Book writing software for writing a novel in Serbian

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

Serbian is written in two alphabets, and that is the thing to check in any tool before you trust it with a book. A face that sets Cyrillic and gives up on the Latin letters, or the reverse, will not carry a novel that quotes a street sign or a song title in the other script.

The ten faces on the Serbian shelf carry both. Set the book’s language to Serbian and you are offered the faces that can do the whole job; the five Latin-only faces that cannot render a word of Cyrillic are hidden rather than offered and then discovered at export.

The quotes are the second thing. Serbian quotes „low, then high“, and software that keys the rule to the script gets it wrong, because Russian and Ukrainian quote in guillemets and share the alphabet. Galley keys it to the language.

The third is Amazon, and it is closed: KDP does not list Serbian in any format. So the print-ready PDF and the valid EPUB are the whole product, and neither is shaped for a store that will not take them.

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 Serbian gets typeset

Both alphabets come from one face, so mixing them inside a paragraph does not change the colour of the page.

Cyrillic italic is a different alphabet, not a slope, and all ten faces carry a drawn one.

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

Sorting is Serbian, so a cast list comes out in the right order in whichever alphabet you are using.

The typefaces you get for Serbian

Ten faces carry a full Cyrillic alphabet alongside their Latin one: Alegreya, Charis SIL, Cormorant, EB Garamond, Gentium Book Plus, Literata, Lora, Source Serif 4, Spectral and Vollkorn. All under the SIL Open Font License.

EB Garamond is the safe first choice for a novel.

Literata reads well at small sizes.

Vollkorn is warmer and a little heavier.

One thing to know: like every free book face, these ship the Russian-style Cyrillic forms. Serbian italic has its own shapes for б, г, д, п and т, and no free face carries them. That is a real gap and it is named here rather than hidden. The typeface documentation lists every face by language.

Exports for a Serbian novel

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

Serbian punctuation

The quote pair you get automatically. Serbian dialogue is set with a dash at the head of the line, which is a character you type.

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

How long a Serbian novel is

Serbian publishing quotes length in authors’ sheets of 16 printed pages and in characters. Galley counts words and projects a page count at your trim, which is the number your printer needs.

The word count to page count converter should be a helpful resource for you.

Trim sizes for a Serbian book

Six standards, from mass market at 4.25×6.87 inches to Royal at 6.14×9.21. Serbian trade fiction is commonly issued around 13×20cm, close to the Digest at 5.5×8.5 inches. 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 Serbian ISBN comes from the national library in Belgrade.

Translating into or out of Serbian

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 Latin-script edition of a Cyrillic book is one of the cases this handles.

There are pages on writing a novel in Croatian, writing a novel in Bulgarian and writing a novel in Slovenian.

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

Self-publishing and traditional publishing in Serbian

Self-publishing. Amazon is closed, so print goes through a Serbian printer or IngramSpark and the ebook goes to Google Play, Apple Books, Kobo or a regional store.

Traditional publishing. Serbian houses read submissions directly, and the regional market is larger than the country, because Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin readers overlap. 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.
• From manuscript to published book is the whole route.