The one place to write, format,
and publish your novel.

Yes. Deckle is a complete, fully functional application, not a concept or a waitlist. Every feature on this page is in the product today. You're buying a working tool, not a promise.

You're covered by a 30-day, no-questions-asked money-back guarantee. If Deckle doesn't earn its place in your workflow within 30 days of purchase, email us and you'll get a full refund: no hassle, no fine print.

No. Every update to Deckle is included, forever. That matters more than it sounds: Scrivener 3 was a paid upgrade for people who already owned Scrivener 2, and that is the normal pattern for software sold as a "one-time purchase". Deckle has no version upgrade fee, no subscription, and no annual renewal. In the future we may offer new, optional functionality as a separate purchase, but you will never pay to keep the software you already bought current.

Scrivener is excellent for writing and organising, and it stops at the manuscript. When it's time to publish, you need another tool, which is why the standard recommendation is Scrivener ($59.99) plus Vellum ($249.99): $309 to $344 for the pair, and Vellum only exists on Mac.

Deckle is the one place to write, format, and publish: binder, codex, timeline, research, and focus mode on the writing side, then professional print PDF, Kindle-optimised EPUB, Apple Books, Kobo, and DOCX for agents on the publishing side, all without leaving the window you wrote in, for $197 on Windows, Mac, and Linux. And if you're already in Scrivener, you can import your project directly: chapters, synopses, notes, and research all come across in one step.

Atticus is a browser-based Progressive Web App that runs in Chrome and stores your work on its servers. It has an offline mode, but you must load your book online first and some features (import, export, local saving) aren't available offline. Deckle is a native desktop application: your work is stored on your computer, and you can write, save, and export completely offline. No internet required.

Price, platform, and workflow.

Price. Scrivener is $59.99, or $95.98 if you want it on both Mac and Windows, because those are separate licences. Vellum Press is $249.99. That's $309 to $344, and major Scrivener versions have historically been paid upgrades on top. Deckle is $197 once, with every future update included: less than Vellum costs on its own.

Platform. Vellum runs on macOS only. There is no Windows version and no Linux version. Deckle runs natively on all three, and one purchase covers all of them.

Workflow. Scrivener plus Vellum means writing in one app, exporting, importing into the second app, formatting, and exporting again, and repeating that loop on every revision. In Deckle the manuscript never moves: you write, you see the live book preview beside your draft, and you export the finished file in about a second.

No. Vellum is macOS only, and its makers have said a Windows version isn't planned. There is no Linux version either, and Scrivener's Linux build was discontinued.

The usual workaround for Windows authors is renting a cloud Mac to run Vellum remotely, which costs $490–$670 in the first year and gives you a slower, laggier version of the same app over a remote desktop. Deckle has native Windows, Mac, and Linux builds. Same features, same output, same price, whichever one you write on.

Yes. Deckle's print PDF passes KDP preflight with fonts fully embedded, and handles drop caps, running headers, crop marks, and automated spine-width calculation for paperback and hardcover. Its EPUBs are validated against the EPUB 3.3 spec and exported as four separate targets tuned per store: Kindle, Apple Books, Kobo, and generic.

On top of that you get 26 typographic presets and an advanced mode with per-element control over every detail of how your book looks. And because the in-app preview runs the real export compiler rather than an approximation, what you see while you're writing is exactly what your readers get.

Yes. Deckle imports Scrivener projects directly from the .zip export. Your chapter and scene structure, synopses, notes, inline comments, and research all come across. You don't start over, you pick up where you left off, in a tool that can take you the rest of the way.

Your Deckle project is stored as a folder on your computer. You can back it up, move it, or open it with any text editor. It's yours, no cloud server required.

Windows, Mac, and Linux, all native builds. Your purchase covers all three at no extra cost, and one licence activates on up to 2 devices. Worth comparing: Vellum is macOS only, and Scrivener sells Mac and Windows as separate licences while its Linux build has been discontinued.

Yes. Deckle exports four separate EPUB targets, each optimised for its platform: Kindle, Apple Books, Kobo, and a generic EPUB for everything else. All four are validated against the EPUB 3.3 spec. Hyphenation, chapter breaks, and metadata are tuned per platform so you upload the right file to the right store without any manual adjustments.

Deckle exports clean DOCX using the conventions novel manuscripts are typically submitted in: double-spaced body text with a 0.5" first-line indent, an unindented opening paragraph for each chapter or scene, centered scene breaks, and clearly distinct chapter headings. Manuscript format does vary by form and by agent or publisher (a short story or poetry submission looks different from a novel), so it's always worth checking specific submission guidelines. For novel-length work, Deckle's defaults line up with what most agents and editors expect.

If you're happy with Scrivener for writing, Deckle saves you money the moment you need to publish. The alternative is adding a separate formatting tool: Vellum at $249.99, which is Mac only and costs more than Deckle does on its own, or Atticus at $147, which keeps your book on someone else's servers. Deckle gives you both writing and professional formatting for $197, and there's no second app to learn or export into.

You can import your existing Scrivener project directly, so nothing you've already built is lost: chapters, scenes, synopses, notes, and research all come across in one step. And if the compile process is what drove you to look elsewhere, that's the part Deckle replaces outright: one click to print PDF, EPUB, or DOCX, with a live preview of the result beside your draft the whole time.

This is intentional, and it comes down to a fundamental difference in how Deckle is built compared to most writing tools.

In traditional writing apps, exporting is a slow, heavy process you only do when your manuscript is completely finished. Because of that, they built full in-app previews so you could see what your book looks like without going through a painful export step. It made sense given their limitations.

Deckle is built differently. Export takes under a second or two for an entire book. That changes the workflow entirely. Export is no longer the big final step you save for the end. It's something you can do anytime, instantly, to see exactly what your manuscript looks like.

So in Deckle, the preview is designed to show you what your current document looks like as you write, whether that's a chapter, scene, part, or special page. When you want to see multiple chapters, a full part, or your entire book, just export it. It takes two seconds and what you get is the real output, not an approximation.

Once that clicks, it's actually a faster and more accurate workflow than anything you'd get from a slow in-app preview.

Deckle is fully local software. Your project lives on your computer, not on a server, which is great for privacy but does mean there's no automatic live sync between devices like you'd get with a cloud based app.

The good news: you can still work across multiple devices easily. Just keep your project folder inside your Google Drive or Dropbox folder, and let that service carry the file between your computers for you.

The one rule: close the project on one device before opening it on the other.

Here's why. Deckle saves your work automatically as you type, but only to the device you're actually using. If you switch to a second device and keep it open on the first one too, the first device won't know about your newer changes until you close and reopen it there.

How to do it right:

1. Finish up on Device A and close Deckle normally (or just close the window).
2. Give your sync app a moment to finish uploading (check that Dropbox/Drive shows everything synced, not still spinning).
3. Open the project on Device B and keep working.

If you forget: nothing breaks. Worst case, whichever device you save on most recently is the version that's kept, the other device's most recent changes just won't carry over. No corrupted files, no crashes.

Extra safety net: Deckle automatically saves a local backup copy on your computer, both when you close a project and periodically during a long writing session. That backup lives on the specific device where it was made, so if you ever need to recover something, check the device you were actually writing on at the time, not the other one.

A couple of things to double check if something seems off:

• Make sure Dropbox or Google Drive is actually running and signed in on both devices, not just installed.
• If you're not sure a sync finished, wait a minute before opening the project on the other device, especially right after closing your laptop lid.

It depends on what you're going for. There are two common versions of this question, so here's both.

"I want to write a series, each book as its own file" (most common)

For this, use a separate Deckle project per book, not one project for the whole series. Here's why: each project only has one title page, one set of front/back matter, and one Book Details entry (title, author, etc), so it's built around being one published book. Trying to cram three books into one project would mean they all share a single title page and can't be exported as separate files.

For carrying your cast and story bible into Book 2, save Book 1 as a Project Template once its Codex, Timeline, and styling are set up the way you like. Starting Book 2 from that template packages the binder structure, Codex entries, and style settings together, so the new project begins with the same characters, locations, and look already in place instead of a blank slate.

One thing worth knowing: a template is a one-time starting point, not a live link. Once Book 2 is created from it, its Codex and Timeline are independent copies, so changes you make in Book 1 afterward won't carry over automatically; you'd update both projects separately.

"I want multiple short books combined into one file" (an omnibus or anthology)

This one's the opposite: use a single project. Structure each book as a Part, with its chapters nested underneath it. When you export, Deckle compiles the whole thing into one file in order, exactly what you want for a combined edition. Just know the whole project still only gets one title page and one set of front matter, so that title page should represent the omnibus as a whole (e.g. "The Complete Trilogy"), not any one book inside it. You can still label each section clearly using its Part name.

Edge cases worth knowing about:

• There's no built in way to split one project into several later. If there's any chance you'll want each book to be its own standalone release, start with separate projects from the beginning. Merging or splitting after the fact means manually copying chapter text between projects.
• Export always compiles everything in Draft that isn't marked excluded. If you only want one book's worth of content in a given export, mark the other books' folders as excluded from export first, run your export, then switch them back on.