Features

Everything your novel needs.
Nothing it doesn't.

A complete manuscript studio built from the ground up for long-form fiction. Manuscript architecture, automatic character tracking, AI when you want it, local-first always.

Download for Windows See Pricing ($79)
What's Inside
Manuscript StudioEditor, views, outlining Characters & WorldAuto-detection, world notes, RAG AI Writing & Craft5 modes, presets, power tools Intelligence & V2Living Grimoire, cost tracking Import & ExportEPUB, DOCX, Scrivener
Manuscript Studio Characters & World AI Writing & Craft Intelligence & V2 Import & Export
I
Manuscript Studio
editor · views · outlining
GrimoireScribe Structure tab showing chapter outline, book settings, and word watchlist

Structure tab · chapter outline, book settings, word watchlist

Manuscript Architecture

Structure without rigidity.

Your book, organized the way a book actually works. Not a folder full of documents. A living hierarchy of books, acts, chapters, and scenes that you can reshape at any point.

  • Books - Acts - Chapters - Scenes hierarchy
  • Drag and reorder anything, any time
  • Track scene status (Draft, In Progress, Final)
  • Scene synopsis and notes panel per scene
  • Scene-level or chapter-level view, your choice
  • Permanent delete with double confirmation (no accidental loss)
Prose Editor

A clean page. Nothing in the way.

Rich text editing built for writers, not word processors. Auto-save, focus mode, and a distraction-free environment so you can think about the story. Not the software.

  • Rich text formatting: bold, italic, alignment
  • Auto-save every 1.5 seconds. Never lose a word.
  • Focus mode: hide everything except the page
  • Live word count per scene and per book
  • Paste from any source cleanly
  • Import DOCX and TXT files directly into scenes
  • Scene purpose tags: Action, Dialogue, Exposition, Transition, Revelation, Emotional
  • POV designation per scene, colour-coded across all views
Dead Words Filter

Toggle a panel in the toolbar to see your overused words (was, just, very, really, that, quite) with occurrence counts and colour-coded severity. Cut weak language before it reaches your editor.

Prose Editor View
Scene 1 · The Desert
Dead Words 8 Auto-saved 1.5s POV · Roland
● Saved1,240 words in sceneFocus mode ready
Manuscript Views

Five ways to see your story.
Beyond the blank page.

Switch between views without leaving your book. Every view is always up to date. No separate planning app needed.

Manuscript Outline
SceneWordsStatusPOVCharacters
ACT I
The Desert1,240FinalRolandRoland, Jake
The Oracle887DraftJakeJake, Oracle
Into the Mountains1,102In ProgressRolandRoland, Susannah
The Speaking Demon654DraftSusannahAll

Manuscript Outline

A spreadsheet-style table of every scene across every chapter. Columns for Chapter, Scene Title, Word Count, Status, POV Character, Synopsis, and Tagged Characters. All columns sortable. Filter by text search or status.

Act separator headers when acts are enabled. Parallel data loading keeps it fast even on 50-plus scene books. Click any row to jump directly to that scene.

Visual Plot Board

Three views of the same story. Corkboard lays out index cards colour-coded by scene status or POV character, in three card sizes (compact, standard, expanded). Timeline arranges scenes chronologically across chapters. Characters groups scene cards by POV.

Group by Chapter, Act, Status, or show all ungrouped. Filter by chapter. Click any card to open that scene.

Visual Plot Board
Corkboard Timeline Characters
The Desert
1,240 wordsFinal
The Oracle
887 wordsDraft
Into the Mountains
1,102 wordsIn Prog.
The Speaking Demon
654 wordsDraft
The Way Station
923 wordsDraft
Brown's World
441 wordsDraft
Split-Screen Editor
Current Scene
Character Profile: Roland

Split-Screen Editor

View reference material alongside your current scene. Options for the reference pane: scene notes, another scene from any chapter, character profiles, or the Story Bible. Useful for keeping continuity while you write forward.

Zen Mode
ZEN MODE
Press Ctrl+Shift+Z to enter · Esc to exit
VellumObsidianCandlelight

Zen Mode

Full deep immersion. Hides the sidebar, AI panel, topbar, and path bar. Only the prose editor remains, centred on screen with generous padding. A floating word count overlay is the only UI element that stays.

Three visual themes. Press Ctrl+Shift+Z to enter, Esc to exit. A step beyond standard Focus mode, which keeps the topbar visible on hover.

Read-Only Preview

Your full manuscript rendered in reading order: all chapters, all scenes, concatenated with scene separators. Scrollable. Click a scene in the sidebar to jump directly to it in the preview. Font size controls. Compatible with Focus mode.

Jump to Scene
Ch. 1 - The Desert
Ch. 1 - The Oracle
Ch. 2 - Mountains
Ch. 2 - The Demon
II
Characters & World Building
scribing · bible · world notes
GrimoireScribe Cast tab showing 106 characters with appearance heatmap and profile editor

Cast tab · 106 characters, appearance heatmap, profile editor

Character Scribing

Your cast, always accounted for.

Write naturally. GrimoireScribe reads your prose as you write, detects characters and their aliases automatically, and tags them to every scene they appear in.

Continuity errors surface before your editor finds them. See exactly which scenes each character appears in, sorted by appearance order.

  • Auto-detect characters from prose via AI scan
  • Alias support: "Elara", "Voss", "the captain" all unified
  • Scene tagging: every appearance tracked
  • Appearances view: full scene list per character
  • Character profiles: role, arc, notes, psychology, voice, inner life
  • Add characters manually or accept AI suggestions
Relationship Map

Bidirectional relationship links between any two characters: ally, enemy, family, mentor. Both directions stored and surfaced. Build the social graph of your story without a separate tool.

Appearance Heatmap

A colour-coded chapter grid showing where each character appears across your manuscript. Spot gaps in a character arc, accidental absences, or crowd scenes at a glance.

AI Name Generator

Context-aware name generation with cultural filters: Fantasy, Nordic, Celtic, Arabic, Japanese, Greek, Slavic, and more. Phonetic avoidance of existing character names built in.

Story Bible

Every answer in one place.

The Story Bible is a browsable, read-only panel that surfaces the full knowledge index your AI backend has built from your manuscript. Five sections, always current.

  • Characters: all profiles with descriptions, arcs, and appearance locations
  • Chapters: AI-generated summaries of every chapter with key events
  • Locations: every place mentioned across your manuscript
  • World: your world notes and uploaded documents
  • Timeline: chronological event listing across the full story

Filter by section. Search within. Counts shown in every filter button. The Story Bible is the reader-facing view of the knowledge index that powers every AI call.

Story Bible
Characters 5 Chapters 8 Locations 12 World 3 Timeline 14
RRoland DeschainProtagonist - The Last Gunslinger
JJake ChambersSupporting - The Boy from New York
SSusannah DeanSupporting - The Lady of Shadows
World Building
World Notes
Magic System Rules
Geography of Midworld
Ka-tet Customs
The Beams
Documents
lore-bible.pdfindexed
map-midworld.pngindexed
World Building

Your lore, always in context.

Upload world documents (lore bibles, maps, timelines, histories) and GrimoireScribe retrieves only what's relevant to the scene you're writing.

No more pasting your entire world bible into every prompt. Retrieval surfaces the right notes automatically, in context, every time. Keyword search works locally out of the box. Semantic search is available through optional cloud or local embedding models.

  • Rich text notes per world topic
  • Upload .txt, .md, .pdf, .docx, .rtf documents
  • Keyword retrieval built in, works fully offline
  • Optional semantic search via cloud or local embeddings
  • All notes stored locally. Nothing on our servers.
Voyage AI Semantic Retrieval

Optional upgrade: Voyage AI embeds your world documents into vector space using voyage-4-lite (free tier: 200M tokens/month). At query time, cosine similarity ranking selects the most relevant passages from your lore. Falls back to keyword scoring when Voyage is not configured. Bring your own API key.

III
AI Writing & Craft
5 modes · presets · power tools
AI Writing: Optional, But Serious

Five modes. All context-aware.
All human-in-the-loop.

AI Models · Settings
AI Models
WriteAnthropicClaude Sonnet 4.6
EditOpenAIGPT-5.5
ChapterAnthropicClaude Sonnet 4.6
New SceneAnthropicClaude Sonnet 4.6
DiscussxAIGrok 4.3

Every AI request automatically injects your book summary, writing style guide, character profiles, relevant world notes, and the prior scene. You ask the question. GrimoireScribe assembles the context.

7 Writing Providers + Offline Mode.

Claude, GPT, Grok, Gemini, Mistral, DeepSeek, or MiMo for cloud writing. Local AI via Offline Mode for fully private, zero-cost operation. Configure a different model per mode. No GrimoireScribe credits. No markup. Ever.

No AI? No Problem.

Skip every API key. The full manuscript studio, character scribing, world building, and export all work completely offline. AI is opt-in. Not a requirement.

Write Mode

Draft prose for a scene with your full manuscript context pre-loaded. A starting point, not a final product. You decide what earns its place.

Edit Mode

Improve existing prose: tighten pacing, sharpen dialogue, cut adverbs, match your established voice. Line-level revision that knows how you write.

Chapter Mode

Generate a full chapter draft from a brief. Review scene by scene. Nothing is auto-inserted. Every paragraph waits for your approval.

Discuss Mode

Multi-turn conversation about your plot, characters, or structure. The AI has read your whole manuscript. Use that.

New Scene Mode

Describe what needs to happen and get a scene drafted from your synopsis. For when you know where you're going but the blank page won't budge.

Series Chat

Chat across every book in a series simultaneously. Full character lists and chapter context from every volume. Continuity errors don't hide.

AI Power Tools

Beyond generation.
Tools that think about your craft.

AI Describe / Sensory Expansion

Highlight any passage in your prose. Get back rich sensory alternatives: how the same moment smells, sounds, feels in the body, tastes, sits in peripheral vision. Concrete, not vague. Your voice, amplified.

Useful for first-draft passes that need grounding, and for revision sessions where a scene reads flat.

AI Brainstorm

A structured creative generator for the moments when the story stalls. Three output modes: plot twists that fit the logic of what you've already written, character secrets that recontextualise what the reader knows, and what-if scenarios for key decision points.

Every suggestion is grounded in your actual manuscript context, not generic creative writing advice.

Manuscript Continuity Checker

Run a full AI audit of your manuscript for timeline inconsistencies, character contradictions, plot holes, world-building errors, and voice shifts. Results are severity-rated so you know what actually needs attention before submission.

Catches the kind of errors a line editor finds on page 300 that traces back to a decision you made on page 12.

Story Structure Templates

Six structural frameworks applied as scaffolding when you create a new book: Hero's Journey, Three-Act, Save the Cat, Snowflake, Fichtean Curve, Seven-Point. Each creates placeholder chapters and scenes with structural notes.

Not a rigid outline. A starting shape to push against, fill in, or discard when the story decides it knows better.

Structural Layer

knowledge.json maps every chapter and scene title to its ID, tracks character appearance data, and stores chapter metadata. The fast-lookup layer for routing queries.

Content Layer

SQLite FTS5 full-text search. Every scene indexed for topic queries. "Where does Ezra talk about the prophecy?" answered in milliseconds without loading a single scene file.

Narrative Layer

Per-chapter summary files and per-character arc files, AI-generated and stored in your book directory. Discuss mode reads these instead of loading full prose, keeping context efficient.

Three-layer knowledge system. Every AI call gets exactly the context it needs. No more, no less.
Writing Style Presets

Craft-grade writing styles.
Built for the genre, not a prompt.

Every AI mode uses a writing style guide to match your voice. GrimoireScribe ships with 15 fully-developed presets, each a detailed craft document with genre-specific technique, prose rules, and structural guidance. Not a list of adjectives.

Signature
5 presets
GrimoireScribe Fantasy GrimoireScribe Fantasy: Dark GrimoireScribe Fantasy: Epic GrimoireScribe Fantasy: Mythic GrimoireScribe Fantasy: YA
Genre
5 presets
Historical Fiction Mystery & Crime Thriller Literary Science Fiction Romance
Literary
3 presets
Literary Fiction Upmarket Fiction Horror & Dark Fiction
Nonfiction
2 presets
Narrative Nonfiction & Memoir Narrative Journalism
Custom
Unlimited

Build your own from scratch or copy any built-in as a starting point. Preview before applying. Switch per-book without affecting other projects.

What a Preset Actually Does

Same prompt. Same model.
Different world.

Same opening premise. Same AI model. One with the GrimoireScribe Fantasy preset applied. One without. Both unedited.

●GrimoireScribe Fantasy preset
What the Cold Remembers

The first thing he knew was the sound.

Not wind. Not exactly. Something beneath the wind, a low and pressureless moan that did not come from any direction but seemed to rise from the ground itself, from the frozen earth pressed against his cheek, from the white nothing stretching out in every direction he had not yet looked.

He opened his eyes.

The sky was the color of old iron. The snow around his face had melted slightly from his body heat and then refrozen, leaving a shallow impression shaped vaguely like a man. He pushed himself up and his arms shook. His ribs sent a sharp pulse through his left side when he breathed.

No em dashes. Specific sensory detail. Precise over generic.

Plain Claude (no preset)
The Unmarked

The cold came before anything else.

Not gradually, not as a slow creeping awareness - it arrived all at once, absolute and merciless, like a verdict. He gasped into wakefulness, and the air that flooded his lungs was so sharp it felt like swallowing broken glass. His body convulsed once, violently, before some deep animal instinct clamped down on the panic and made him be still.

He was lying face-down in the snow.

He didn't know how he knew that word. Snow. He didn't know how he knew anything - the word for the colorless sky pressing down above him like a slab of pale stone, the word for the bare black trees that jutted from the frozen earth at wrong angles.

Em dashes. Stock similes. Generic atmosphere.

Explore all 15 presets
IV
AI Intelligence & Tracking
Living Grimoire · cost tracking
Coming in V2 V2

The Living Grimoire.
Your magic system, built through conversation.

Most world-building tools ask you to fill forms. The Living Grimoire asks you questions. Over three phases of dialogue, it pulls your magic system out of your head and turns it into a structured, searchable Grimoire document that lives in your world notes.

Not a template. A conversation. You describe what you have. It probes what you haven't thought about yet. Then it codifies everything into nine organized sections, including a ruling-out log: a catalog of explicit constraints that protects your system from creep as you write.

The Grimoire integrates directly with RAG retrieval. Every scene you write, the relevant rules surface automatically.

Learn more about the Living Grimoire
Three-Phase Build Process
I
DiscoveryYou describe what you have. The AI asks what you haven't thought about yet.
II
Stress-TestingEdge cases, contradictions, and plot-relevant implications surfaced and resolved.
III
CodificationYour system becomes a structured Grimoire document in your world notes, automatically indexed for RAG retrieval.

The ruling-out log records what can't exist in your system. As powerful as what can.

Usage & Cost Transparency

See exactly what you spend.

Every API call is logged with real dollar estimates: provider, model, mode, and operation. No mystery bills. No end-of-month surprise.

Filter by date range, provider, model, or operation type. Drill into per-call logs. Export everything to CSV or JSON. Set custom per-token prices if you're on a negotiated rate.

  • Estimated cost per call, based on public API rates
  • Breakdown by provider, model, and AI mode
  • Filter by date range, provider, model, or operation
  • Per-call log with full token counts
  • Character scan costs tracked separately
  • Export to CSV or JSON. Your data, your records.
  • Edit price per model for custom/negotiated rates
Usage & Costs
Total Spend
$12.47
all time
Tokens Used
847K
across all providers
By Provider
ProviderModelTokensEst. Cost
AnthropicClaude Sonnet 4.6612K$8.23
OpenAIGPT-5.5198K$3.41
xAIGrok 4.337K$0.83
Estimates use public API rates. Set custom prices per model anytime.
V
Import, Export & Compatibility
EPUB · DOCX · Scrivener
Compile · Export
EPUB 3Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books ready
DOCXAgents, editors, beta readers
PDFPrint-ready via Puppeteer rendering
PRESETSKindle, Manuscript, Print, Custom
Compile Now
Export / Compile View· Screenshot coming soon
Export & Compile

From draft to finished book.

Compile your entire manuscript to a polished output format in one click. Presets for every destination: Kindle, manuscript submission, trade paperback print.

  • EPUB 3: Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books ready
  • Word .docx: agents, editors, beta readers
  • Print-ready PDF via Puppeteer rendering
  • Presets: Kindle, Manuscript, Print, Custom
  • Title page, table of contents, typography controls
  • Plain text and Markdown export available
Import

Bring your existing work in.

Import from Scrivener, Word, plain text, or Markdown. GrimoireScribe walks you through it step by step, placing content exactly where you want it.

  • Import .scriv projects: full structure, scenes, synopses, and front matter
  • Research folder imports as world reference documents (text and PDF)
  • Import .docx, .txt, .md files into new or existing books
  • Choose destination: new book or append to current
  • Set title, author, series, genre, and save location
  • Files saved to your chosen folder on your hard drive
Import Document
Title
The Gunslinger
Author
Stephen King
Series
The Dark Tower
Genre
Fantasy
Save to
C:\Users\Author\Documents
CancelImport
Import Scrivener Project
Project File
MyNovel.scrivBrowse
Series
The Dark Tower
Save to
C:\Users\Author\Documents
CancelImport
Scrivener Compatibility

Leave when you're ready.
Not before.

GrimoireScribe reads and writes native .scriv projects. Import your entire back catalog. Keep exporting back to Scrivener while you transition. Or use both in parallel, indefinitely.

It's a two-way door. No lock-in, no pressure, no migration cliff.

  • Import full .scriv projects: structure, scenes, synopses, and front matter
  • Export back to Scrivener at any time with zero data loss
  • Live resync: changes in GrimoireScribe flow back to .scriv
  • Your Scrivener project is never modified without your action
How It Compares

The full picture.

✦ Included Partial · Not available Soon
Manuscript & Editor10 features+
Feature GrimoireScribe Scrivener Sudowrite NovelCrafter
Book/Act/Chapter/Scene hierarchy✦✦·✦
Book cover art (upload, crop, compile output)✦✦··
Series management (multi-book ordering + stats)✦Partial··
Drag-and-drop reordering✦✦·✦
Manuscript Outline (spreadsheet view)✦✦·Partial
Visual Plot Board (corkboard + timeline)✦✦··
Split-Screen Editor✦✦··
Zen / Distraction-Free Mode✦✦··
EPUB / DOCX / PDF export✦✦·Partial
Scrivener .scriv import/export✦Native··
Characters & World6 features+
Feature GrimoireScribe Scrivener Sudowrite NovelCrafter
Story Bible✦··Partial
Automatic character detection✦···
Character Relationship Map✦···
Character Appearance Heatmap✦···
Manuscript Continuity Checker✦···
Story Structure Templates✦·PartialPartial
AI & Craft8 features+
Feature GrimoireScribe Scrivener Sudowrite NovelCrafter
7 AI providers (Claude/GPT/Grok/Gemini/Mistral/DeepSeek/MiMo)✦·1Partial
AI writing (5 modes)✦·✦Partial
AI Brainstorm + Sensory Expansion✦·Partial·
World building with retrieval (local + cloud)✦··Partial
Voyage AI semantic retrieval (RAG)✦···
Per-mode AI model configuration✦···
Writing style presets (genre-tuned)✦···
Series multi-book AI chat✦···
Ownership & Platform11 features+
Feature GrimoireScribe Scrivener Sudowrite NovelCrafter
Dead Words Filter✦·Partial·
Usage & cost tracking✦···
Local-first (no cloud)✦✦··
Bring your own API keys✦N/A·✦
No subscription required✦✦··
Windows✦✦WebWeb
MacSoon✦WebWeb
iPad / MobileSooniOSWebWeb
Ready to start?

The writing studio
you've been waiting for.

One-time purchase. All future major versions included. 30-day refund, no questions.

Download for Windows Pricing ($79)