Write the story
Shape the book
Send it out to sea
Your own AI, optional
Meet your First MateThe checker that catches the slips, knows your story and never forgets what you decided.See what it does
Salt of the Page is a writing studio for authors who want to finish. The manuscript, the blogs, the newsletter and the calendar all live at one quiet desk that follows you from your computer to your phone to the web, and the AI is there to get you unstuck, never to write the book for you.
Everything in one place
Tap any feature to jump straight to it.
The real app
This is My Day, where each writing session starts. Switch between day and night to see both themes.
Why another writing app
Every keystroke is saved on your device within two seconds, then shared. A sync conflict makes a side-by-side copy. It never overwrites a sentence.
No red lines while you draft. First Mate, our checker, fixes obvious typos as you type, reviews the rest when you ask, and knows that dialogue is allowed to be a fragment.
Built for whole novels in one place. Typing stays quick at 150,000 words, and the book is yours to export in one click: Word, EPUB, print PDF, Markdown, a full backup.
The AI is a creative partner, not a ghostwriter. It's off until you connect yours, only ever suggests, never trains on your manuscript, and runs on your own AI account, so nobody is metering your words.
The writing room
Serif type, a quiet toolbar, chapters down the left. When you need more, the Studio slides in beside the page: your Source of Truth for characters and places, margin notes, chapter history, and First Mate, the grammar and style checker.
The page. Chapters, word counts, a one-line status that always says whether you're saved on this device or shared. Nothing else.
Source of Truth. Characters, places, ships, things and lore, each with a count of where it shows up in the book, so continuity is a search away.
First Mate. Typos fixed as you type, then spelling, grammar, consistency, style and your own house rules when you ask. It runs on this device, leaves dialogue alone and never rewrites your voice. Meet First Mate
Focus mode. The page and nothing else. Step between chapters without leaving, and press Esc when you're done.
Meet your First Mate
Focus mode and Sounds
Focus mode clears away everything but the page. Then put on a track, mix in rain on the roof or waves on the shore, set a fade-out timer, and write until it stops. Go on, press play.
An always-growing library. New tracks, sounds and scenes arrive with every update.
The toolbar, the chapter list and every panel fade away. Just the page, in the type and width you chose.
A slim bar up top steps to the previous or next chapter (Alt Page Up, Alt Page Down) or jumps to any chapter, without leaving focus.
Start a 15-minute sprint. Today’s words against your goal sit quietly along the bottom.
Press Esc or Exit focus and you’re back exactly where you were.
Music 75-second previews of all 19 tracks
Ambient sounds tap a sound to turn it on, slide to mix
Or start from a scene tap again to stop it
Nothing playing yet.
Search your book
One search for the whole manuscript. Find every mention of a name, or ask a question and get the answer from your own pages.
See it as a book
One keystroke lays your draft out as a real two-page spread with running heads, folios and front matter. The same book is set properly for Apple Books, the Kindle app, a Paperwhite with its E Ink page flash, a Scribe and an iPad. Turn pages with the arrow keys, a swipe or a click.
Paperback. A real spread with a paper page turn, chapters opening on right-hand pages, and page counts that match your trim size.
Kindle Paperwhite. E Ink, with the page-turn flash, so you know how the chapter breaks before a reader does.
iPhone. Apple Books sizing, with White, Sepia and Night pages and text sizes to test.
All devices. The current chapter's opening on every device at once, each with its own page count.
Book design. Ten built-in looks and your own saved styles. 18 book fonts, 27 heading fonts, drop caps, small caps, 15 scene-break ornaments, 7 trim sizes, margins that grow with page count to stay above KDP's minimums. Every change shows on the page as you make it.
Export an EPUB that passes the validator every time, a print PDF with mirrored margins and a gutter sized to your page count, or a Word file that opens cleanly. Fonts are embedded and free to use in books. A publishing guide walks you through KDP, IngramSpark, Draft2Digital, Apple, Kobo and Barnes & Noble.
AI, your way
Salt of the Page isn't built to churn out chapters. The story is yours, and so is every sentence in it. The AI is a tool for the hard days: it looks things up, throws out ideas, asks the question you hadn't thought of and checks your facts, so the creative juices keep flowing and you keep moving. Connect the AI you already use, or leave it off entirely.
You don't have to know how to talk to an AI. We've written the rulebook for it: how to help an author, what never to touch, and how to answer. Plug yours in and it reads those rules every time, so you get the best help from the first question.
Get a key from your Anthropic account at console.anthropic.com. Pay-as-you-go; set your own monthly limit there.
Get a key from your OpenAI account at platform.openai.com. Pay-as-you-go; set your own monthly limit there.
Get a key from Google AI Studio at aistudio.google.com. Google offers a free tier to start.
Run a free model on your own machine with Ollama or LM Studio. No key, no bill, and nothing leaves your computer.
Good to know: a ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro subscription is separate from a key. A key is its own pay-as-you-go account, and you pay the AI company directly for what you use. We never charge for AI, never see your bill and never sit in the middle.
First Mate, Ask the book, the dictionary, imports, exports and the book preview all run on your own device. No request goes anywhere. The status line says "saved on this device" and means it.
Writers who want nothing to do with AI get the whole studio. There is no reduced version, and you can connect an AI later if you change your mind.
Shown connected to Claude. With ChatGPT, Gemini or a local model it looks and works the same.
Every AI is different, and most need careful instructions to be useful to a writer. Salt of the Page hands yours a full set of house rules before it answers anything. Whichever AI you connect, it gets the same instructions and behaves the same way.
What a question costs. You pay your AI company directly, by the request. With an everyday model like Claude Sonnet:
The promise, in plain words. The AI assists; you write. Your manuscript never trains an AI. AI is off until you connect yours, and it is turned on per feature, per book. It never changes your text directly: every suggestion arrives as something you accept or reject. You choose the provider, your key stays on your devices, and we never see your prompts or your AI bill.
The part other apps leave to you
Salt of the Page is a hybrid on purpose. Beside the manuscript sits a blog hub for every website you publish to, a newsletter that turns Logbook entries into email, and one calendar that holds the whole operation.
A bar switches between blogs, and + adds another. Each one keeps its own posts, ideas, site address, start date and posting days. Write, check, preview the post in your site's design, then publish with one explicit click. Nothing goes live without a preview.
Turn a Logbook entry into an issue, send it through your newsletter service, and keep the sign-up form on your site. Run one list per site or one list for all of them.
Signings, calls, deadlines, launches and trips sit next to every blog's posts, the 52-week blog plan and the To Do list. Filter by kind, or see the next 30 days as a list.
Blog Ideas
Blank calendars are where blogs go quiet. Blog Ideas lays every post your blog could carry along a dotted route: a stop each week, a post every Tuesday and Thursday, for 52 weeks. Pick a week below and see its sailing orders.
Every dot is a week. The seaplane marks this week, gold dots are being written and green ones are published. Pick a week to see just its posts.
This week’s two posts, stamped with the day and who’s writing it. Press Start writing and a draft opens in the blog hub with the title and notes filled in.
Not feeling this week’s pair? Deal one idea from anywhere on the route instead.
Each topic is an island. Bigger islands hold more ideas, and a green flag means one has been published. Pick one to see only its ideas.
An example plan for a novel set in the Caribbean
52 weeks · a post every Tuesday and Thursday
OpenIn progressPublishedYou are here
Islands Each topic is an island. Pick one to light up its weeks.
A good day's work
My Day greets you with today's words, a sunrise that fills as you write, your streak, the chapter you left off in and a spark to start from. The rest of the room is there when you want it.
Everywhere you write
Salt of the Page comes as a desktop app, a phone app and a web app, and they're all the same book. Write a page on your laptop, fix a line on your phone in line at the post office, check the calendar from any browser, and everything is already there when you sit back down. It works with no signal too, and catches up the moment you're back online.
Share a book with a co-writer, an editor or a spouse and you both see the same chapters, list and calendar, and who's online, without ever overwriting each other.
Everything, at a glance
How it stacks up
Most authors stitch three or four tools together. Here's how Salt of the Page compares with the apps they usually reach for.
| Salt of the Page | Scrivener | Atticus | Vellum | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $150 once, or $10 a month | $59.99 once per platform | $147 once | $199.99 to $249.99 once |
| Design the book and preview it on devices | YesPaperback, Kindle, iPhone, Android, iPad | PartlyCompile settings | Yes | Yes |
| Blogs for several websites | Yes | No | No | No |
| Newsletter | Yes | No | No | No |
| AI | YesOptional, your own AI, assists but never writes | NoNone | NoNone | NoNone |
Pricing
Two honest prices. No credits, no meters, no surprise renewals, and your writing is always yours to export.
Own it
$150once
The whole studio, yours to keep. Pay one time and write forever.
One payment. Every device you own, no extra seats.
Stay current
$10a month
Everything in Own it, plus every new feature the day it ships.
Billed monthly. We'll email you before anything renews.
Not sure yet? Write in it for 30 days. If it isn't the desk you hoped for, tell us and we'll refund you, and your manuscript leaves with you as Word, EPUB and a full backup.
Questions
No. AI is off by default for every book, and the studio is complete without it: First Mate, Ask the book, the dictionary, the book previews, imports and exports all run on your own device. If you never switch it on, you'll never see it.
No, and that's on purpose. Salt of the Page has no button that writes chapters. Once you connect your own AI, it's a tool to keep the creative juices flowing: it researches, brainstorms, answers questions about your own book and checks facts. Anything it suggests sits beside the page until you decide what to do with it. The writing is yours.
Connect the AI you already use. In Settings, pick Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini and paste a key from that company's website, or point the app at a free model running on your own computer with Ollama or LM Studio. Settings links you to the right page and checks the key works. The AI panel, the helper beside every text box and the blog idea generator then all run through it.
You pay the AI company directly for what you use, usually pennies a request (about 1¢ to tighten a paragraph with an everyday model) and a few dollars a month, and we never charge for AI or see your bill. A ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro subscription doesn't include a key; a key is a separate pay-as-you-go account.
On your device first, always. Every edit is written locally within two seconds, then synced to your other devices, so the desktop app, the phone app and the web all open to the same page. Chapter versions are kept for at least 90 days. You can download everything in one click at any time: Word, EPUB, Markdown and a ZIP with the manuscript, notes, Source of Truth, blog posts and ideas.
Yes. Salt of the Page comes as a desktop app for Mac, Windows and Linux, a phone app for iPhone and Android, and a web app for any browser. They're the same book in three places, kept in sync, so you can pick up wherever you left off.
Writing, saving, First Mate and the book preview all work with no internet. The status line tells you whether you're saved on this device or shared, and the shared copy catches up when you're back online. Research and publishing need a connection, for obvious reasons.
Yes. Import a Word file, a Google Doc, a PDF or pasted text. You'll see it split into chapters in a preview before anything is saved, and headings, italics, bold, scene breaks and footnotes survive the round trip back to Word.
Amazon has no public way for any app to upload a book for you, so no app can. Salt of the Page makes the files KDP asks for, a validated EPUB and a print-ready PDF interior with the right margins and gutter, and walks you through the upload with a guide that also covers IngramSpark, Draft2Digital, Apple, Kobo and Barnes & Noble.
Each blog has its own site address, posting days and schedule. Posts are previewed in your site's design and published with one explicit click, never automatically. Newsletters send through a newsletter service you connect in Settings, and a sign-up form goes on your site. Analytics uses a privacy-friendly counter with exact numbers and no cookie banner.
Own it is the whole studio as it stands today, yours forever, with fixes and security updates for that version. Stay current adds every new feature the day it ships, for as long as you subscribe, and you can cancel from Settings in one click. If you bought it and later want the updates, add the plan any time.
Yes. A shared workspace syncs chapters, ideas, tasks and the calendar between you, shows who's online, and merges piece by piece so two people on different things never overwrite each other. If you both change the same chapter at once, the newer edit wins and the other is kept in that chapter's history.
