From first idea to print-ready book: ideas, manuscripts, editorial, and production, in one place that actually knows they’re the same book.
Built by indie authors and publishing people.
Most independent publishers are running five subscriptions that have never heard of each other. Your manuscript lives in one, your schedule in another, your editor’s comments in a third. Nothing knows what anything else is doing, and every handoff is a copy-paste.
Here’s what that stack usually looks like, and what takes its place.
| You’re paying for | BookWorkz gives you |
|---|---|
| A writing appchapters, drafts, word counts | A chapter editor built for books: acts, outline, versions, and word counts that mean something |
| A project trackerspreadsheets or a board bent into shape | A roadmap that knows what a book is: schedules, timelines, and who’s carrying what |
| A shared doc for editingcomments in a file nobody’s sure is current | Editorial with rounds, sign-offs, and comment threads anchored to the text they’re about |
| A formatting toola separate app, a separate export, a separate learning curve | Export a finished book yourself: print-ready PDF, EPUB, and DOCX from one setup you can customize down to the trim size, the typeface, and the chapter openers |
| A link-in-bio serviceone more monthly fee for a page of links | Unlimited pen names and authors, each with a customizable, personalized link page — plus a public page for every book |
Multiple bills, multiple logins, multiple places for something to go stale. Or one place to access everything.
We didn’t set out to build software. We set out to stop paying for it.
At our core, we are authors and indie publishers. We are doing what you’re doing: we’re living the writing dream, all the headaches included.
We were using a dozen or so subscriptions to write, edit, and publish our books: a writing app, a project board, a shared drive, docs for editorial, a formatting tool, a cover mockup service, a link-in-bio page, a newsletter, a list builder, ARC distribution services, a scheduler, a backup service, and probably more we didn’t name here.
Every one of them was fine. Not one of them was built specifically for what we do as indie authors and publishers.
The cost was never really the bills, though the bills were real. It was the copy-paste. The chapter that was current in one place and stale in three, all the emails back and forth with editors and cover designers, building ARC review campaigns in spreadsheets, using prioritization SaaS built for any industry to track release dates and the steps still needed to get there, and none of it was connected to the other pieces.
The mental load of keeping track of writing and publishing projects can be just as difficult as actually writing the books.
So, we built the part nobody had solved for: the whole pipeline. In one place. The place where all of our ideas live, where an idea becomes a manuscript, a manuscript goes through editorial (with the ability to collaborate directly in the platform!), and editorial comes out as a file you can send to a printer or retailer— with one record of what happened underneath all of it. We never have to leave the platform to see what stage of development a book is at or to refresh our memory of the lore for that series we put down a year ago and just picked back up.
The rest of that list is on the roadmap. What’s here today is everything from the idea to the finished file.
We hope that BookWorkz makes publishing your books easier so you can spend more time doing the writing you love!
—The BookWorkz Team
Every book takes the same path. BookWorkz is built around it rather than around a folder.
Every book starts as a line in a notebook. Here it starts as a record with a status, an owner and a history — so an idea you had in March is still findable in September, and you can see what happened to it.
Write in a chapter editor that understands structure. Chapters grouped by act, an outline you can seed real chapters from, and version history when a revision goes wrong. Story references — outline, character bios, settings, lore, chapter beats, and synopsis — live beside the manuscript instead of in a folder you forgot, and gather into one printable Book Bible you can read on a second screen or take to your desk.
Developmental, content, line, and copy, each as its own stage with its own sign-off. Comments anchor to the passage they’re about and travel with it as the text moves. A book can’t leave editorial with conversations still open — the gate is real, and it tells you what’s outstanding before you try.
Set the book up for print and ebook: trim size, typography, chapter openers, scene breaks, ornaments, cover, and matter. Start from a house template or build your own, and reuse it across a list.
Most tools pick one and make the other awkward. This one asks which you are and gets out of the way.
The four editorial stages and their sign-offs, kept whole — developmental, content, line and copy, each one closed deliberately before the next begins. What goes is the ceremony around them: no rounds to open, no handoffs to nobody, no “waiting on” column pointing at yourself. You get the discipline of working through the passes without performing a workflow for an audience of one.
Rounds, whose turn it is, handoffs between writer and editor, and a sign-off per stage. Everyone can see where the book actually is without asking, and the record of who did what survives the project.
You’re writing the book and running the business. BookWorkz keeps the writing first — a real editor, your outline and characters to hand, versions when you need to go back — and quietly does the rest: what’s due, what’s next, and a public page readers can actually find.
Pen names are first-class. Each one carries its own voice profile, its own catalog, and its own customizable public links page.
You have a list, not a book. See every title at once, who’s carrying it, what’s late and what’s about to be. Assign editors, run passes, sign off stages, and set house style once so every book on the list starts from it.
Book IDs are assigned automatically and stay put.
Plenty of tools will write your book for you. BookWorkz’s AI features are built around YOU as the author and publisher, not the AI.
AI is off until you turn it on. Until then nothing in BookWorkz will generate a word — and that is enforced on our servers, not by hiding a button.
Nothing is sent unless you ask for it. There is no background job, nothing on save, and nothing that quietly reads your work while you sleep. Every generation is a button you pressed.
It’s tailored to how you write. Every generator gets the pen name’s voice profile — point of view, tone, style notes, comparable titles — and the prompts know the difference between a cozy mystery and epic fantasy. It writes toward your book, not toward the average of all books.
Everything it produces is a draft you edit before it saves. A chapter, an outline, a character bio, a synopsis — it arrives for review, not in your manuscript. You accept it, change it, or throw it away.
It’s metered separately from your subscription, with a visible balance and a price on every action before you run it. You always know what something costs before you press it.
You can write all of it by hand. Every story reference AI can generate, you can also just write. The generator is a shortcut, not the only door.
What gets sent depends on what you asked for. Most of it — an outline, a character bio, a setting, lore — reads your notes rather than your prose. A synopsis or a reverse outline reads the book itself, because they can’t be written from anything else. We’d rather tell you which is which than claim we never look.
We don’t train anything on your work. BookWorkz has no models of its own, and your manuscripts are never used to build one.
It’s your book. The machine gets a vote, not a veto.
We give 1% of our revenue to offsetting the environmental cost of the AI we run. Revenue, not profit — so it starts the day someone subscribes, not the day we’re comfortable.
Every author needs a page. Most pay a separate subscription for one.
An author page at /a/your-name — your pen name, your bio, your links: store, socials, newsletter, and website. Pick a look that suits the work rather than the platform.
Change your address and the old one keeps working. Anyone who wrote it down, printed it, or shared it still gets where they were going.
A 14-day trial, no card. Bring the manuscript you’re already working on and see whether one place beats five.