Welcome to Colophon
Colophon is a story bible and revision desk for novelists. You keep writing in the app you already use. Colophon sits beside it, reads your chapters, and remembers what your book has promised and how it has changed.
What Colophon does
- The bible — characters, locations, threads and a timeline, each linked to the scenes they appear in. See Characters and locations.
- The manuscript desk — Colophon reads the folder your chapters already live in and keeps a permanent, paragraph-level record of what changed from one reading to the next. See How revision tracking works.
- Continuity — a place to track the small facts your novel has to keep straight, like a scar, a borrowed jacket, or who knew what and when, each with a status, a priority and a log. See Track continuity.
- Search — one search across your chapters, your bible and every revision you've recorded, including sentences you've since cut. See Search your book.
Your manuscript stays yours
Colophon opens your manuscript folder read-only and never writes to your chapter files. Your bible and revision history are kept in a Colophon document on your Mac, separate from your chapters. Colophon makes no network connections. See Your files and your privacy.
A good first hour
- Choose File ▸ New Sample Novel… to see a document that already has a bible and four recorded passes. See Explore the sample novel.
- Make a document for your own book with File ▸ New Document… (⌘N). See Create or open a document.
- Attach the folder your chapters live in. See Attach your manuscript folder.
- Take a baseline, so Colophon has a starting point to compare against. See Take a baseline.
- Add a few characters and link them to the scenes they're in.
Colophon needs macOS 12 or later.