Chapters & structure
In a word processor a "chapter" is just a big heading you typed and hoped stayed put. In Galley chapters are real objects: you pick them up, rename them, reorder them, group them, and mark how finished each one is. The shape of your book is something you hold, not something you fake with formatting.
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.
Chapter stages
Draft → Revised → Final
Every chapter carries its stage, so the sidebar tells you where the book actually is at a glance.
The sidebar
The left rail lists everything in the book, top to bottom, in reading order. It's split into three bands that appear as you need them:
- Front matter
- Title page, copyright, dedication, and the like. Collapsible.
- Chapters
- The main run: your parts and chapters, drag-to-reorder.
- Back matter
- About the author, acknowledgements, glossary, references. Collapsible.
Each chapter row shows its title, its word count, and its stage chip. Hover a row for its controls: a drag handle, a to rename (or just click the title), and a menu for the rest.
Adding and arranging chapters
At the bottom of the sidebar:
- Add a chapter with Add chapter . It lands at the end of the main run, named "Chapter N", ready to rename.
- Reorder by dragging the handle. Everything renumbers itself.
- Rename by clicking the title or the pencil.
- Delete from the menu. It goes to the bin, not the void (see below).
When the book exports, each chapter becomes a proper chapter opening: the title dropped a third of the way down a fresh page, the way novels do it. Exactly how that opening looks is your call, over in Book design.
Prologues, epilogues and interludes
Use Add prologue or epilogue at the bottom of the sidebar. The book gives these no chapter number. A prologue keeps the word "Prologue" wherever a chapter title would print, including in the contents, and your first chapter stays Chapter One. An interlude works the same way, anywhere in the book.
They count as manuscript, so the consistency sweep, overused words, the pacing map and your word count all read them. Put an epilogue in the back matter instead and it drops out of the contents page and out of every check.
Delivery readiness notes it if the prologue is not first or the epilogue is not last. It does not block the export.
Parts
If your book is divided into larger sections, add a Part to group the chapters under it. Drag chapters into a part's band and they belong to it; collapse the part in the sidebar to tidy the list while you work on something else. Parts get their own pages when the book prints and appear in the table of contents. Your chapter numbers keep counting straight through them, so Part Two doesn't restart at Chapter One.
type of "part". That's why it
lives in the same list and drags around the same way. You don't need to know that to use it,
but it explains why there's no separate "parts" screen to hunt for. Synopses: a one-line reminder per chapter
You can pin a single line to any chapter, a note to yourself about what happens in it ("Renn finds the letter; the tide turns"). It's just for you and never appears in the book. It's there so you can glance down the list and remember the shape of the whole thing without opening every chapter. Add or edit it from the chapter's menu.
Stages: how finished a chapter is
Every chapter carries a stage chip. Click it to move it along as the work matures:
DraftRevisedFinal
This isn't decoration. Your dashboard reads these chips across the whole book and draws a progress bar from them, so you can see at a glance how close the manuscript is to done. A book that's all Final chips is a book ready to export.
Front & back matter
Every book has a handful of pages that aren't the story: the title and copyright pages at the front, the "about the author" and acknowledgements at the back. Galley calls these front and back matter. You manage them under Metadata → Front & back matter. Add or remove them whenever; Galley drops each into the spot where it conventionally belongs. Several build themselves:
- The table of contents fills itself in from your chapters and parts.
- The copyright page can write its own standard wording from the book's details. See Publishing.
- The glossary and references pages assemble from the terms you mark as you write. See the story bible.
The bin
Deleting a chapter doesn't destroy it. It drops into the bin at the bottom of the sidebar and waits there for 30 days, so a mis-click is a two-second undo, not a disaster. Restore it with any time inside that window; after 30 days it's cleared for good. The same net covers deleted books from the dashboard.