Questions, answered.

Yes. InkSpine runs locally on your machine — no account or internet connection required to write. It opens instantly and works with the Wi-Fi off.

Yes. Start a project for one book and write it normally; if it becomes a series later, just add another book to the same project. Nothing needs migrating.

Download it for Windows, macOS or Linux and install it. There is nothing to sign up for to start writing: the free version needs no account, no key and no internet connection.

Yes — a permanent free version, not a time-limited demo. It never caps your writing, and it includes the corkboard, plot overview, search, import and Markdown/HTML export, with room for one book, ten entries across characters, locations, lore and factions, and three story arcs per project. Anything over a free limit stays visible and readable. InkSpine Core, the paid version, adds the publishable EPUB, DOCX and PDF files, unlimited worldbuilding, every chapter version, book-wide rename and the revision tools. You can also try the full product, Core included, before you decide; you can start the trial on this website or from inside the app.

That is the point of it. InkSpine replaces the usual stack of a heavyweight word processor, a separate plotting tool like Plottr, a spreadsheet for characters, and a separate export tool like Vellum — with one cross-platform app.

InkSpine can’t open a .scriv project directly yet, but the manuscript moves across in a few minutes. In Scrivener, select your Draft (Manuscript) folder and choose File → Compile; pick the Manuscript (Times) or a similar format, set “Compile for” to Microsoft Word (.docx), and save the file. Then in InkSpine choose Import, then Choose file…, and pick that .docx — InkSpine splits it into chapters at the headings Scrivener wrote and shows you the result before anything is created. Character sheets and research notes don’t come along in a compile; export those with File → Export → Files and paste what you need into InkSpine’s worldbuilding pages. The desktop app points you here if you choose Open and pick a Scrivener folder.

Yes. Characters, locations, and lore live beside the manuscript and cross-link into it, plus a corkboard and plot overview for structuring longer or multi-book projects.

You can plot in it. A corkboard shows every chapter as a card you can reorder; a plot overview shows which characters appear in which chapter, with optional layers for pacing, referenced locations and story beats; and a story-arc board gives each storyline — the rebellion, a romance, one character’s turn — its own lane across the book, with every beat marked in the chapter it happens in. Because the arcs sit in the same project as the prose, InkSpine can tell you the longest stretch a storyline has gone without a beat, which is usually where a middle starts to sag. Arcs are stored per series, so a plot that spans a trilogy is one arc rather than three copies of it.

Two separate things, and both are optional. If you want a target, a book can carry a word-count goal and a deadline, and InkSpine works out what that means per day and shows the days remaining — or you can set the daily number yourself and ignore the deadline. Separately, there is an Activity popup (the button at the left of the footer, or ⇧⌘A on a Mac, Ctrl+Shift+A on Windows and Linux), which is a record to look back at rather than a target: a twelve-month heatmap of words written per day, your current and longest writing streaks, your best day, session figures and a timeline of milestones you have passed. That popup carries no pace warnings, no comparisons with other writers and nothing to share — it is there for people who like seeing their own process, and it is entirely ignorable if you are not one of them. A day spent cutting rather than adding carries your streak forward: revising is work.

Validated EPUB 3 and DOCX, ready for KDP and other publishing platforms, plus a proof-copy PDF for sending to an agent or a first reader. Markdown and HTML export are there too, since your prose is Markdown already. Markdown and HTML export stay free; the publishable EPUB, DOCX and PDF files are part of InkSpine Core (see below).

In a plain folder on your own disk — prose as Markdown files, structured data (characters, locations, chapters) as readable JSON right beside it. InkSpine is not a cloud app and holds no proprietary format; you can open your project in any text editor.

Yes. Every chapter is versioned automatically with a snapshot as you write — no manual saves to remember. You can read any earlier version of a chapter beside your draft and bring back the exact lines you want, so nothing you write is ever really gone.

Windows, macOS, and Linux, from a single codebase.

Windows shows this notice for any app whose publisher certificate it doesn’t recognise yet, and ours is still on its way. It isn’t a verdict on the app. To install, click "More info", then "Run anyway". If you’d like to check the file first, compare its SHA-256 checksum with the one linked from the download page.

Yes. The macOS build is signed with an Apple Developer ID certificate and notarized by Apple, so it opens normally with no Gatekeeper warning — no manual approval steps needed.

We ship .deb (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, and derivatives) and .rpm (Fedora, RHEL, openSUSE, and derivatives) — between them, that covers most mainstream desktop Linux distros. We don’t currently publish a signed package repository, so your package manager won’t verify a GPG signature on install; download only from our official download page, and scan the package with an online virus-analysis service first if you want extra peace of mind.

On many Chromebooks, yes, through ChromeOS’s built-in Linux support, though we don’t officially support it yet. It needs a Chromebook with an Intel or AMD processor; it won’t run on ARM-based models. Turn on Linux in Settings → About ChromeOS → Developers, then download the Linux .deb and open it to install. Keep your projects in the "Linux files" folder.

The free version costs nothing. InkSpine Core is a one-time purchase, not a subscription: you own the version you buy, it works on up to three of your devices, and it keeps working with no recurring fee. It includes 12 months of feature updates. After the first year, more updates cost half the Core price at the time, and you keep everything either way. The price, in your own currency and with tax included, is shown on the pricing page before you buy.

InkSpine becomes the free version. Nothing is deleted: everything you wrote stays in your files, and anything over a free limit stays readable.