Our Story
The story of why Deckle exists, and who's actually building it.
I came to book-writing software from an odd angle: mechanical engineering first, then software development. Not fiction. Not publishing. I found my way into this world almost by accident, looking into what tools authors actually used to write and publish their books.
What I found was a lot of good software, and a lot of the same complaint. Ask a Scrivener user what's missing and they'll point you to Vellum. Ask a Vellum user and they'll point you back the other way. Every tool had its fans, and every tool had the same gap: you write in one place, you format in another, and you spend more time getting your manuscript to survive the trip between them than you'd like to admit.
I'm not an author. I'm a problem solver. And this looked like a problem worth solving properly.
The more I looked into it, the more it bothered me. Here was an entire category of people doing serious, meaningful creative work, and the tools available to them each solved part of the problem without solving all of it. Nobody had built the obvious thing: one modern, offline desktop app that took a manuscript from the first word to a publish-ready file, without asking the author to become a software wrangler along the way.
So we built it.
Deckle is for the author who takes their craft seriously. The one who's been in Scrivener for years and loves the organisation but dreads the compile. The one who's been eyeing Vellum but doesn't want to buy a Mac for one piece of software. The one who's been copying their manuscript between apps for every draft and wondering why this has to be so complicated.
It's also for the writer who's just starting out and wants to do this properly from the beginning, without inheriting someone else's patchwork workflow.
Whether you've published twenty books or you're writing your first chapter, Deckle is built to be the one place your manuscript lives from start to finish.
We ship fast and we listen carefully. Timeline, the Codex overhaul, spellcheck in a dozen languages, the sprint timer, the writing goals system — none of it came from a roadmap meeting. It came from writers asking for the same thing until it was obvious we had to build it. We read every email. We track every feature request. Ask, and it gets heard.
We're not perfect, and we'd never claim to be. Every piece of software has rough edges, and Deckle is no exception. What we can promise is that we take every piece of feedback seriously, we fix what's broken, and we keep building. Our measure of success is simple: are our users happy? Are more books being written and published because Deckle exists? That's the mission. Not growth targets. Not market share. Just authors, finishing books, and telling other authors about the tool that helped them do it.
No venture capital. No board. No investors to answer to instead of you. It's my family. My siblings each handle different parts of actually running this, and my parents have supported it since before it was anything. When you email hello@deckle.studio, a real person reads it.
That matters more than it might sound. It means the decisions we make about Deckle are made by people who care about the product and the people using it, not by a quarterly earnings target. We're not optimising for an exit. We're building something we want to be proud of for a long time.
AI is genuinely changing a lot of fields for the better, and we don't think that's something to dismiss. But writing isn't one of those fields, at least not the part that matters. A book comes from a person: their experience, their voice, the specific way they see the world that nobody else could have written down the same way. Software can help you organise that, shape it, and get it in front of readers. It can't write it for you, and we don't think it should try.
There is no AI in Deckle. That's not a positioning statement. It's just the truth.
Deckle is still early. The foundation is solid and the product is real, but there's a long list of things we want to build: mobile apps, deeper collaboration features, more language support, more export targets, and capabilities we haven't announced yet because we'd rather ship them than promise them.
What won't change is the approach. One place. Your manuscript. Your voice. Everything else in service of that.
— The Ezzy Family