Writers, especially novelists, often face challenges in maintaining consistency in their manuscripts. This includes keeping track of character details, plot points, and timelines across multiple chapters. Inconsistencies such as changing a character's eye color or mentioning a dead character can detract from the quality of the work and require significant effort to correct manually.
Pain Points
- Manual tracking of character details and plot points is time-consuming and error-prone.
- Inconsistencies in manuscripts can lead to a poor reader experience.
- Writers need to spend additional time reviewing and correcting errors instead of focusing on creative writing.
- Lack of tools to automatically detect and correct continuity errors in long manuscripts.
I'm a developer who writes fiction as a hobby. About 18 months ago, I was 60,000 words into a novel and realized I'd changed a character's eye color between chapters 3 and 18. Then I found a dead character mentioned casually in chapter 22. That's when I thought: "I'm a developer. I should be able to build something to catch this." That turned into Writers Studio — a native macOS app that uses AI to read your manuscript and extract structured data (character profiles, locations, timeline events), then checks continuity across chapters. **What I learned building this solo:** * SwiftData performance degrades hard after \~10K entities (had to implement pagination and lazy loading) * Structuring AI responses with JSON schemas is 10x more reliable than free-text parsing * Supporting 4 AI providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Ollama) meant building an abstraction layer that took 2 months alone * The MAS submission process is... a journey. Especially with AI features and StoreKit 2. **Where I am now:** * In public beta with a few serious testers * Pre-sale launched yesterday: $39-79 lifetime * Goal: 50 sales in 30 days to validate demand * Biggest challenge: marketing as a solo dev who hates marketing [https://litestep.com/writers-studio/](https://litestep.com/writers-studio/) **Questions for other solo devs:** * How do you handle marketing when you just want to code? * Anyone else supporting multiple AI providers? How'd you structure it? * What's your take on lifetime vs. subscription for dev tools? Feel free to ask me any questions I'm working a similar version for the Mac App Store (MAS) that will be free to download and use but will require a basic or premium subscription to access AI providers. Ollama will be free.
A native macOS app that uses AI to read your manuscript and extract structured data (character profiles, locations, timeline events), then checks continuity across chapters.