Files and import.
A manuscript that lives inside someone else's server is only yours while the subscription lasts and the connection holds. Draftline keeps your book as a single file on your own disk, in a format you can open in ten years, and the application never needs the internet to open it, save it, or check it.
Local first.
The book is a `.draftline` file, which is a zip archive of HTML chapters and JSON metadata, and you can save it in any folder your cloud already syncs. Before every save Draftline writes a numbered backup beside the file and keeps the last ten, and inside the file it keeps a history of chapter snapshots, recorded ten minutes after you stop editing a chapter and again immediately before and after any accepted AI pass, so an earlier version of a chapter is always there to compare against. There are no Draftline servers, the app has no telemetry, and nothing in it phones home.
Import.
If you are fifty thousand words into a book somewhere else, you do not paste it in chapter by chapter. Draftline imports EPUB and DOCX, which between them cover what Word, Google Docs, Scrivener, and every e-book tool export, and rebuilds the manuscript on the way in: headings become chapters, a title page or dedication is routed to front matter and an afterword to back matter, and a horizontal rule between scenes becomes the ⁂ scene break. Anything the importer had to skip or truncate is listed as a warning before you commit.
Going the other way.
EPUB for storefronts, DOCX for an editor who works in track changes, and a print-ready PDF with trim size, bleed, crop marks and mirrored margins — the part most manuscript tools leave to a typesetter. It has grown into its own thing: you describe an edition of the book once, with its cover art, its ISBNs and its typesetting, and every export after that is a button rather than a dialog full of guesses.
Front matter, scene breaks, and chapter headings survive every format, because they are structure in the file rather than formatting on the page.
Export and editions →Off-grid approved.
Whether the wifi is flaky, absent, or switched off on purpose, the manuscript is on your disk and stays there.