Every thread accounted for.

Not yet. StoryLedger is a Windows app for now (Windows 10 and 11). If you are on a Mac and would like it, email me: enough requests and it moves up the list.

Yes. Windows shows that warning for new apps from independent developers until they have built up a download history. Click More info, then Run anyway. The installer comes straight from StoryLedger’s official release page and contains nothing but the app.

No. There is no AI in StoryLedger. It does not write for you, suggest plot, rewrite a sentence, summarise a chapter or score your characters. Everything in your library is there because you typed it, and the app’s only job is to hand it back at the moment you need it. Nothing you record is sent anywhere, analysed, or used to train any system. For completeness: I use AI tools to help write the code, as a great deal of software now is. None of it is in the app, and none of it touches your writing.

Nothing you write is ever uploaded, wherever you write it. Where the manuscript itself lives is up to you. Write at the Desk and your chapters and scenes are kept in your own StoryLedger library, on your own computer, alongside everything else. Write in Word or Scrivener instead and StoryLedger does not go looking for that file at all — the only time it opens a .docx is when you choose Preview structure and hand it one yourself, and it opens that copy read-only without changing it. Either way, nothing is sent anywhere, analysed, or used to train any system. The only time StoryLedger goes online is to check whether a newer version is available.

StoryLedger asks for a licence key before opening your library. Your work is never held hostage: the same window always offers Back up my data, so you can keep a complete copy of everything whether you buy or not.

Buy through the secure Paystack page. I email your personal licence key within 24 hours, usually much sooner. Paste it into StoryLedger once and you are done. It works offline and is yours to keep.

No. Updates download and install themselves, and every update during Early Access and version 1 is included in your licence.

Yes. The price is charged in rand through Paystack and any international card works; your bank converts it automatically, which comes to about US$31.

Yes. The Progress screen keeps a record of your manuscript's word count and works out how many words a day you need to reach your target by your target draft date. Set your own daily ceiling and it tells you when the plan has stopped fitting, and what would fix it. It also shows the pace you have really been keeping and when you would finish at that pace. You type the number in: Progress never goes looking at your files. The Desk keeps its own running count while you write, and that count stays separate from Progress until you enter it yourself.

Yes. The writing page at the Desk zooms from 50% to 400% — with Ctrl and the plus or minus keys, Ctrl and the mouse wheel, or the control at the foot of the window. Ctrl and 0 puts it back to normal. The page grows along with the words rather than simply magnifying them, so the line stays a readable length and there is nothing to scroll sideways. Your choice is remembered in every book, so you set it once and it is there the next time you open the app. It changes what is drawn on screen and nothing else: your manuscript, its formatting and the file that comes out of Export to Word are untouched. Full screen (F11) clears everything else out of the way, which helps at the larger sizes. If there is something else that would make StoryLedger easier for you to use, write to me at hello@blurbcraftstudio.com — I would rather hear it than guess.

Yes — that is most of what it is. Every character has roles, a description, characteristics, dates, relationships, and three boxes of their own for Eyes, Hair and Height: the details authors most often go back through a whole novel to find. They are free text, so amber is an answer and so is the grey of wet slate, and height takes a head shorter than Isla as readily as a number. Ages lays the whole cast against every year of the book. All of it comes out in the Story Bible export, and all of it stays on your computer.

Yes, and it is one of the things it does best. Create a project for each manuscript you are working on and record the names, spellings, ages, dates and physical details you would normally keep in a style sheet — then search and filter them instead of scrolling a Word file. Log each inconsistency as you read, with the exact phrase to search for, and export the list as a consistency report for the author. Every client’s work stays in its own project, on your own computer.

No. The Desk is there if you want it and ignorable if you do not. Everything else in StoryLedger works exactly as it did whether you draft in Word, in Scrivener, in Google Docs or on paper — the characters, threads, timeline and continuity ledger have never needed to see your manuscript and still do not.

Yes, if your chapters and scenes are marked with Word headings. Choose Preview structure, point it at your .docx, and it shows you what it makes of the file — which headings it read as chapters, which as scenes, and anything it could not place — before a single word is imported. Your original is opened read-only and is never altered. If the structure does not look right, close it, fix the headings and look again.

Both. A series is simply several projects grouped together. Plenty of writers use it for a single long novel, or for standalones that share a cast and a setting, where the same facts still have to hold from one book to the next.

StoryLedger makes an automatic backup the first time you open it each day and keeps the fourteen most recent. You can also save a complete backup anywhere you like, such as a USB stick or cloud folder, with one click.