Epilogue. Write novels, scripts & poetry
The professional book writing app built for serious authors
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Epilogue. Write novels, scripts & poetry - The professional book writing app built for serious authors

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Epilogue is the writing environment built for writers who take their craft seriously. Whether you're drafting your first novel, structuring a script, compiling a collection of poems, or sharing a finished book with a large alpha reader group, Epilogue keeps you in flow. No distractions, no server lag, no lock-in.

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Maker
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A few years ago, a friend of mine & crafter of gorgeous prose, showed me the first three chapters of her novel. Sharp sentences, an eerie world, characters I loved. Then she pulled up her desktop. Twelve Google Docs. A spreadsheet for character notes. Notes app on her iPhone for similar “Character arcs” she thought of while traveling. Another Notes folder saying “Feedback from Priya”. She’d spent more time managing the chaos of writing than actually writing. I kept thinking about her setup for weeks. The fragmentation broke the creative flow instead of fuelling it. Authors are using tools built for management consultants and product managers. Google Docs emphasizes public collaboration but feedback from mum and my editor or alpha readers shouldn’t be public. Seeing someone else’s comments can bias the group. Nobody built something just for the person trying to finish a book. I faced the same chaos trying to publish my first book and got frustrated but had too much else going on. Now I’ve built the fix to help me finish book number 2. Hopefully, in a few weeks.

 This seems like a great and actually valuable product for writers!!

Maker

 thank you 🙏 please test it out and let me know if you have any feedback

Isn't this something similar to Elipus?

Maker

 ellipsus? I haven't used it. Is there something you like more about it.

 Maybe their UI, but it has been a long time I used it.

Oh, I felt this one personally. Twelve docs, character notes in three places, feedback living somewhere in the void.

Love that you’re solving the boring-but-deadly part of writing: keeping the book alive while everything around it tries to turn into chaos.

How Epilogue handles messy second drafts? when the story is already there, but half of it needs to merge or die.

Maker

 2 ways to manage that.

  1. In the sidebar, you can directly rearrange chapters and make the narrative flow

  2. Switch to planning tab and redraft the narrative the way it makes most sense to you

I like the first option more personally but a couple of beta users expressed interest to make it more of a visual whiteboard. I'm still thinking about that

finally a serious tool for long form authors not just blog posts ✍️ congrats!!

Wow, keeping alpha reader feedback private really helps one loud note not anchoring the whole group! Most writing tools get this backwards by defaulting to public comments... Love the product, you seem to be on the right path

Maker

 thank you :) please give it a shot

This market (serious author writing apps) is genuinely crowded - Scrivener, Ulysses, iA Writer, even Obsidian with the right plugins. All of them make the same "no distractions, keeps you in flow" promise.

The alpha reader sharing angle is the one thing here that's actually underserved. Getting a draft in front of 20 beta readers without turning it into a Google Docs mess is still painful, and nobody's solved it cleanly yet.

What's the concrete differentiation from Ulysses specifically? That's probably your closest direct competitor for the "offline-first, focused, serious author" positioning - and the answer to that question is what would make me switch.

great launch! this looks really interesting. as an academic writer, I’m always bouncing between docs and apps while writing, which is okay for single manuscripts but tough for books or monographs…I’ve got an upcoming project and I might give this a try…how does it compare to an app like scrivener (other than cost)?

Maker

 I love scrivener. My design approach was to intentionally make it calmer and minimal without sacrificing any of the power. I find it much easier with the writing / planning toggles to keep in flow and write 300-400 words a day. Also, the sharing flow for feedback has a different lens with default private links.

But, I'm biased :-) Please give it a shot and see how it performs for you. Happy to hear any feedback for academic writing that can make it better.

What format do you store projects in, plain text or markdown, and how easy is it to export everything?

Maker

 it is markdown.

I'm still improving the export options to allow people to publish beautiful books across all the stores. What formats would be most relevant for you?

The private alpha-reader feedback default is the genuinely underserved bit, agree with Gal there. The thing I would want settled before trusting a multi-year manuscript to any tool is Thami's format question. A book has to outlive the app it was written in. If the store underneath is plain markdown with a sidecar for the character and feedback metadata, and export is lossless, that is the real moat. It means I could walk away clean, which is exactly why I would stay. Is that the shape of it?