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.
Why is writing a book split across four different pieces of software that don't talk to each other?
I'm not an author. I'm a problem solver, and this looked like a problem worth solving properly: one place to write, organise, and get to a finished, publishable book, instead of a chain of tools stitched together with exported files and crossed fingers. That's the entire reason Deckle exists.
We can't build every feature every person asks for. Nobody honestly can. But we listen to what the majority of our users are actually asking for, and we build it. Features like Timeline and the Codex overhaul didn't come from a roadmap meeting; they came from enough writers asking for the same thing until it was obvious we had to build it. We have real users who'll tell you the same thing: ask, and it gets heard.
There's no venture capital behind Deckle. No board, no growth targets to hit before a board meeting, 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 the whole thing since before it was anything. When you email hello@deckle.studio, it's read by someone who's related to me, not a support queue.
AI is genuinely changing a lot of fields for the better, and I 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.
A book comes from a person. Deckle is built to get that book onto the page, not to write it for you.
Thanks for reading this far, and for considering us with your manuscript.
— Ezzy, and the rest of the family