The draft is in Word. The plan is in a spreadsheet. The feedback is in fourteen email threads.
Bonafor puts the whole making of a book in one place: the writing, the editing, the readers, the schedule, and the facts you have to keep straight. So the next step is always obvious, and the book actually gets finished.
Being built now, in the open, by one person. Nothing to try yet, and no date to promise.
What it covers
The whole book, not just the writing.
Plan and structure
Beat sheets and story structures that link to the actual scenes, so the outline and the draft stop drifting apart, and you can see what is planned but not yet written.
Drafting
A quiet editor that never interrupts. Typing never waits on the network, history is complete, and you can find a sentence you deleted two drafts ago.
Editing and review
An editor's pass comes back as decisions, not ten thousand red marks: sorted, grouped, with a clean view when you just want to read the result. Your editor can keep working in Word.
Beta and ARC readers
Send a link, not a file. See who is reading, where they stopped, and what confused them, without the spreadsheet and the chased-up group chat.
The production pipeline
Edits, cover, formatting, launch: what waits on what, with a warning before a dependency bites instead of after. The print cover needs a final page count, and the plan knows it.
The backlist
One approved version of every blurb, category and retailer link. Release book seven and see exactly what books one to six now need.
And everyone you invite is free. Your editor, your beta readers, your coauthor: every role, forever. No seats.
How it behaves
Seven principles, written down before the code.
- Collaboration is assumed, not added. Nothing ships single-player.
- Nothing is ever destructive. Complete history, one-click restore, and even rejected edits are kept.
- Opinionated, but flexible. Your content is yours to shape; the model underneath is not a build-your-own kit.
- Doors both ways. Every part imports and exports. A one-way feature is unfinished.
- Fewer steps than the way you do it now. Counted, written down, and defended.
- Built for the device each person actually holds. You at a desk, your readers on their phones, your editor in Word.
- Starting is the easiest thing in the product. Nothing required at signup that can be asked later.
Your words
Your words are your words.
The commitments, stated so they can be checked: your work is never trained on, never sold, and never sent anywhere without your permission, given per book, revocable in one click, and logged where you can see it. Nothing arrives switched on. Everything that touches your words is opt-in, always. And you can take all of it out at any time, whatever your billing status. We will not build your replacement out of your own sentences.
What you will not find here is the slogan “no AI, ever.” Not because we are hedging. A promise that cannot be pinned down cannot be kept or broken, and “AI” means a different thing to every person who says it, and will mean something else again in five years. We would rather make specific promises you can hold us to than a comforting one that might quietly turn out to be worthless.
And the honest picture of how this gets made: AI coding tools are helping build Bonafor, directed by twenty-plus years of software development experience, and the tools that build it are never connected to your work. That is a written rule of the project, not a habit. The app itself has no AI in it, and none will be added unless how these systems are trained and used changes in ways we would be willing to defend in writing. If that day ever comes, it arrives as a choice you make, per book, switched off until you switch it on.
The name
Why “Bonafor”?
Around 1250, Bonaventure of Paris wrote down that a book is made by four different jobs, and only one of them is the author. His word for that one, auctor, is where “author” comes from. Bonafor is named for the man who first wrote down that a book is never made alone.
Where this stands
Pre-launch, one person, no date.
Bonafor is being designed by one person, the whole application on paper before the first line of code, so nothing about it is an accident. There is no launch date, and we will not invent one. When there is something to try, it will start free, without a card. And the design commits to this from day one: your export is complete, automatic, and usable without us.
The one thing you can do today
Help decide what this becomes.
The most useful thing right now is not your email address. It is five minutes of truth about how you actually make your books. Fiction, nonfiction, academic, one book or twenty, published or not.
No sign-in. Every question optional. Your answers are used for this research only, never shared and never sold. The email field at the end is genuinely optional.