Write the Same Book at the Same Time.

Five Roles, per Book or per Chapter

• Owner: the only one who can invite people, change roles, remove people or delete the project.
• Co-author: edits everything, as you do.
• Editor: comments and suggests changes, which wait until someone who may edit accepts them.
• Commenter: reads and comments.
• Viewer: reads.

You invite by email and the invite waits in Shiro until that address signs in, for up to 14 days. Any chapter can have its own role, so a friend can write the sailing chapter and only read the rest, or a surgeon can comment on the one chapter set in an operating theatre.

A project takes up to 5 co-authors and editors, and up to 25 viewers and commenters. Viewers and commenters can be invited on any plan. Co-authors and editors need a paid plan on the owner’s account, though they themselves don’t.

Readers outside the project are a different matter. For a round of feedback from people with no account, use a beta reader link.

On the Page Together

Open a scene someone else is in and you see their caret and their typing as it happens. A list shows who else is in the book and where: Priya, writing in The Ferry. Edits merge character by character, so nobody ends up with a conflict copy to sort through.

Watching someone delete your favourite sentence in real time is an experience, and not everyone wants it. The owner can switch live editing off, and changes then come in when a scene is saved.

You can each write in the desktop app or the web app, whichever suits. A copy of a cloud project stays cached on each device you sign in on.

Who Wrote What

Turn on Who wrote and the page shows the last 7 days of edits by person, yours included if you like, with a name on each stretch of text. The People list counts words per person for the whole book, and the authorship report of a cloud book carries the same split.

It sits alongside the record of how text arrived. A pasted paragraph, or one accepted from Shiro, keeps that origin and also says who brought it in. Text from before the project moved to the cloud is marked as such. Project history goes back 90 days on a paid plan, at one version per 10 minutes, so a bad afternoon can be undone.

The Limits

It takes a cloud project. A local folder can’t be shared, so you move it to the cloud first. Cloud projects aren’t encrypted end to end: the server reads them for history, webhooks and agents.

Merging isn’t agreement. Rewrite the same sentence at the same moment and you’ll get both rewrites woven together, with no prompt to choose. There are no branches either, so everyone is working on the one text.

Names follow accounts. The record knows whose account typed a passage. It doesn’t know whose idea it was, and if you share a login, it will believe whatever the login says.

Downloading drops it. Download as vault leaves the who-wrote-what record behind, because local folders don’t hold it.

It settles nothing. A word count per person makes a poor royalty split, as anyone who wrote the short, good chapter will tell you. Whose name goes first and who gets what are for a conversation, and preferably a contract.

The Questions People Ask

Does my co-author have to pay?

No. Inviting co-authors and editors comes with a paid plan on the owner’s side. Everyone invited needs only a free Shiro account.

Can we work on different computers?

Yes. Shiro runs on Mac, Windows and Linux, and a cloud project also opens in the web app, so one of you can write in a browser.

Can an editor change my text?

No. An editor comments and suggests. Suggestions wait as proposals until someone who may edit accepts them.

Can someone co-write one chapter and only read the rest?

Yes. Each person has a role for the book, and any chapter can have a different one. The role follows the chapter if you rename or move it.