Welcome to Galley
Galley is a quiet room for writing a novel, and, when you're done, for turning it into an actual book. These pages are the full manual: every screen, every button, every setting, explained plainly, with no technical background assumed.
CHAPTER ONE
The Station at Dusk
At Weirwater the lamps were lit by hand, and it was Mara Vale who lit them. She had come down to The Quiet Harbour before the neap, when the water draws back so far it seems to be deciding whether to return.
At Weirwater Station the lamps were not yet lit. Someone had left before the end of their watch, and in a town this size that was not a small thing.
* * *
Whatever the tide left, it left at the keeper's door first. The crossing that mattered was set down in the harbour ledger, in a level hand that did not lie so much as decline to explain.
He read the flats the way other men read the paper, for news of what the sea had been doing while no one watched.
At Weirwater the lamps were lit by hand, and it was Mara Vale who lit them, down at The Quiet Harbour before the neap.1
At Weirwater Station the lamps were not yet lit. Someone had left before the end of their watch.
* * *
The crossing that mattered was set down in the harbour ledger, in a level hand.
Glossary
neap
The tide at its least, when the water barely moves. The word glows green wherever it appears in your prose.
If you've ever written a book in Word or Google Docs, you know the two things that go wrong: the app has no idea what a chapter is, and when you finally type "The End," you're staring down a week of fighting margins to make it look like a real book. Galley exists to make both of those problems disappear. You write on a page that already looks like a paperback, your characters and notes stay within reach, and the finished files come out the other side ready to publish.
It runs in your web browser, so there's nothing to download and it's always up to date. Your work saves itself as you type, including offline, in beta: lose the connection and your chapters keep saving to your device, then sync when you're back (see Writing offline). All you need is a comfortable screen, Galley is made for sitting down at a desk and writing, not for tapping out chapters on your phone.
Who Galley is for
Novelists, specifically. Not screenwriters, not bloggers, not teams collaborating on a report. Galley only cares about novels, so it can understand chapters, keep track of your cast, and catch the mistakes that creep into fiction, a character's name misspelled once in chapter fourteen, a filler word you lean on too hard. A tool built for everyone tends to be built for no one in particular. This one's built for you.
Finding your way around these docs
The sidebar groups everything into a natural order, roughly, the journey a book takes from blank page to bookshelf:
- Getting started, set up your first book, or bring one you've already begun.
- Writing, the page you type on, how chapters work, and the shortcuts that keep you moving.
- The story bible, a home for your characters, places, timeline, and the little facts that are easy to lose track of.
- Book design, how your book looks: its size, its typeface, the way chapters begin. Plain-English explanations, I promise.
- Revise & publish, the tools that help you polish, and how to get finished files out the door.
- Your account, devices, writing goals, and how your work is kept safe.
- Accessibility, what works with a keyboard and a screen reader, measured rather than promised, and what is still missing.
No AI touches your prose
No artificial intelligence writes, rewrites, or "improves" a single word of your book. Galley has tools that count and check and tidy the layout, but none of them put words on the page. That's your job, and keeping it that way is the point. Your writing is never fed to train anything, and you can download all of it, anytime. There's more on that in Your data & privacy.
When you need a hand
Inside the app, click your profile picture and choose Help & feedback. That reaches a real person, the one who built Galley and writes in it every day. The same spot lets you suggest features, and the good ones get built.