Features · The story bible

Notes and references in the right place

Everything the book has to remember, beside the book.

Every novel grows a second document: who's who, where things are, when they happened, and the one fact you looked up for eleven minutes in 2024. In Galley it lives on tabs of the book itself. At chapter nine it's still there — unlike the separate app you swore you'd keep updated.

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

Everything the story touches

Characters with aliases and roles, so the same person can be Elias, Crane, and "the keeper" without confusing the checks. Locations. A timeline in narrative dates, with events tied to the chapters, characters and places they involve. World-building for the lore. A style sheet for your own spelling law, which is what stops an editor asking why "grey" turned into "gray" in chapter twelve.

Sections

Add named sections to a character sheet. Eight suggestions to start from, including Appearance, Voice, Wants and fears and Arc, or name your own. Each takes bold, italics and lists, and @ and # work inside them the same as in your prose. Locations and world-building entries get the same sheet.

Renaming a character

Change the name and every tagged mention changes with it, in the chapters and in the notes, with a snapshot of each chapter taken first. Mentions tagged under an alias stay as they were. Plain prose gets counted and shown to you, not rewritten, and one button replaces it if that's what you want. Keep the old name as an alias and the name check still recognises it.

Who appears where

A table of the whole cast: role, aliases, how many chapters of how many, first and last appearance, the longest gap, who they share chapters with. You type none of it. It counts the @ mentions you tagged and the names as they stand in the prose. Useful for spotting a lead who turns out to be in four chapters of twenty-six. No AI, and nothing leaves your browser.

Research you keep, not links you re-open

A clipping is the passage itself — the fact, the phrase, the word the overseers were called — with your note on why it matters and a source line written the way you'd write it. It doesn't rot the way a bookmark does.

One clipping, three jobs

Galley also holds the glossary, the endnotes and the permissions ledger, so a clipping becomes any of them without being retyped. A quoted lyric is research and a rights problem at the same time: mark it and it lands in the ledger as "to request", then follows you through requested, granted, paid. Delivery readiness won't call the book finished while one is still outstanding.

It shows up where you write

Add a term to the glossary or a source to references and every mention glows softly in the prose as you write. At export, references number themselves from first occurrence and the glossary assembles its own back-matter page — and renumbers when you move chapters, because that is the machine's job. Press ⌘K and the whole book answers: a character, a place, a term, a clipping from two years ago.

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

What's included

Every card goes to the part of the docs that explains it.

Characters Aliases, roles, and sections you name yourself Cast overview Who appears where, counted from the prose Locations Every place the story touches, same sheet as the cast Timeline Narrative dates on a scrollable line World-building Magic, history, culture, and the rules you set Research clippings The passage, why it matters, where it came from Style sheet Your spelling and hyphenation rules, your call Glossary Terms glow in the prose, and get their own page at export References Superscripts that number themselves at export

Thirty minutes in it beats reading about it.

Launch Galley

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

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Safe & yours

Private, backed up, never trained on, never locked in.