Where we came from.

Hey there, I’m Ben Wilson. I write novels, seven of them so far, published through Merovex Press, and 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 built Verkilo because I was tired of choosing between tools that didn’t respect my data, tools that were a pile of Lego bricks I had to assemble myself, and tools that trapped me on an operating system I didn’t want to use.

I’d tried all of them. Google Docs and Atticus both worked, but they held my manuscripts hostage on someone else’s servers. I don’t write books so a platform can own them. Obsidian was better. I could get professionally formatted output if I was willing to wire together enough plugins, but at some point you’re not writing anymore, you’re maintaining infrastructure.

Then there was Scrivener. Scrivener actually worked. It’s the reason I bought a Mac back in 2009 in the first place. But over the years it picked up the same disease Word has: too many features, too many menus, too much software standing between me and the page.

The breaking point came when I wanted to move from Mac to Linux, which is where I actually prefer to work. Scrivener wasn’t going anywhere near Linux. I’d bought a whole computer, fifteen years earlier, just to use one program, and now that program was the reason I couldn’t leave.

That was it. I needed something cross-platform, something that didn’t lock my work in someone else’s cloud, and something that could use AI the right way, not to write my books for me, but to help me catch continuity errors and tighten my line editing the way a good second set of eyes would. I looked, and nothing like that existed. So I built it.

I wrote Verkilo for myself first. I’m an author before anything else, and I needed a tool that worked the way I work. But somewhere in the building of it, I started to notice it wasn’t just solving my problem. Other writers have the same three complaints I had: their data isn’t really theirs, their tools are either bloated or held together with duct tape, and they can’t work on the machine they want to work on.

If that’s your story too, Verkilo might be worth a look. I’m still building it, still improving it, and I still write every book I publish using it myself. That’s not going to change.

— Ben