Book writing software for writing a novel in Swedish

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

Swedish quotes with a right-facing double mark at both ends. Not the English open-and-close pair, not guillemets. Almost no writing tool knows that, because almost no writing tool asks what language the book is in before it decides how a straight quote should curl. Galley asks, and a Swedish book gets the Swedish pair as you type.

Hyphenation is the second thing. Swedish compounds are long, and a justified Swedish page without hyphenation opens gaps. Galley carries Swedish patterns and uses them in the print PDF when you justify. Justification is off by default, so if you set ragged right the question never comes up.

Third is the font licence, which most tools skip. Galley embeds the face inside your PDF and your EPUB, so every face on the shelf is one you are allowed to 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 Swedish gets typeset

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

Å ä ö go all the way through, including into the download filename, so a book called Långa Skuggor arrives under its own name.

Sorting is Swedish, which matters more here than in most languages: å ä ö come after z in the Swedish alphabet, and a cast list sorted the English way puts them in the wrong place entirely.

Italics work, on a drawn italic in every one of the fifteen faces.

The typefaces you get for Swedish

Fifteen faces, all under the SIL Open Font License.

EB Garamond is the safe first choice for a novel.

Source Serif 4 comes out of Fournier and sets a clean, even page.

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

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

Exports for a Swedish novel

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

Swedish punctuation

The quote pair you get automatically. The other Swedish habit is the talstreck, a dash at the head of the line opening speech, which a great deal of Swedish fiction uses in place of quoting at all. It is a character you type and it comes through untouched.

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

How long a Swedish novel is

Swedish publishers quote length in words and in printed pages. Swedish fiction sits broadly where English does for adult literary and commercial work, between 80,000 and 100,000 words, and Swedish crime, which is the export, often runs longer.

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

Trim sizes for a Swedish book

Six standards, from mass market at 4.25×6.87 inches to Royal at 6.14×9.21. The Swedish pocket runs near 11×17.8cm, close to mass market, and the trade format around 13.5×21.5cm, 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 Swedish ISBN comes from the Kungliga biblioteket, and registering the book in Bokinfo is what puts it in front of Swedish shops and libraries.

Translating into or out of Swedish

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 Danish, writing a novel in Norwegian and writing a novel in Finnish.

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

Self-publishing and traditional publishing in Swedish

Self-publishing. Amazon takes Swedish in all three formats. amazon.se is newer than the other European stores, and the Swedish market still runs heavily through Adlibris and Bokus, which take a book through a distributor rather than directly. The same print PDF works for all of them.

Traditional publishing. Swedish houses read submissions directly more often than Anglophone ones do. 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.
• Choosing a trim size is the longer argument on format.