Features · The story bible

Your notes, next to the manuscript

Characters, places, a timeline and your research, in tabs beside the book.

Most novelists keep notes somewhere else: who's who, where things are, when things happened, and the facts they looked up. In Galley those notes are in tabs on the book itself, so they're right there while you write.

A character page: role, aliases, the sections you named yourself, the chapters this character appears in, and the events they are in.

Characters, places, a timeline and the world

Characters can have aliases and roles, so Elizabeth, Lizzy and Miss Bennet are counted as the same person. There are locations, a timeline that uses your story's dates and links events to chapters, characters and places, and a world-building section for everything else. There's also a style sheet for your own spelling rules, which is useful when an editor asks why "grey" is spelled "gray" in chapter twelve.

Character sheets you shape yourself

You can add named sections to a character. Galley suggests eight to start with, like Appearance, Voice, Wants and fears, and Arc, or you can name your own. Sections support bold, italics and lists, and you can use @ and # in them the same way you do in the manuscript. Locations and world-building entries work the same way.

Renaming a character

When you change a character's name, every tagged mention changes with it, in the chapters and in the notes. Galley takes a snapshot of each chapter first. Mentions tagged with an alias don't change. Untagged mentions in the text are counted and shown to you, and you can replace them all with one button if you want to. If you keep the old name as an alias, the name check still recognises it.

Who appears where

The cast table shows each character's role, aliases, how many chapters they appear in, their first and last appearance, the longest gap between appearances, and who they share chapters with. It's filled in from your @ mentions and the names in the text, so you don't have to enter anything. It's useful for noticing that a main character only shows up in four chapters out of twenty-six. It doesn't use AI, and your text doesn't leave your browser.

Research you keep, not links you reopen

A clipping saves the actual passage you need, like a fact or a phrase, along with your note about why it matters and where it came from. You don't have to go back to the original link, which might not work anymore.

One clipping, three jobs

Galley also has a glossary, endnotes and a permissions ledger, and a clipping can be turned into any of them without retyping it. For example, a quoted song lyric is research, but you also need permission to use it. If you mark it, it goes into the ledger as "to request" and you can move it through requested, granted and paid. Delivery readiness won't mark the book as finished while a permission is still open.

It shows up where you write

When you add a term to the glossary or a source to your references, every mention of it is highlighted in the text. When you export, references are numbered in the order they appear and the glossary becomes its own page at the back. If you move chapters around, the numbers update. Press ⌘K to search the whole book, including characters, places, terms and clippings.

The command palette open over the editor, filtering chapters, pages, and actions as you type.

What's included

Click any of these for the bit of the docs that explains it.

Timeline Your story’s dates, linked to chapters Research clippings Save a passage with your note and where it came from Glossary Terms are highlighted in the text and get a page at the back

More features

The writing room

You pick the trim and typeface first, then write on that page.

Revision

Galley counts and checks the whole book, and you decide what to change.

Toolkit

Exports, preflight and the submission package are all in one menu.

Safe & Secure

Only you can read it, it’s backed up, and no AI is trained on it.

Go on, write a page in it.

Opens straight into a book. Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for.

Open the demo See what €199 gets you