Guides

Writing your novel in Threadbound's Manuscript module

By the Threadbound team · October 2026

Switching it on

Open Settings, go to Modules and install Manuscript. It is switched on per project, so installing it in one novel doesn't add it to the others. It adds two tabs next to Timeline and Board: Manuscript and Status. Switching it off later only hides the tabs, and your writing stays where it is.

The binder

The binder is the list on the left. It has three levels:

• Acts are optional. If you never create one, chapters simply appear in a flat list.
• Chapters sit in an act, or on their own.
• Scenes sit in a chapter, and are what you actually write in.

Drag the handle beside any item to reorder it. You can drag a chapter onto an act to put it inside that act, and drag a scene onto a different chapter to move it there. Each scene, chapter and the whole manuscript show a word count. If your chapter titles get cut off, drag the divider between the binder and the editor to make the binder wider.

The editor

The editor is deliberately simple: bold, italic and underline, and nothing else to fiddle with. Your work saves as you type. Pasted text is cleaned up so it brings no stray formatting with it.

Comments

Select some text and add a comment to leave yourself a note: "check this date", "too slow". The commented text is highlighted, and hovering a comment in the panel highlights its passage. Mark a comment resolved and it dims instead of vanishing, so you can bring it back. Comments never appear in your exports.

Snapshots

Take a snapshot whenever you're about to rewrite something: click the camera button, then "Save a snapshot". Threadbound can also snapshot a scene automatically the first time you edit it each day, keeping what it looked like beforehand. Automatic snapshots are on by default and kept for 30 days; the same window lets you turn them off or keep them for up to 180 days. Ones you take yourself are kept until you delete them. Restoring a snapshot saves the current text first, so restoring never destroys anything.

Revisions

When you want to rewrite a scene without losing the version you have, use the branch button in the toolbar. It shows how many versions the scene has, and opens the Revisions window. Start a new revision from a copy of what you're viewing or from a blank page, and name it if you like ("Darker ending").

You can view and edit any revision. Exactly one is active, and that is the one the rest of Threadbound uses: the word counts, the exports, the Status tab and Codex mentions. Viewing another revision doesn't change which is active, and a banner above the editor reminds you when you're looking at a draft that isn't. Choose "Make active" when you've decided it's the keeper. The scene's title, status and linked events are shared by all its revisions, but each revision has its own comments and snapshots.

Deleted revisions wait in the same window until you restore them or delete them for good. If you decide both versions belong in the book, "New scene" copies a revision into a scene of its own, right after the original.

Read aloud

The speaker button reads the scene to you and highlights each sentence as it's spoken, which is a good way to catch clunky lines and missing words. Select some text to hear only that, or click where you want to start and it reads on from there. A small bar has play, pause, stop, speed and voice. Typing stops it, because the text it was reading has changed.

Threadbound only uses voices that run on your device or in your browser. Some browsers also list online voices, which send the text to a server to be spoken, and those are left out, so nothing you write leaves the app. If your browser has no on-device voice, the bar tells you and doesn't read anything.

Reader mode

The book button in the editor toolbar (on a scene, a chapter or a part), or the Reader button above the binder, opens Reader, which shows your book full screen, page by page, like an e-reader. It's for reviewing: reading the manuscript the way a reader would, and getting a feel for pacing and page length. Choose a device size, font, text size, line spacing, margins and a light, sepia, dark or e-ink page, or show two pages at once. It uses the same layout as your EPUB export, with the cover, title page, contents and chapter headings, and it remembers where you stopped.

Select words inside a paragraph and choose "Add note" to leave a note about that spot. Your notes are listed in the Notes tab of the comments panel and are kept in your backups, and the Edit this button takes you back to the same place in the editor. Page counts are approximate, because they depend on the device size and settings you pick rather than a real device.

Focus mode

The Focus button takes the editor full screen, hiding the sidebar and binder, until you press Esc or the exit button.

Linking scenes to plot events

This is what makes Manuscript part of Threadbound rather than a separate word processor. In a scene, choose which plot events it covers. The list follows your timeline order and can be filtered by thread.

The Status tab then turns it around. It lists every plot event in date order and shows which scenes, if any, cover it. Events with no scene are the parts of your outline you haven't written yet. Click an event to open it in the same editor as on the Board. Events whose threads are all in the Recycle Bin are left out.

Deleting a scene

Deleting a scene moves it to the module's own Trash, button in the binder header, rather than destroying it, because losing prose is worse than losing structure. Restore it from there with its comments and snapshots intact. Deleting an empty chapter or act is permanent, with a warning first.

Book details

The Details tab, next to Status, is where you say what the book is: title, subtitle, author, language, series and book number, a blurb and a cover image. It saves as you type. You can also add a dedication, switch a copyright page on or off with notes of your own, and choose whether exports number your chapters ("Chapter 3: Name" or "3. Name"). Chapters you have already named "Chapter 5" or "Prologue" are left as written.

Covers can be JPEG, PNG or WebP. Threadbound shrinks the picture and saves it as a JPEG inside your project, so it travels with your backups, and anything else is refused.

Exporting

Export gives you Markdown, a PDF or an EPUB e-book. They all use your book details: a cover, a title page, the copyright page and dedication, then your chapters. The EPUB has a linked table of contents and opens in any e-reader app. To read it on a Kindle, send it with Amazon's Send to Kindle, because Kindles ignore EPUB files copied over USB. The PDF opens your browser's print dialog, and you choose "Save as PDF", so nothing downloads until you do. Exports keep paragraphs plus bold, italic and underline, and leave out comments. The Markdown export has no cover image. There is no Word export yet.

Working alongside your Timeline

The binder's "New window" button opens your project in a second window straight on the Manuscript tab, so you can write in one window and keep the Board or Timeline open in the other. Both read the same data, but a change in one shows up in the other only after it reloads or you switch projects.

Backups

Acts, chapters and scenes are part of Threadbound's normal backup, including scenes in the Trash, every revision of a scene and your comments. Snapshots and your book cover are saved when you export a backup from Settings, but Google Drive backups leave them out to stay small, so export one now and then. After a restore, each comment goes back onto the words it was about; if those words have changed, it waits in the Notes tab of the comments panel so you can attach it to new text or delete it. Back up as usual from Settings, or set up automatic Google Drive backup; edits you make in Manuscript trigger it too.