---
title: "Galley docs — Introduction"
description: "Galley is a writing app for novelists: draft on a real book page, keep your story bible beside the manuscript, and export print-ready files. Start here."
source: https://usegalley.com/docs
---
# 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.

*The Galley editor showing a chapter of The Lantern of Quiet Hours on a book page, with the chapter sidebar and the document bar.*

The editor: sidebar of chapters on the left, the book page in the middle, one document bar across the top.

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](https://usegalley.com/docs/offline-writing)).
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.

👋 Brand new? Jump to [Your first book](https://usegalley.com/docs/your-first-book), you'll
go from a blank screen to writing in about two minutes.

## 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](https://usegalley.com/docs/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](https://usegalley.com/docs/your-data).

## 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.

[NextYour first book](https://usegalley.com/docs/your-first-book)