Preview & export
Turning a manuscript into files a printer or store will accept usually takes a stressful week. In Galley it's all in one menu.
The Toolkit menu
Up in the book's top bar, click Toolkit . It has everything you can make from your manuscript, in groups:
The last two, Overused words and Name consistency, are covered under Revision. Everything else is below.
Preview
Before you export anything, open Preview book to see what the files will look like. You switch devices at the top, and it opens on Kindle:
KindleiPhoneiPadPrint
- Kindle, iPhone and iPad
- Your book as an ebook in a device frame, one chapter at a time, at the text size the reader picks. Flip through the chapters and try the three text sizes to see how it reflows before you publish.
- The print PDF itself, the same file a printer gets, with margins, page numbers, running heads and chapter openings.
CHAPTER ONE
A Scandal in Bohemia
To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind.
I had seen little of Holmes lately. My marriage had drifted us away from each other. My own complete happiness, and the home-centred interests which rise up around the man who first finds himself master of his own establishment, were sufficient to absorb all my attention, while Holmes, who loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in Baker Street, buried among his old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen nature.
His manner was not effusive. It seldom was; but he was glad, I think, to see me. With hardly a word spoken, but with a kindly eye, he waved me to an armchair, threw across his case of cigars, and indicated a spirit case and a gasogene in the corner. Then he stood before the fire and looked me over in his singular introspective fashion.
“Wedlock suits you,” he remarked. “I think, Watson, that you have put on seven and a half pounds since I saw you.”
Readers choose their own type size. This is how your book reflows on a Kindle.
To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name.
He waved me to an armchair, threw across his case of cigars, and indicated a spirit case and a gasogene in the corner.
* * *
“Now, I know that there are seventeen steps, because I have both seen and observed.”
Preview
Kindle, iPhone, iPad, Print
Each chapter reflowed on a Kindle, an iPhone or an iPad at the reader's text size, and the print PDF itself.
Read-through
Preview shows you the pages, and Read-through is for reading the book. It shows the whole book as one continuous page, every chapter in order from the front matter to the back, in your book's typeface without the editor around it. You can't edit in it, so you can read without stopping to change things. It's good for catching things you only notice when you read straight through, like a repeated moment or a slow scene.
“Quite so,” he answered, lighting a cigarette, and throwing himself down into an armchair. “You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear. For example, you have frequently seen the steps which lead up from the hall to this room.”
“Quite so! You have not observed. And yet you have seen. That is just my point. Now, I know that there are seventeen steps, because I have both seen and observed.”
CHAPTER TWO
The Red-Headed League
I had called upon my friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, one day in the autumn of last year and found him in deep conversation with a very stout, florid-faced, elderly gentleman with fiery red hair. With an apology for my intrusion, I was about to withdraw when Holmes pulled me abruptly into the room and closed the door behind me.
“You could not possibly have come at a better time, my dear Watson,” he said cordially.
“I was afraid that you were engaged.”
“So I am. Very much so.”
To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name.
He waved me to an armchair, threw across his case of cigars, and indicated a spirit case and a gasogene in the corner.
* * *
“Now, I know that there are seventeen steps, because I have both seen and observed.”
Read-through
The whole book
The book in one scroll, front to back and read-only, set the way a reader will get it.
The files you can make
Here's what each format is for. Every file is named after your book when it downloads.
The print PDF gives you the final page count, which your cover designer will need. The free spine width calculator turns it into a spine and a full wrap size, and there are more of these on the resources page.
- Print PDF
- The inside of your paperback, typeset and sized to your trim, with mirrored margins and a proper gutter. This is what you upload for a print edition. There's a step-by-step in export a print PDF for KDP.
- EPUB
- The ebook file (EPUB 3), with your cover, tagged with your book's language, and carrying its own accessibility metadata. Works on Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books, anywhere ebooks are sold. Why the metadata matters in the EU is in Accessible ebooks and the European Accessibility Act.
- Word (.docx)
- A tidy manuscript to send an editor, with your typeface named in the document. You can bring their marked-up version back in, too.
- Manuscript format (.docx)
- The same book set the way editors and agents ask for it: 12pt Times New Roman, double-spaced, one-inch margins, indented paragraphs, your surname and title in the header of every page. It's the plain copy an editor works on, not the designed book you get from the Word export. For a manuscript that isn't in Galley, the Shunn format generator does the same job in the browser.
- Markdown
- A plain-text copy for your own backups or for other tools.
- Proofreading PDF
- Two pages to a sheet, with room to mark it up with a pen.
Copies made for other people
- Share a copy
- A watermarked copy for each reader, with their name printed on every page. Enter a few names and pick how they get it: an EPUB, a PDF, or a link that opens the book in a reader. A link takes a password and an expiry date, tells you whether it has been opened, and can be turned off. Your reader sees a page with your name and the book's title before it opens.
- Submission package
- A cover page, your synopsis, author bio, and first three chapters, in the double-spaced format literary agents expect. The synopsis comes from the Synopsis field on the book's Metadata page (the blurb stays on your listing), and the bio from your profile.
- KDP preflight
- A checklist run against your book before you upload to Kindle Direct Publishing, so you catch small problems (like a missing ISBN or an unusual trim) before Amazon rejects the file. See Publishing.
- Back up everything
- Your whole library, including the story bible, as one zip file you can download. You can take all your work with you whenever you want.
How many readers to send it to, and what to ask them, is in Sending your novel to beta readers.
Glossary & references at export
The glossary and references you added while writing (see the story bible) are turned into pages when you export:
- The glossary becomes an alphabetical page at the back: each term in italics, an em dash, then its definition.
- References become endnotes, numbered per chapter. In the text you get a small superscript number; on the notes page the numbers restart each chapter, grouped under that chapter's heading, with the citation beside each. If you move chapters around, the numbers update.
Your book design is used in every export
Everything you set in Book design (trim, typeface, chapter openings, scene breaks, running heads, justification, language) is used in the exports automatically. Galley also makes the table of contents, the copyright page, and the glossary and references pages, and numbers everything for you.