I was spending more time
managing tools than writing books.

When I decided to write my first novel, I thought the hard part would be the writing. I was wrong. The writing was the best part. The hard part was everything else.

I took online courses and live weekly training sessions. I bought Scrivener, Ulysses, Atticus, Vellum, AutoCrit, and ProWriting Aid. I ran my publishing business through Notion, Word, and Excel. I learned launch planning, Amazon advertising, Facebook ads, and graphic design for promotional creatives. I hired book cover designers and freelancers on Upwork — some brilliant, some not. I studied the craft and I studied the business, because being an indie author means doing both.

Somewhere along the way, I realised I was spending more time switching between tools than actually writing. Each app did one thing reasonably well, but none of them understood the full shape of what a working author needs. Scrivener for drafting, Vellum for formatting, a spreadsheet for royalties, a calendar for deadlines, scattered folders for character notes. The toolkit had become the obstacle.

Then, a month after publishing Perfect Attachment, a spider bite led to a fungal infection in my head — Mucormycosis, which carries an 85% fatality rate. What followed was several months in hospital and seven surgeries. I came out on the better end of the deal, but only just.

In those long days and nights in a hospital bed, I had time I hadn't had before — time to think about what mattered and what didn't. The fragmented mess of author tools I'd been wrestling with definitely fell into the second category. So I started building the application I wished had existed when I published my first book. Inscript Studio was born in that hospital room.

One quiet desktop app — for Mac, Windows, and Linux — where a book lives from first sentence to launch day: the editor, the formatter, the story bible, the task list, the finances, all in one window. No subscriptions. No cloud dependency. No account required. Just the tools a working author actually needs, sitting right beside the manuscript.

Writing books is hard enough. It's the business side of being an author that doesn't come naturally — at least not to me. Inscript exists so the business tools stay close at hand without getting in the way of the work that matters.