Write and organize a book

A book is a manuscript made of sections. It belongs to your account rather than to a team, so Books shows the same books whichever team is selected. A book you open is listed in Recent work on Dashboard, under Personal.

Start a book

Open Books, select New book, enter a working Title and select Create book. The book opens on its Contents page. While a book is open, the sidebar has Contents and Book Settings for it.

The Contents page

The manuscript is in four lists:

• Front matter: pages before the chapters, such as a foreword or a note to the reader. They are not numbered.
• Chapters: the body of the book, numbered in order.
• Back matter: pages after the chapters, such as acknowledgments or an author's note.
• Set aside: writing that is part of the project but not in the book. It is left out of the preview, the published book and the downloads.

Each list has a + menu: Write a new chapter (or Write a new page, or Write a new section in Set aside) and Import notes. In Chapters it also has Add a part break, which groups the chapters after it into Part One, Part Two and so on. A part break is added at the end of the chapters; drag it into place, and use its Name this part button to give the part a title.

Drag sections within and between the lists, or use Move up and Move down. Set aside takes a section out of the book and Add to book puts it back. Cards and List switch how the sections are shown. The total word count is shown at the top, against your goal if you set one in Book Settings.

Each section can have a status (Outline, Draft, Revised or Done) from its status menu. Select one section and choose Synopsis to write a line about it; the synopsis is shown only to you, in place of the section's opening words on the Contents page.

Bring in notes

Choose Import notes from a + menu, search your notes or pick from recent ones, and select Add selected. The list has the notes you wrote in Personal and in the teams where you can use Notes. Each note becomes a section at the end of that list. A section is a copy: editing it never changes the note, and deleting it never deletes the note. Hide notes already in this book leaves out notes you have already added.

To add many notes at once, choose Or add unused notes in bulk, choose the oldest or newest notes that are not in any of your books, and choose whether they become chapters or go to Set aside. They keep the order they were written in. Book Settings can put each imported note's date at the top of its section (see Design, publish, and export a book).

Write a section

Select a section to open it. Write the title and the text. The row with Save and the toolbar stay at the top of the window however far down you scroll. The toolbar has Bold, Italic, Heading, Small heading, Quote, Scene break and Image; More tools adds Underline, Strikethrough, a Font (serif or sans), a Size, and Page break. Image opens the image picker: pick pictures from Your images, or upload new ones (see Use the image library). The pictures go in after the paragraph the cursor is in, or in place of an empty line. A picture you paste, or a picture file you drop on the text, is added to Your images and then goes in the same way, after the paragraph you pasted or dropped it in. Select a picture to change it: Move up and Move down move it past one paragraph at a time, Replace opens the same picker, Remove takes it out of the section, and you can add a caption.

The section saves as you write, and the bar shows Saving…, Saved or Unsaved changes. Save now saves at once. Contents goes back to the Contents page.

Earlier versions

Each time you sit down to edit a section, the text as it was before is kept. Select History in the section editor to see the earlier versions, then Restore this version. The current text is kept in History first, so a restore can be undone the same way. Each section keeps its 30 most recent versions.

Combine, delete and find and replace

Select several sections in the same list and choose Combine into one to join them, in order, under the first one's title. A combined section cannot be split again automatically. Delete removes the selected sections; Set aside instead keeps them out of the book without deleting them. Deleting a section that came from a note does not delete the note. Removing a part break keeps the chapters under it.

Find & replace on the Contents page searches every section's title and text. Replace all changes every match; each changed section keeps its previous text in its History.

Books in the mobile app

In the mobile app, tap New on the Books list to start a book. It starts as a private draft. Open a book to see its Contents grouped as front matter, chapters, back matter and set aside, then tap a section to read it. From a section's menu you can Edit text, Rename it, delete it, Move up or Move down, or move it to another group or set it aside; a moved section goes to the end of its new group. The book's menu adds a section at the end of the chapters, and publishes the book or returns it to draft. Dragging, importing notes, synopses, statuses and Book Settings are not in the app.

The app edits section text as Markdown: **bold**, *italic*, ~~strikethrough~~, [link](https://…), ## heading, - list, > quote, and * * * for a scene break. A single line break stays a line break. Pictures and page breaks appear as [[Picture 1]] and [[Page break]] lines: move a line to move the picture or page break, or delete the line to remove it. Pictures are not added in the app. A section that uses underline, a different font or text size, or list items with line breaks can be read, renamed and deleted in the app, but not edited there, so that formatting is not lost.

If the section changed somewhere else while you were editing it, the app shows the latest saved version: choose Use latest version or Replace latest with this version.

Limits

Your own plan sets how many books you can have: 1 on the free plan, and as many as you like with Pro. A book can hold 400 sections, including those set aside; the bulk import says so when it reaches the limit.

For a section whose text or order cannot be recovered from History, Contact support.