Whether it is a novel or a non-fiction book, you open a project and start writing. While you do, the app keeps a private copy safe in the cloud — and when you want someone writing alongside you, you invite them by typing their GitHub username, not by clicking around a website hunting for the right button.
Who AuthorsWorkspace is for
- Writers with a real structure — parts, chapters, sections and scenes, a notebook beside them with research and planning needed for the book.
- Novelist Write scenes when inspiration hits then drag them into the correct order later.
- Co-authors who need two or more people in one manuscript and to sync the changes between each other without merge conflicts. Nothing caps how many authors a book can have; each one brings their own license — or shares a Family Household License if you live together.
- Series writers Write all you books in one project and keep all you research, character sheets, locations sheets, worldbuilding all in one spot.
- Anyone who wants to own their own work — the files are plain text, the backup belongs to you in your own git repository that you control, you are not locked in if you want to leave.
Your book is safe in the cloud before you’ve written a word
When you create a new project, AuthorsWorkspace can open a private GitHub repository automatically and puts your first draft there straight away. One tick in the New Project window, and within a few seconds your book is already backed up remotely somewhere else other than your laptop. If the laptop is stolen, or dies, the work is already safe.
After that it looks after itself:
- Every save pushes your work up in the background.
- Every time you open the project it brings you the latest copy first.
- Private means private — nobody can read your writing unless you decide they can.
There is no AuthorsWorkspace cloud. The repository is yours, it sits on GitHub, and it is exactly as private as you made it.
AuthorsWorkspace needs a GitHub personal access token to allow it to automatically work with GitHub — one copy and paste into Settings and AuthorsWorkspace handles all sync and collaboration for you automatically. No clicking through menus on GitHubs website trying to work out what you have to do, AuthorsWorkspace does it for you.
Prefer GitLab, Bitbucket or a server of your own? Yoy can manually connect your third party repositories instead and everything works the same way except you have to manually connect to the remote repository and manually give collaborators access to the git repository.
The same book on every device you own
Native apps on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS — one app, one project, in step with itself. It syncs when you open a project and pushes when you save, without you asking it to.
One license gets you access to both mobile and desktop versions with no count of how many devices you may use — one laptop and two desktops, a phone and tablet sync exactly the same way, because they are just talking to your own git repository.
On a phone or tablet you get the same editor, with touch selection handles and a word suggestion completion bar, so fixing a line on a bus or train is an easy thing to do.
Invite your co-authors
How many people write the book is your call — two, five, or a whole writing group. There is no limit on the number of authors a project can have.
Type a GitHub username into the Invite GitHub User to Collaborate… screen and the app takes it from there. It checks the account is real, sends an invitation that lets them write, and tells you immediately if they were already on the book.
You never open github.com to find the repository, dig through its Settings, and paste in an username to add another collaborator. All of that lives inside AuthorsWorkspace.
One step is theirs alone: GitHub emails them the invitation and they click accept. After that they open AuthorsWorkspace, Choose Open Project select Clone Repository… and paste the repository address into the Git Repository field, and they are in the book with you.
You are never charged for the collaboration — but each co-author will need their own AuthorsWorkspace license to work in it, unless they live in your household as family. A Family Household License covers every family member under your roof, so a co-author who is a partner, a child or a sibling costs you nothing extra. A co-author in another house, or a flatmate who is not family, buys their own license. The household is the boundary that decides licenses; the number of authors on the book is not capped by anything.
Two things worth knowing first. A collaborator can edit the whole book, so invite the people you would genuinely hand the manuscript to. And when several people are working on one book, everyone should sync on each of their devices regularly — that is what keeps everyone’s copy of the book the same.
Writing with other people doesn’t mean stopping to sort out a merge conflict
Two authors editing the same chapter is the normal case here, not the disaster case — and it stays the normal case whether there are two of you writing the book or twenty. AuthorsWorkspace works it out behind the scenes:
- You each edited different scenes — there is nothing to do.
- You each edited different lines of the same scene — everyone gets their version.
- Two of you rewrote the very same line — both survive, side by side, for you to tidy up later. A To Do Item is added so that you cannot forget to clean this up before release.
- You each added chapters — everyone keeps their chapters.
The merge underneath only ever has to choose between two versions of a line, so a book with twenty authors on it is settled the same way as a book with two.
No conflict markers, no second program to learn. You will never open a scene and find a wall of technical noise sitting in the middle of your prose.
No lock-in — take your book with you
Your book is plain text in a folder you can open yourself. Not a database, not a sealed document, not a format only this app understands. Nothing here needs AuthorsWorkspace in order to read your own work.
Today you can point any text editor at that folder and read every scene in it. The files carry a little bookkeeping alongside the prose, and the filenames are internal identifiers rather than titles — still plain text, still perfectly readable, and none of it locked away.
One Export to AsciiDoc Format command writes the finished book out as pure AsciiDoc, ready to take anywhere:
- Human-friendly filenames.
Chapter 3 - The Drowning.adoc, not a string of letters and digits. - No AuthorsWorkspace front matter. The internal tags, word counts and IDs are left out of the text you read.
- A proper manuscript. Title page, contents and heading structure are assembled from your book’s own outline rather than typed out by hand.
Take that AsciiDoc Export and carry on writing in whatever plain text editor you please. All of it still works, because what you get back is just AsciiDoc and none of it needs AuthorsWorkspace.
What else is in AuthorsWorkspace
Writing An editor that formats as you type, so bold and headings look the part without you learning a markup language. Word-count targets for a scene or a whole book with live progress, a writing clock that pauses when you stop, and spell check with right-click suggestions.
Structure Your book in parts, chapters, sections and scenes, with a notebook beside it for characters, locations, world building and research. Each book keeps its own archive and trash, so deleting something is never a one-way door.
Note cards A corkboard of your scenes. Every card carries its point of view, its characters, its location and a short preview, and you can set who wrote it. Drag them into the order you want.
Tags that live in the text To-dos, comments, characters, points of view and hooks sit right inside your prose as small boxes. Rename a character and every tag naming them follows. The to-do and hook lists gather them across the whole project, with due dates, priorities and whose responsibility they are.
Snowflake Method All eleven steps, including the character steps and a scene list where you drag scenes and story beats into place.
Statistics, per author A tab for each writer plus a combined view: their own daily words, sessions, streaks, consistency score and words per hour — with project totals that still add up when four people are writing on four machines.
Getting the book out
A manuscript compiles to PDF, epub e-books, web pages and Word documents, with the title page, contents and images put together from your book’s own details rather than typed out by hand.
A manuscript can be exported to AsciiDoc format with the Export to AsciiDoc Format command and writes the finished book out as pure AsciiDoc, ready to take anywhere.
You can export the project in AuthorsWorkspace format using the Export Project… command. It gathers the whole project into a single archive — history included — so you can move a book to a new computer or keep a spare copy. The same command brings it back again.
We recommend cloning git repositories to get the book onto an new device.