Google Docs alternatives for writing your book

It slows down, or runs out of room

A Google Doc holds at most 1.02 million characters, roughly 170,000 words, and a long novel can start to lag well before it gets there. These keep a book in pieces from the start, so no single file has to carry all of it.

• Scrivener — Each scene its own document in the Binder.
• Ulysses — Sheets in a library, gathered into a book, on Apple devices.

Your chapters are in one long document, or in twenty

Tabs divide one file, and a document per chapter leaves you a folder to keep in order. Neither gives a chapter any idea of which scenes it holds.

• NovelPad — Chapters side by side as columns of scene cards, where moving a card moves the scene.
• Obsidian — A Markdown note per chapter, linked to the others, in a vault on your own disk.

You want your book offline, and private

A Google Doc lives in your Google account. Writing without a connection means turning offline access on before you need it.

• NEO — A free desktop app, and no account to make.
• bibisco — Open source, running offline on Linux, macOS, and Windows.

You want to plan the book as well as write it

Docs gives you the page and nothing beside it. The plan ends up in a second document you keep switching to.

• Plottr — A visual timeline for the plot, kept apart from the prose.
• Campfire — Characters, maps, and invented languages, each recorded in a module of its own.
• Dabble — A Plot Grid of cards in columns beside the manuscript.

Reasons to stay with Google Docs

It is free and already open in your browser, and a co-writer can type in the same paragraph as you at the same moment. If one thing is the trouble rather than everything, fix that first:

• Google Docs is slow on my long novel
• Google Docs says my book is too large
• Reordering chapters in Google Docs
• Downloading a whole book from Google Docs tabs

And Tabularia

It was made for a manuscript at book length, and the benchmark on the home page shows it staying quick at a million words. So your book can be one manuscript rather than a folder of documents. Chapters and scenes are real parts of it, which means the Outline is always the book's actual order and any of them is a click away. The Minimap keeps your place in the whole. Want one part only? Working Scope narrows the page to it, and an anchor marks a passage you mean to come back to.

Planning happens beside the prose, not in another file. Open a Sheet for a character and it sits beside the page you are writing. Threads of the plot run along timelines whose markers are fastened to the passages they are about, so you stay close to the story rather than to notes about it. If you like to plan first, a story shape can set out the acts and chapters before you write a word.

On the Free plan your book stays in the browser on your own device, keeps working with no connection, and is not sent to Tabularia's cloud. The Cloud plan adds backup, sync between devices, and sharing. Sharing works in turns rather than in one live document: an Editor you invite gets a draft to write in while your manuscript stays exactly as you left it, and what they send back is yours to take a difference at a time or all at once.

None of it has to be on screen. Focus Mode, the middle of the Compass, puts everything but the page away, and then it is as plain as a blank Google Doc. To bring your book across, download it as a Word file and import that. The Google Docs comparison covers the move.