Where Verkilo came from

Howdy, I’m Ben Wilson. I am an independent author. I’ve published seven novels through Merovex Press over the past dozen years. I built Verkilo because nothing else would let me write the way I needed to write.

People ask me why I built my own manuscript tool when there are so many already out there. They assume there’s some grand vision behind it. There isn’t. I write series, I finish my own books, and I wanted to do both on the computer I own.

What I tried

I’d tried all of them. Scrivener came the closest, and it’s the reason I bought that Mac. In fact, it’s the reason my house has been a Mac house since 2007. I wrote four novels in it. Scrivener organizes one book at a time. That’s what it set out to do, and it does it well. It just isn’t the shape of the work I do.

Google Docs and Atticus keep the manuscript on someone else’s server. That’s how they’re built. It also means the network is part of the deal, and I don’t want a morning’s work depending on an outage I can’t see coming.

Obsidian was better than either. It’s a toolkit. With enough plugins wired together I could get professionally formatted output, and I did. Then I was spending my evenings maintaining the rig. I had to daisy-chain solutions with Scrivener, but I want an all-in-one solution.

Writing in series

I don’t write one book. I write series. The characters, relationships, and world don’t reset when a volume ends. I needed one project file that holds the whole series, so book four can see what book one established. I needed the software to track continuity instead of asking me to carry it across four manuscripts and hope I got it right. And I needed a world notebook with enough texture to be worth opening.

I wanted help with line editing too. Not a machine that writes my books. A second set of eyes for the repeated word, the tense that slipped, the paragraph I’ve read too many times to read straight. I used to use Pro Writing Aid for that, but it would take me hours to get a book’s final polish done.

Setting type

I set type in high school, back when it was photographic and physical. You learn what a well-made page looks like and how much work goes into one.

Most authors use three programs to publish a book. Write in the first, export, re-import somewhere else to build the interior, then a third for the cover. Every hand-off is a chance to lose your formatting, and there’s a font embedding problem waiting for you at the printer. I wanted to go from manuscript to finished interior to finished cover without leaving the application. Trim sizes, drop caps, running heads, recto and verso starts, and a PDF I trust when I upload it.

The breaking point

I wanted to move from Mac to Linux, which is where I prefer to work. Scrivener wasn’t going anywhere near Linux. I’d bought a whole computer, thirteen years earlier, to run one program, and now that program was the reason I couldn’t leave.

That was it. Over Christmas 2022 I started Verkilo as an internal project, just for me.

What it is

Verkilo takes the desktop as seriously as Scrivener does, and takes finishing the book as seriously as Atticus does. Novel writing with series continuity, line editing, interior design, and cover design, in one application. Mac, Windows, and Linux, because a writing tool has no business choosing your hardware for you. Linux is where I write, and that’s why I started building. You don’t have to care about that part.

Your manuscript is a file on your own disk. The application runs with the network unplugged.

Desktop first in 2026 sounds like nostalgia. There’s no browser tab and no phone app. What you get for that is an account that can’t lock you out and an outage that can’t stop your morning pages.

Three tries

That Christmas start was the third time I built this thing. The first was barely an app at all, a Markdown compiler similar to Kitabu that used Pandoc to turn plain text files into finished books. It worked, but it was a pipeline, not a place to write. The second was a real attempt at an application, started in 2019. I got far enough to learn everything that was wrong with my approach before it stalled out. It was Internet-first. This one I began with all of that behind me. It’s the first that actually stuck, and I wrote my last three novels in it.

This is 1.0 because it’s the first time I’ve made it available to you as my fellow author. The name is old and the idea is older. In my heart, it will always be version 3.0.

Who’s building it

I’ve been building software for a living since 1999, developer first, then technology manager. I have more than twenty-five years of shipping systems and keeping them alive long after launch. I’ve also been writing novels for over a decade. That combination is the point, not a contradiction I need to explain away. In 2025 I reached a fork in the road where I could focus on writing and Verkilo full time. I took it, and here we are.

I’ve got no patience for the guy who writes one book, then spends the next five years selling tools to writers instead of writing anything else. Verkilo isn’t that. Every book I write and publish from here forward comes out of Verkilo. If it ever slows me down, I’m the first one who pays for it, which is the only reason to trust a tool like this. It’s closer to Basecamp than to most software built for writers. 37signals still runs their whole business on their own product. I still run my career on mine.

If that’s your story too, Verkilo might be worth a look. I’m still building it, still improving it, and that’s not going to change.

— Ben