Chapters and structure
Keeping a book in order in the tool you already use, from moving a chapter to reading the whole draft as one.
Where a book's shape gets lost
A novel is long enough that the tool holding it starts to matter. Word processors see one long page. Note apps see a pile of separate notes. The questions here come from that gap: moving a chapter without breaking it, counting one, and reading a book that lives in thirty files as a single draft.
Most of the answers turn on the same small habit. A chapter title has to be marked as a chapter, with a heading style or a numbered file name, before any tool can find it, move it, or count it. Each page shows how to do that in the app you use now, then what changes when the book is kept as one manuscript with its chapters listed beside it.
The answers
- Should my novel be one file or one file per chapter? — The tradeoffs of each, and why Word's Master Documents are best avoided.
- How do I move chapters around in Word? — The Navigation Pane, Outline view, and chapters that will not show up.
- How do I reorder chapters in Google Docs? — Cut and paste, missing outline headings, and tabs as an alternative.
- How do I see the word count for each chapter? — Select-and-count in Word and Google Docs, and a count on every Outline row.
- How do I download or print a whole book from Google Docs tabs? — All tabs in a download or a printout, and the per-tab word count.
- How do I read an Obsidian novel as one document? — An embed note, the Longform plugin, and keeping scene order safe.
- How do I organize a novel's chapters in iA Writer? — Numbered files in a folder, and content blocks to assemble them.
- How do I turn Notion pages into one manuscript? — Moving blocks into one page, exporting subpages, and importing the export.
- Scrivener feels too complicated. What is simpler? — The few features that matter, the built-in tutorial, and moving a project.
- Is there a Google Docs template for writing a novel? — A downloadable starting file, and the three settings that matter.
- How do I track my novel’s word count in a spreadsheet? — Six columns and the formulas that fill four of them.
Try it on your own manuscript
Nothing is metered: as many projects as you like at any length, the outline and minimap to move through them, drafts and markup mode for revising, snapshots to return to, sheets and timelines beside the page, and export to DOCX, PDF, EPUB, HTML, Markdown, plain text and Fountain. Bring in what you have already written and read it back as a book.
The Cloud plan is $18 a month, or $172.80 a year, and adds backup, sync across your devices, sharing a manuscript for review, and publishing your work as a web page — the readers and collaborators you invite do not need a paid account of their own. Tabularia is in Public Beta and shipping steadily; the release notes record what has landed.