Documentation
Learn how to use Bookshaper to write, organize, style, and publish your manuscript.
Workflows
Detailed documentation for each area of Bookshaper.
Manuscript management
- Creating a project
- Each manuscript is a project. Create a new project or import an existing manuscript file to get started.
- Chapters and scenes
- Manuscripts are organized into chapters, each containing one or more scenes. Use the sidebar to navigate between chapters and scenes.
- Parts
- For longer works, chapters can be grouped into parts. Parts are optional and can be added from the Structure section.
- Front and back matter
- Add title pages, dedications, acknowledgments, and other front or back matter items from the Structure section.
- Area walkthroughs
- Each area of the app — Write, Structure, Notebook, Analyze, Lume, Format, Package, and Market — offers a short walkthrough of what it does, offered once, the first time you open that area. It’s a dismissible card, not a blocker: skip it and keep working, or take it and reopen it anytime from that area or from Guide. Nothing is required to start writing.
Writing and editing
- The editor
- The writing environment supports rich text editing with standard formatting: bold, italic, headings, block quotes, and lists. Write one scene at a time for focused editing.
- Beats
- A read-only view in the Analysis section that reads the beats and pacing analysis detected across your scenes, chapter by chapter, with a one-click way to bring any of them into your editable structure. Each chapter's own summary sits on the chapter in the Outline view, which is also where you change your structure. Pacing is one of the fields you can set yourself in Chapter Details; where you haven't, the analysis fills it in.
- Scene metadata
- Each scene can track point of view, location, characters, purpose tags, timeline type, and tension level. Point of view and characters are yours to set — type them in the scene's details and they stay yours; leave them and an analysis run writes them for you. Either way the field says where its value came from, and an analysis never overwrites something you typed. This metadata powers the visual dashboards.
- Chapter classification
- A chapter carries its own pacing, narrative voice, and tension plot. Set them yourself in Chapter Details — pick a pacing, name the voice, drag the tension points — or leave them to an analysis run. Each field is tagged with its origin, so you can always tell what you decided from what was inferred, and what you decided stays put across later runs.
- Manuscript preview
- Use the preview pane to see the full chapter rendered as continuous prose. Toggle the preview with Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + P.
- Scene narration (Narrate)
- Click Narrate in the toolbar to hear the scene you’re working on read aloud in a professional AI voice. Narrate the whole scene, or select a passage and narrate just that. Play, pause, and cycle the playback speed while you follow along, and pick your voice from the panel’s settings. Narration is a Pro feature; in platform mode it costs AI credits priced by how much text it reads, and the panel shows the estimate before you generate (nothing when you’re using your own AI key). Once it’s generated, the audio is saved in your project and can be downloaded as MP3 — your permanent, portable copy. If the scene or the voice changes afterwards, the panel says so and offers to regenerate.
- Find and replace
- Cmd+F to find, Cmd+H to find and replace, Cmd+Shift+F for project-wide search. Preserve-case replacement maps character name casing automatically. Structural operators let you search by chapter title, scene, character, location, or tag. Filter by formatting (bold, italic, underline), save searches for reuse, and undo project-wide replacements with Cmd+Z.
- Quick Open
- Press Cmd+P or click the search box in the toolbar to jump to any scene, chapter, character, or location in your project. Results update as you type with fuzzy matching.
Organization views
- Outline
- An editable top-down tree of your whole manuscript — parts, chapters, scenes, and beats, each level collapsible. Rename inline, add or delete at any level, and drag to reorder or re-parent across levels. This is where plotters build and reshape structure.
- Beat Cards
- A bottom-up board of beat cards grouped inside their scenes, led by a prominent Unplaced pool. Capture loose beats first, then place each into a scene — or spin up a new scene (or chapter and scene) right from the card. The pantser's companion to Outline; both edit the same structure.
- Timeline
- Two tabs over your book's chronology. Dates is an entry table — every scene in reading order, with its date and timeline label editable in place, so you can build the whole timeline yourself with analysis switched off. Chronology draws it: a year axis across the top with your scenes grouped into date buckets beneath it — click a year to drill into it. It opens in chronological order, so you see the story as it happened; switch to reading order when you want to compare that against the order the manuscript tells it in. Two more toggles sit alongside: refined or original date labels, and a Characters lens that swaps the year axis for POV swimlanes, one dot per scene sized by word count. Scenes with no dates fall back to chapter grouping.
Refine and Dialogue
- Expand
- In the Refine panel, Expand develops thin scenes with AI-generated prose that follows your established beats. Review the expanded text in a side-by-side diff before applying.
- Revise
- Open the Refine panel and switch to Revise to rework a scene across six dimensions: voice, tone, diction, syntax, figurative language, and structural style. Choose meaning-preserving, continuity-preserving, or suggestions-only modes, and review every change in a side-by-side diff before applying.
- Line Edit
- The Line Edit tool in the Refine panel makes sentence-level refinements — clarity, rhythm, diction. Each micro-edit is shown individually so you can accept or reject changes one at a time.
- Dialogue
- Dialogue has its own toolbar button because it works at the chapter level, not the scene. It reads dialogue across an entire chapter to judge character-voice consistency and groups its suggestions by character. Because it spans the chapter, its results stay put as you move between scenes.
- Your style profile (ESP)
- The first time you run a style-conditioned operation, Bookshaper extracts a style profile from your manuscript — your characteristic patterns of diction, syntax, and tone — and uses it to condition Revise, Line Edit, Expand, Dialogue, and the proofread style pass, so suggestions follow your established voice instead of generic editorial defaults. There is nothing to set up and no profile to manage: it is generated automatically and kept as conditioning input. What you do see is a note on each new result saying whether it was styled to your voice or produced generically — and, when generic, why (no API key configured, a read-only subscription, or a profile that couldn’t be generated).
- Undo and redo
- Every applied refinement is tracked in a history stack. Undo and redo refine operations at any time without affecting your regular editing history.
Dashboards
- Health summary
- An overview of your manuscript’s key metrics: word counts, scene distribution, POV balance, dialogue ratios, and structural composition.
- Tension plot
- A chart showing tension levels across your entire manuscript, so you can see your story’s dramatic shape at a glance.
- Pacing heatmap
- See your story’s rhythm visualized as a color-coded heatmap. Identify slow stretches and high-intensity sequences.
- Themes and motifs
- See which chapters carry each theme and where it goes quiet. The analysis locates the themes and proposes a name; you decide what each one is called — and once you have named one, it is read back to you: a theme you planted early and never paid off, one that opens and closes the book but disappears through the middle, one that does not arrive until past the midpoint.
Characters and locations
- Character profiles
- Create and manage character profiles with descriptions and aliases. The list is your record — you add, edit, and delete every entry on it, and no analysis run adds or removes one, and nothing writes into the description or notes you keep there.
- Presence
- Two maps of which characters are in which chapters: the one you build yourself by tagging scenes, which needs no analysis and works with AI off, and the analysis's mention-density read of the same question. Read across a row to follow one character's thread, or down a column to see a chapter's cast; chapter numbers are links, so you can open a chapter and check whether a gap is deliberate.
- Relationships
- Character-to-character and character-to-place connections, listed alongside the characters no connection has been recorded for. Add, edit, and remove them yourself.
- Location management
- Define locations and link them to scenes. See which locations appear throughout your story.
- Record Gaps
- A gap check reads your draft for the characters, places, and connections in it, compares them against your records, and reports the difference — who is on the page and not on your list. It reports only; add an item to your records and the scenes it appears in are tagged from what the last run already read, with no re-run and no credits. It lives with the analysis tools under Analysis → Record Gaps.
- Story Bible PDF
- Download your cast, places, relationships, and dated chapters as one printable reference, set in your book's own style template. It is reference material built from your records, not a verdict on them, and it states how much of the book carries dates rather than implying all of it does.
Notebook
- Research and notes
- The Notebook provides a space for research notes, character backstories, world-building details, and other reference material. Notes are organized into folders and can be tagged for quick retrieval.
- Scene linking
- Link notebook entries to specific scenes for contextual reference while writing.
Formatting and export
- Formatting editor
- Customize the visual presentation of your book using dozens of style targets across front matter, body, back matter, page layout, and inline elements. Control fonts, sizes, spacing, margins, running headers, ornamental decorations, and hyperlink appearance.
- Design My Interior (AI art direction)
- Click Design My Interior in the Formatting editor toolbar and Bookshaper art-directs a coherent interior for you: a genre-aware template, a scene-break ornament, a body/display font pairing, and a recommended trim size — each with a short rationale for why it fits your book, and kept consistent with your Cover Studio cover when one exists. It needs your book's genre set first (Bookshaper asks if it isn't). It costs 2 credits in platform mode, and nothing when you're using your own AI key (BYOK). A trim-size change resizes the page, so Bookshaper always asks before applying that part — you can take the template, ornament, and fonts while keeping your current trim. Every recommendation is a starting point: everything stays fully editable after you apply it, and you can undo the whole thing.
- Your fonts
- Upload your own TTF or OTF fonts from the Book Fonts panel in the Formatting editor. After a quick license confirmation, uploaded fonts appear in every font picker, render in previews, and are embedded in your exported EPUB, PDF, and DOCX. Web-packaged formats (WOFF/WOFF2) need converting to TTF/OTF first.
- Templates
- Start from one of 62 built-in templates organized into 9 genre / era categories — Modern Literary Fiction, Commercial Thriller, Contemporary Romance, Epic Fantasy, Cozy Mystery, YA / Crossover, Victorian Classic Reprint, Mid-Century Pulp / Noir, and Memoir & Narrative Nonfiction — plus submission and accessibility formats (Shunn-style manuscript, Large Print, ARC). Browse with the side-by-side comparison preview, clone any template to customize, or build your own from scratch. Preview in real time for both print and ebook formats.
- Marketing blurb generator
- Generate AI-powered cover copy—a back-cover blurb and a tagline—from your chapter synopses and character data. Edit the results to match your voice, then run the built-in blurb analysis for scoring and actionable suggestions. Retailer listing descriptions are generated separately, per retailer, in KDP Metadata.
- Cover Studio
- Design front covers, back covers, and spines in one integrated workspace. Start from AI-generated concepts, bring your own artwork, or build a typographic cover on a solid or gradient background. Customize text, backgrounds, and layout for each surface, check the result at thumbnail size with print safe-area guides, then export print-ready images.
- Cover Studio wizard
- A guided four-step flow — Concept Preferences, Pick a Proof, Text Treatment, Fine-Tune — takes you from a few plain-language inputs to a finished front cover. Cover Studio generates a grid of nine low-cost proofs; you pick a favorite, it becomes your cover art and applies a genre-styled title treatment, then lands you in a pre-populated editor to hand-tune. A step rail tracks your progress and lets you jump back to swap a proof or treatment, and Advanced mode reveals the full creative brief and concept-generation controls whenever you want them.
- Cover genre presets
- Pick one of 13 genre presets — thriller, cozy mystery, romance (in bright and soft variants), romantasy, epic fantasy, sci-fi, literary, horror, historical, nonfiction, memoir, and YA — and Cover Studio applies that genre's font pairing, palette direction, and effect stack in one click, then seasons the AI art-direction brief so the generated concepts already lean the right way. Presets are a starting point: everything they set stays fully editable.
- Cover art direction & AI brief
- Before generating concepts you can guide the AI: pick moods, a palette direction (chosen from swatch rows, no hex values needed), and an imagery style, and add anything to avoid. A one-click path still works with no inputs. Each brief proposes about three creative directions per section — palettes, moods, scenes, and layouts — that you mix and match, with a plain-language summary up front and the full detail one tap away. Refining or regenerating keeps your earlier briefs so you can restore any of them.
- Cover text effects & textures
- Give titles a traditionally-published finish: foil and metallic fills, six blendable textures (foil grain, brushed metal, grunge, scratches, paper fiber, canvas weave), drop and long shadows, outline, glow, neon, emboss, etched, gradient fills, and curved (arc) titles. Blend modes — multiply, screen, overlay, and soft-light — grade background scrims and vignettes over your cover art. On the front cover you can also set the title behind the imagery, weaving it around your subject with a painted foreground mask. Every effect is adjustable per text element on each surface.
- Cover exports (KDP wrap & ACX audiobook)
- Export print-ready cover files straight from Cover Studio. The KDP cover wrap (on the Export tab) computes spine width from your page count and paper stock and handles bleed automatically. The ACX audiobook cover previews on the Front Cover tab beside your print/ebook front: a true 2560×2560 square—above ACX's 2400px minimum. Since a portrait cover can't be cropped square without losing the focal point, the square art is generated separately—reframed to 1:1 keeping the focal point—then your title and author re-flow onto it, with a warning if either would be hidden. If your cover is based on an approved AI concept, a disclosure reminder appears at every export point since KDP requires AI-content disclosure at publish time.
- Cover versions
- Save the whole cover design—front, back, spine, brief, and approved artwork—as a named version you can restore later. Keep a light and a dark variant side by side, or A/B-test two directions and restore whichever one wins. Restoring replaces the current design (with a one-click option to save the current design first), and each saved version keeps its own copies of uploaded images so a later upload never changes a version you already saved.
- Cover mockups
- Turn your finished cover into promo-ready marketing images from the Mockups tab — rendered live from the actual design, no AI credits used. Choose a scene (flat cover, 3D paperback with front and spine in perspective, or an e-reader frame) and a background (transparent, solid, or gradient), then export a 2000×2000 PNG. The 3D paperback uses your composited spine when you've set one up, and falls back to a stretched slice of the front cover's edge when you haven't.
- Series style kits
- Save a cover's style—typography, colors, effects, and layout for front, back, and spine, plus background type and genre preset—as a named kit, then apply it to any other project to lock in a matching series look in one click. Content stays per-book: title and author text pull from each project's own metadata, and artwork, uploads, masks, word-level overrides, and blurb text never transfer. Kits are saved at the app level so every project can see and apply them, and applying one offers a one-click option to save the current design as a version first.
- EPUB export
- Export your manuscript as a reflowable EPUB with CSS styling and font embedding.
- PDF export
- Export a print-ready PDF with margins, bleed, gutter settings, and full typographic control.
- Store links (retailer editions, Also-By, author profile)
- Open Project Settings → Store Links to point your ebook at real storefronts. Under “This book”, paste your buy links per retailer — Amazon, Apple Books, Kobo, Barnes & Noble — plus a universal (Books2Read / Booklinker / landing-page) fallback; enter an ASIN or ISBN and Bookshaper suggests the retailer URL for you. Under “Also by this author”, build a catalog of your other titles, each with a title, series line, cover thumbnail, and its own per-retailer links. Under “About the author”, add your website and social links. All three render in the ebook back matter.
- Ebook editions (Edition picker)
- Once a project has store-link content, the export dialog shows an Edition picker for EPUB. Pick Standard (universal) to use only your universal links, a single retailer (e.g. Kindle Edition — links to Amazon) to export one file where every buy link points at that store and falls back to universal where a store link is missing, or All retailer editions to write five files (universal + one per store) at once. Filenames are suffixed by edition. PDF exports render store links as plain text; DOCX keeps them as live hyperlinks.