The Foundry — FAQ

LATRAME's long-form writing studio — for writing a whole book (chapters, scenes, characters, narrative threads), not just short social-style scenes. All in your browser, nothing to install.

A binder to organize chapters and scenes, a private Codex for your character/place sheets and narrative threads, a research space for images/notes/links, exporting your book as EPUB/PDF (plus a format designed for submitting to a publisher or agent), and a full downloadable backup anytime.

Not for pioneers. The first 500 LATRAME creators get the studio free, forever — no card, no expiry, including whatever comes later. The number of remaining seats is shown on the Pioneers page.

No — and avoiding exactly that is the point. Many authors export to Word to run a checker there, and end up with two versions of their book: the one in the writing software, which goes stale, and the one in Word, where the corrections keep happening.

The checking lives here, in the workshop, on your current text: a spellchecker in the language of your manuscript, language rules that tell you WHY (and that you can silence), consistency across the whole book — the words you spell two different ways — and your style sheet, which remembers your decisions.

Nothing is ever rewritten for you: it underlines, you decide. And DOCX is still there when you need it — as a file you generate, not a second version to maintain.

Not once they have an entry in your Codex: the checker knows your book's names and aliases. For everything else, one click keeps a word — for this book only, or for all your books.

And it works the other way round: a word that looks like one of your Codex names without being one earns a “did you mean…?”. An ordinary checker can't do that — it doesn't know who your characters are.

No. None. It's a dictionary and a list of hand-written rules, which can be read and corrected. That's deliberate: a rule explains itself and gives the same answer twice, and about language you need to know why, not to obey.

Your text never leaves the workshop to be checked.

No, never. Plenty of people come just to write. You can keep your book to yourself and export it anytime, publish a simple showcase page with no price, or publish nothing at all. Nothing forces you to put a book up for sale.

Selling is optional. For a book to actually be buyable, four things must be true at once: it's marked "finished", you've set a price and switched it to "for sale", your public page is published, and your Stripe account is active (that's what collects payment — the money goes straight to you). Markers at the top of the "Public page & shop settings" tab show at a glance what's left to do. Once everything's green, your book appears on your author page AND in The Reading Room.

LATRAME's public bookshop — the multi-author catalogue where readers discover books for sale. As soon as your book is for sale and your page is published, it shows up there, in addition to your author page. It's the main way to get found by new readers.

Your buyer gets a frozen edition: they keep the version as it was at the moment of purchase. Your edits only reach them the day you explicitly publish an edition update (they're then notified by email). So you can polish your text freely, without what they bought changing under their eyes.

Interested readers can join a "notify me" list on your page. They get a confirmation when they sign up, then a single "it's out" email — which YOU trigger when you're ready. The list is then erased. You only ever see the number of sign-ups, never the raw list, and it's never public.

That's what we promised them under the field: one email, no newsletter. For a list you keep and can take with you, see the next question.

Yes, and it's separate from "notify me". Your public page carries a "Get the news" block, and under each upcoming book there's an unticked box, "I'd also like news from the author". Readers who tick it agree that YOU may write to them: you see their addresses, and you download the list as a file from "Your storefront at a glance".

It's yours. Nothing stops you from taking it to the mailing tool of your choice — the file holds one unsubscribe link per reader, to drop into your own mailings. Two things to know: we collect no first name, only the address; and if you import the list elsewhere, that tool's unsubscribe becomes the one that counts. You can close the list any time under "Public page & shop settings".

Yes. Invite your co-authors by their username, one at a time: everyone gets equal, shared access to the book, you can see who's writing alongside you in real time, and you can leave each other Sticky Notes and anchored highlights right in the text.

French, English, or Spanish, chosen per book — typography (quotes, dashes) adapts automatically to your text's language.

No. You can import a Word file (.docx) or plain text (.txt) directly: every major heading becomes a chapter, with a review screen to check and adjust before anything is saved.

From Scrivener it takes two steps: Compile → Microsoft Word (.docx), then import that file here. Your chapter breaks come with it, and you review them before anything is kept. Any tool that can export to Word comes through the same door.

Autosave on every scene as you write. You can also export a full backup (.json) of your entire book — text, Codex, research — anytime, to keep your own copy outside LATRAME.

Halfway — and that half protects what matters most: the typing you're doing right now.

The open scene keeps a local copy on your device at every keystroke, before the save even tries the network. If the save fails for lack of connection, the draft stays on your device and picks itself back up as soon as the network returns. A dropout mid-chapter loses nothing of what you're typing.

What it does not do: open a book or move around the studio offline. For that, you need a connection.