The whole studio.

Most writing software is document-based. It's just files and folders, and the cumulative project lives in isolation. Scribi is different. It's backed by a relational database, so all your projects and finished manuscripts for every pen name, across any number of story worlds and book series, live together in a single unified catalog.

The catalog organizes your work the way authors actually think: pen names at the top, then story worlds, series, and books nested underneath. This isn't a rigid hierarchy. You start with a pen name at the root, and then if you write standalone books, that's your prerogative. If you want to join them in a series later, do that. If you realize you've got something epic on your hands late in the game, put them in a story world to share assets across series.

Every book carries a status like planned, work in progress, editing, reader, and published, so you always know where things stand at a glance. When you export ebooks, those references are stored too, making it easy to update a published title when your back matter or front matter changes as your catalog grows.

Scribi's brainstorming system lets you build individual prompt series or group them together into structured sessions, whether you're exploring the economics of a fantasy nation, digging into your romance lead's wound, or fleshing out an entire story world. Every brainstorm can be saved as a reusable template, refined over time, and applied to future projects. When you know the right questions that trigger your creative process, being able to revisit them across different projects helps you ideate faster and start writing sooner.

You can tag brainstorm prompts by subject, including your storybase elements, so the material you generate stays connected to the rest of your project. While you're writing, those tagged brainstorms are available in the sidebar for quick reference, no hunting through old notes.

AI can accelerate the process too. Scribi's built-in assistant can generate a fresh brainstorm series for you to work through, or you can brainstorm conversationally, with the in-app assistant or with Claude connected through the desktop plugin, and have the assistant summarize the session, prompts, ideas, and all, packaged up and ready to use as project material.

Scribi comes with a growing library of beat sheet templates, including the Hero's Journey, Romancing the Beat by Gwen Hayes (used with permission), and many more, ready to plug into any book project. You can set beat targets by percentage, word count, or simple sequence, and modify, customize, or save any beat sheet as a new reusable template.

What sets Scribi apart is live beat tracking. Set a project target, say a 100,000-word novel, and as you write, the beat sheet sidebar shows you exactly where you are in your story's structure. A color-coded system highlights upcoming beats, marks where you are now, and flags beats that may be arriving late. When a beat lands, mark it and Scribi tucks it away for reference, keeping your focus on what's ahead.

Your assistant adds another dimension: it has context about your current beat sheet and manuscript progress, so you can talk through your story structure conversationally, discuss pacing, explore alternatives, and commit decisions directly to your project. Use Scribi's built-in assistant or connect Claude desktop; both work with the same tools.

Scribi's outliner gives you two ways to work: document mode for linear, chapter-by-chapter planning, or corkboard mode for a visual grid you can rearrange on the fly. Either way, your outline layers with your beat sheet so you can see where key story moments land within your evolving structure. You can assign point of view per scene, set notes, and drag things around until the shape feels right.

As you outline, you can start tagging and creating storybase elements, characters, locations, events, right in context. Everything you build here will be waiting for you in the manuscript editor when you're ready to start writing, connected and searchable from day one.

Pantsers aren't left out either. You can reverse-engineer an outline after drafting by asking your assistant to summarize your manuscript documents, or talk through your outline as you work, exploring structure and pacing conversationally. And if you've dated your documents on the story timeline, you can view your whole outline in chronological order: story order and telling order, side by side.

The storybase is Scribi's relational story bible, and it grows organically as you work. Tag a character in your outline, mention a location in a brainstorm, or highlight a name in the manuscript editor, and it all flows into the storybase automatically. You can drag text from the manuscript onto story elements in the sidebar to save notes on the fly, and when you're ready to organize those notes into structured attributes, you can ask your assistant to do it for you.

How deep you go is entirely up to you. The storybase can be a simple repository of names and notes, or a complex taxonomic system with types, subtypes, and element groups organized however you like. You can establish customizable relationships between elements, or use the standard ones Scribi provides, and defining one end automatically establishes the other. Your elements reach the rest of the studio, too: place them on interactive maps, date them on your story timeline, explore them in the connection graph, cast them into stat blocks, and give them a language of their own.

Scribi's assistant, built into the app or Claude connected through the desktop plugin, can update your storybase directly from your manuscript: a genuine personal assistant that helps you remember every detail so you can tell the biggest, most epic stories you can imagine without losing track of a single thread.

With the full-featured map module, your world gets real geography. Upload map images, place locations, zoom in and out, and link regions of one map to another, so you can travel from the global map down to a single town or district, fully interactive the whole way. Drag elements from your storybase straight onto a map to lay out key locations in seconds.

Maps support labels, clickable regions, and defined scale and distance, so you can measure real distances with paths. However far your characters have to march, sail, or fly, you'll know exactly how far that is, and how long it should take them.

Scribi's timeline module lets you define a custom calendar, your own months, seasons, and eras, then set your world against it. Create timeline events, give characters birth and death dates, mark elements with a start and an end, and date your manuscript documents themselves.

Dated documents unlock a chronological view of your outline, so you can check your story's internal history at a glance no matter how out of order you tell it.

The connection graph makes your storybase explorable. Click any element and follow the chain of connections outward: character to faction, faction to city, city to the war that razed it. For large, complex worlds it's more than a pretty visualization. Following those chains is one of the best ways to mine new story angles that were already hiding in your own connections.

For the authors who go deepest, data tables and element stat blocks let you define structured stats for any story element, for TTRPG sourcebooks, for reference pages in any book that needs them, or just as a fun artifact of your world. Blocks are fully customizable, can link to element attributes to fill themselves in automatically, and can be mounted directly onto print book or epub pages. Duplicate and modify any layout so you never rebuild the same table from scratch twice.

Scribi's language tools let you build a constructed language beside the storybase: a phoneme inventory, morphology patterns, grammar rules, a searchable lexicon, and the phrases your characters actually say. The language belongs to the world, so its words are there in the sidebar when a character needs one.

Scribi's manuscript editor is a clean, focused space to write, with your entire project at your fingertips. Focus mode blocks out distractions when you need to get into flow. As you write, you can tag new characters, locations, and story elements on the fly with simple shortcuts, drag text onto sidebar elements to save notes, and add scenes to story threads without ever leaving the page.

When it's time to revise, Scribi offers a full versioning system for each document. Fork a revision, rewrite from scratch, or make incremental edits; nothing is ever lost. Mark sections as finalized to track what's ready and what still needs work, and before publishing, Scribi checks that every document is finalized so nothing half-edited slips through.

The manuscript is fully connected to the rest of your project. Linked characters, locations, and beats appear in the sidebar as you write, and updating an element's name or details can be reflected throughout the manuscript automatically. When you're ready to edit, your assistant can give feedback through inline comments and tracked changes, suggestions you review and accept, never silent rewrites.

Create a book in branching format and Scribi turns the manuscript editor into a branching-story workspace. Instead of one linear sequence, your scenes become choice points: link any passage to the documents a reader could turn to next, right inside the editor, and Scribi keeps every branch connected as your story grows.

A dedicated graph view renders your whole project as a decision tree, with manuscript documents shown as nodes that lead to other documents in a branching layout. It gives manuscript navigation a second dimension beyond the linear file tree, so you can see the shape of every path, find dead ends, and move through the story the way a reader will.

When the story is ready, export an EPUB specially formatted for branching-narrative reading, with the choices wired up so readers tap through the branches on any e-reader. You can approximate this by hand in other tools, but Scribi is the only writing software that builds and exports branching books natively, and makes it genuinely easy.

Scribi supports multiple languages in a single book project, with an editor interface built specifically for translation. Add a new language version of your manuscript, open the translation editor, and the original sits side by side with the new language; reference is always one glance away while you work.

Your assistant ships with tools built specifically for translation work. Or, with Scribi's cloud collaboration, hand the manuscript directly to your translator and receive it back when they're done: no exporting, no emailing files, no reassembly.

Formatting doesn't multiply with your languages, either. Format the book once, and export ebooks in every language in one export operation. Together with multi-edition print support, one Scribi project manages every language and every edition of your book.

Scribi's book block system lets you assemble professional ebooks with customizable, modular blocks for front matter, back matter, acknowledgments, author bios, newsletter calls, and more. Drag and drop to arrange your layout, automatically include the first chapter of the next book in a series to boost readthrough, and save the whole thing as a reusable template.

Both layout and styling are saved at whatever catalog scope makes sense, pen name, story world, or series, on top of your global defaults. That means every book under a pen name or series shares a consistent look and feel. Update a block or change a style, and you can re-export all the affected books at once without touching each one individually.

Export to fully formatted EPUB or DOCX, and to print-ready PDF through Scribi's full print layout system. Because Scribi's relational database tracks every block in every export, updating your back matter across an entire catalog is as simple as editing the block and hitting re-export. And if your book has multiple language versions, you format once and export every language in a single operation.

Scribi exports print-ready PDF, the file your printer actually wants, with no conversion required on their end. Every trim size supported by KDP, IngramSpark, and most large offset printers is built in, and the layout manager is an exact one-to-one representation of the final printed file. What you see on screen is what comes off the press.

The layout system was built for real book design: complex artwork layouts, multi-column pages, and artwork placement driven by line-height calculation, so your images always flow perfectly with your text instead of fighting it. Set global styles for the whole book, then override per document, or per page, when a chapter calls for something special.

One project can also carry multiple print editions. Lay out a hardcover and a softcover, or produce a large print edition for accessibility; whatever your book needs, every edition lives in the same project, right beside your ebooks and translations.

Switching to Scribi doesn't mean starting over. Import DOCX and EPUB files, and Scribi will intelligently break them into chapters and scenes based on preferences you set. Import one book at a time, or bulk-import an entire catalog by organizing files into a folder structure; Scribi will create catalog entries for your pen names, worlds, and series and import each book into its own project. Even if you've got dozens of published titles, picking up Scribi is a painless process.

Scribi also makes round-tripping with your editor seamless. Export a manuscript as DOCX, send it off for editing, and when it comes back, re-import the file; Scribi brings tracked changes and comments in with it. You're never trapped in Word for the editing process; you can always cleanly re-import into Scribi and keep working in the environment you prefer.

Scribi's productivity suite starts with a built-in sprint timer inspired by the Pomodoro technique. Design your own sprint schedules, set work durations, break intervals, and number of rounds, then name and save them so you can reuse your favorite rhythms across projects. When you run a sprint session, Scribi tracks your output in real time: words written, pace per interval, and total progress across the session.

Beyond sprints, Scribi tracks your daily writing activity across all your projects, stored locally on your machine, to give you a clear picture of when you're most productive, what your average writing speed is, and how long different kinds of projects take from start to finish. The goal is to help you schedule your work realistically and find a sustainable pace that actually fits your life.

Your assistant ties it together: it can help you set goals, review your patterns, suggest realistic schedules, and keep you on track, not by nagging, but by giving you honest, data-backed insight into your own creative process. The productivity tools aren't about writing faster; they're about writing smarter.

Scribi never requires a subscription. Your license is yours forever, and the app is fully functional on its own. Scribi Cloud is an optional $5.99-a-month add-on for when you want the connected studio: it syncs your entire catalog across devices and unlocks collaboration, chat, and the mobile companion app (coming soon).

Collaboration works as a clean handoff. Share a project with your editor, co-author, illustrator, or beta reader; they open it in Scribi, do their work, and hand it back. Only the person sharing needs a Cloud subscription, recipients don't, so working with your editor never means asking them to subscribe to anything.

Cloud also adds user-to-user chat. Add a friend by email and message one on one or in groups without leaving the studio, including sharing template resources securely over chat. More friend features are on the way: group sprints, shared task boards for accountability groups, and expanded asset sharing to enable round-robin critiques between friends. Writing may be solitary work, but it doesn't have to be lonely.

Scribi's assistant is an administrative assistant and a librarian, not a writing partner. It shelves what you write, remembers it across a series, keeps the storybase current from the manuscript, plans your schedule, and does the technical chores around a book. It is a harness as much as a helper: it works only through the tools Scribi gives it, and none of those tools develop your story or produce raw creative content. It will never write your book.

Whether you use it at all is up to you. Scribi is fully functional without any AI, and nothing in the studio depends on it. When you want a hand, bring your own key from OpenRouter or OpenAI and pick your model, or connect Claude Desktop through Scribi's MCP plugin on Windows and macOS. Both work through the same tools, so there is no capability difference between them.

With those tools it can answer questions about your own story from the storybase, summarize a brainstorm session into project material, generate the next round of brainstorm prompts, keep the story bible current as you write, review a draft as inline comments and tracked changes you accept or reject, help a translation along, and suggest a writing schedule from your own history. New tools ship with every release, and every one of them stays inside the harness.

The point is the same as the point of the studio: take the administrative and technical work off your plate, so the part you keep is the fun part. Writing the book.