Software with opinions

Every writing tool is shaped less by what it does than by what it refuses to do. Most refuse nothing. They grow toward every audience, every format, every request, and end up as furniture warehouses where you came to write a book. Galley is built the other way. This page is the reasoning, in one place, so you can decide whether my opinions fit yours before you buy it.

The name

A galley is a printer's term: the proof pulled right before a book becomes real, the manuscript already set in its pages, ready for one last read. That's the whole product in one word. Everything in the app exists to get your novel from a blank page to a galley without leaving the room.

Novelists, not “writers”

Galley is not for screenwriters, academics, bloggers, or teams. Because Galley only serves novels, the editor can enforce fiction conventions (first paragraphs don't indent; scene breaks are typographic), the story bible can be characters-places-timeline instead of a generic wiki, and the revision tools can look for the things that actually go wrong in novels: the drifting character name, the filler word that peaks in chapter twelve. Depth comes from the narrowing. A tool for everyone is a tool for no one in particular.

A web app, on purpose

One codebase, always the latest version, on any computer you sit down at (Mac, Windows, Linux), with nothing to install and nothing to update. Your manuscript saves to your account as you write. I back all of it with daily version snapshots, a 30-day bin, and a one-zip export of everything you've ever written here.

No mobile app

Novels are written at desks, in stretches of quiet, on screens big enough to hold a page. A phone version of Galley would be a guilt machine in your pocket. When you're away from the desk, be away from the desk. The streak will survive, and if it doesn't, it was measuring the wrong thing.

Why the app is dark

The writing room is dark to keep distractions at a minimum, and because the page should be the brightest thing in the room, exactly like a desk lamp over paper. The page itself flips independently between light and dark, so you can draft on cream paper at noon or on a dark page at 2am while the room around it stays quiet either way. Your surroundings should never compete with your prose.

No theme libraries

Book interiors are one of the most conservative designs in existence, and that's their beauty: readers never notice them and always feel them. Mirrored margins, a gutter that respects the spine, running heads, drop folios, indent conventions. These aren't styles to choose between, they're conventions to get right. So Galley sets them correctly and gives you the choices that are truly yours: six named trim sizes, thirty-five book typefaces licensed for commercial publishing, your own chapter ornament, your own scene-break mark. That's not fewer options than a theme library, it's the correct ones geared towards novels.

No image dumps, no fifty formats

You won't find inline image gardens, custom font uploads, or forty export formats here. A novel's interior is text, set well. Exports are the four that matter (print-interior PDF, EPUB 3, Word, Markdown) plus the working copies a novelist actually sends: watermarked beta drafts, a proofreading PDF, an agent submission package. Every format I'd have to half-support is a format I refused.

That said, there is a very valid reason for allowing more visual elements for image pages, maps, etc., and is something I'm currently working on.

No AI in your prose.

Galley's tools count, check, typeset, and remember. None of them write. Your manuscript is never used to train anything, and no model ever suggests a sentence into it. This isn't a missing feature, it's the point. The voice on the page being entirely yours is what makes the book worth writing, and worth paying for software to protect.

I'm not alone in it, and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise. Novlr is writer-owned and has held this line for years, and The Novel Factory is AI-free with deeper plotting than I offer. Novelium draws the line elsewhere, letting AI read the manuscript but not write it, and says so plainly. Sudowrite is openly a co-writer and never pretends not to be. The ones worth avoiding are the ones that don't say.

One price, one-time licence

A novel doesn't arrive on a monthly schedule, so Galley doesn't bill on one. €199, once: every feature, every export, every future update, with no upgrade fee. It's a one-time licence — it doesn't expire, and there's nothing to renew. Subscriptions make software grow toward revenue retention, which is the wrong approach for a tool like Galley. I know which one I'd rather build.

Leaving must be easy

One click exports your whole library (manuscripts, story bible, versions) as open formats in a zip. No proprietary file, no export tax, no dark pattern at the door. Lock-in is a confession that a product can't keep you on merit.