which makes a 10 list novel somewhere around 60,000 to 65,000
words.

Check out the
[word count to page count converter](https://usegalley.com/resources/word-count-to-page-count) that turns a
manuscript length into a page count at your trim, and
[novel word counts by genre](https://usegalley.com/resources/novel-word-count-by-genre) gives you the
ranges publishers work to.

## Trim sizes for a Russian book

Galley offers six standard trim sizes, from mass market at 4.25×6.87 inches to
Royal at 6.14×9.21 inches. Russian trade paperbacks are commonly issued at
around 130×200mm, which sits between the B-format at 5.06×7.81 inches and the
Digest at 5.5×8.5. If you are printing with a Russian press instead of a
print-on-demand service, ask them what they set and match it before you start,
because trim decides your page count and your page count decides your spine.

The [spine width calculator](https://usegalley.com/resources/book-spine-width-calculator) and the
[trim size comparison](https://usegalley.com/resources/book-trim-size-comparison) would be helpful here.

## Metadata and the copyright page

Your title, your name and your dedication are ordinary text, and every field in
the app detects its own direction and script, so a Cyrillic title in one field
and a Latin ISBN in the next both come out right. Export filenames keep their
Cyrillic too: a book called Тихие часы downloads under its own name instead of a
row of underscores.

The [copyright page](https://usegalley.com/docs/publishing#copyright-page) builds itself from the
metadata you already filled in. An [ISBN](https://usegalley.com/resources/isbn-checker) comes from
the agency for your country of publication. The language of the book has nothing
to do with it. Some storefronts will also ask for a Latin transliteration of
your name in their own metadata fields.

## Typing Russian

Spellcheck runs against your own browser’s dictionary. Install the Russian
dictionary on your machine and a Russian book spellchecks. Nothing is uploaded
to make that happen, in Russian or in any other language, because the check
happens in your browser and never leaves it.

## Translating into or out of Russian

A translation in Galley is its own book: its own
language, its own typeface shelf, its own ISBN, its own cover, its own blurb,
still linked to the original. Open a chapter and the editor splits, with the
original read-only on the left and your translation on the right.

The consequence is that a Russian edition of your English novel is not the
English book with different words in it. It gets a face that can set Cyrillic,
Russian hyphenation, and a `ru` tag in the EPUB. The same goes for
[writing a novel in English](https://usegalley.com/book-writing-software-english) and
[writing a novel in Persian](https://usegalley.com/book-writing-software-persian).

No machine touches the prose. Galley has
[no AI anywhere near your writing](https://usegalley.com/blog/no-ai-in-your-prose), which includes not
offering to translate it for you.

## Self-publishing and traditional publishing in Russian

**Start with the fact that decides everything else: Amazon KDP does not publish
in Russian.** Not as a Kindle ebook, not as a paperback, not as a hardcover.
Amazon’s own supported-language lists are three separate lists and Russian is on
none of them. That is not a Galley limitation and no tool can route around it.

So the export is the product. Galley gives you a print-ready PDF that any
printer can take and a valid EPUB that any store that sells Russian can take,
and neither file is shaped for Amazon in particular. Everything Amazon-specific
in the app, the preflight and the KDP metadata fields, switches itself off on a
book in a language Amazon does not sell, and it says why instead of letting you
find out at upload.

**Traditional publishing.** Russian trade publishing is concentrated in a few
large houses and works on the авторский лист as its unit. What Galley gives you
is a [submission package](https://usegalley.com/docs/publishing#where-it-goes) with the synopsis, the
bio and the opening chapters, and a manuscript in the double-spaced format an
editor asks for.

Either way the decision is not one you make at the start. The same book exports
a submission and a print-ready interior. The longer arguments are in
[Galley for self-publishing](https://usegalley.com/blog/galley-for-self-publishing) and
[Galley for traditional publishing](https://usegalley.com/blog/galley-for-traditional-publishing).

## Where to go next

- [Writing software for novelists who don’t write in English](https://usegalley.com/blog/write-a-novel-in-your-language)
covers every script Galley sets, and says what is unfinished.

- [Book design and typefaces](https://usegalley.com/docs/book-design#typeface) lists every face by
language, with the reasoning behind each one.

- [Series and translations](https://usegalley.com/docs/series-and-translations) covers the full
language list and the side-by-side view.

- [The typography rules that make a book look professionally made](https://usegalley.com/blog/book-typography-basics)
applies to a Russian book as much as an English one.

## Questions people ask about writing a novel in Russian

### Can I write a novel in Russian in Galley?

Yes. Set the book's language to Russian on its metadata page and the typeface shelf narrows to the ten faces that carry a full Cyrillic alphabet, the print PDF hyphenates by Russian rules, and the EPUB is tagged Russian.

### Which fonts can set Russian?

Ten of the fifteen Latin book faces carry Cyrillic: Alegreya, Charis SIL, Cormorant, EB Garamond, Gentium Book Plus, Literata, Lora, Source Serif 4, Spectral and Vollkorn. The other five cannot render a word of Russian and are hidden on a Russian book.

### Do the italics work in Cyrillic?

Yes. Cyrillic italic is a different set of letterforms, and all ten faces ship a drawn one. Emphasis behaves the way it does in English.

### Does Galley hyphenate Russian?

Yes, using Russian hyphenation patterns, and only when you justify the print PDF. Justification is off by default, and ragged right never needs hyphenation.

### Can I publish a Russian book on Amazon KDP?

No. Amazon does not list Russian in any format, for ebook, paperback or hardcover. Every Galley export still works, so the file goes to another store, another print-on-demand service, or a printer.

### Is the Galley interface available in Russian?

No. The interface is English and stays English. One person builds Galley, and a half-translated interface is worse than an English one. Your book is fully Russian.

## Other languages

- [Book writing software for Persian](https://usegalley.com/book-writing-software-persian)Write and typeset a Persian novel: right to left, set in Markazi Text or Amiri, with the half-space intact and a print-ready PDF at the end. What Persian asks of a book tool, and where most of them give up.
- [Book writing software for English](https://usegalley.com/book-writing-software-english)Write and typeset an English novel: fifteen book faces, British or American house style, a print-ready PDF for KDP or IngramSpark and a valid EPUB. One payment, no subscription, no AI in your prose.

Start the book. Galley sets it in Russian from the first sentence to the print PDF.

[Launch Galley](https://app.usegalley.com)