Every book collects other people eventually. A writing partner. An editor with opinions. The friend who reads everything first. And the moment someone else touches a manuscript, one question decides whether collaboration is a gift or a disaster: whose version is this?
Charc’s whole design for collaboration is a set of answers to that question — a different one for each kind of collaborator.
Inviting someone
Share opens from the top-right of the Write tab. Invite by email — they join whether or not they have a Charc account yet, and people who do also see the invitation waiting in their own project list. The panel shows your team against your plan’s limits; free covers one coauthor, two editors, and five alpha readers.
The three roles
The role you pick at invite time is the answer to the whose-version question:
Coauthor — edits your manuscript directly. Full write access to scenes, acts, and structure. This is for a true writing partner: there is one book, and you’re both writing it.
Editor — gets their own private copy to revise, and nothing they do lands in your draft until you adopt it. By default they can’t restructure your acts and scenes, unless you grant that separately. Your book stays yours; their opinion of it lives beside it.
Alpha reader — reads. They can leave scene notes and overall reactions in the Feedback panel, and they cannot change a word.
Writing at the same time
With a coauthor in the book, you can see who’s in the project and which scene they’re in, each in their own color — pick yours in the share panel. Their words appear as they type them.
The interesting problem is two people in one scene, and Charc resolves it with a scene lock: whoever starts typing claims the scene, and everyone else sees it faded and read-only until they’re done. No merge conflicts, no overwritten paragraphs — the unit of ownership is the scene, which is small enough to share a chapter and large enough to finish a thought. The lock releases on its own after a minute of quiet, so a forgotten tab never holds a scene hostage.
Comments
Anyone with access can highlight a passage and leave a note in the margin. Comments show up for collaborators immediately, and they work on an editor’s separate copy as well as on the main manuscript — so a margin conversation can happen about either version.
Their copy, beside yours
An editor’s copy appears in the Drafting sidebar, next to your working draft and your automatic saves. Open it to read their version whole, compare it against yours line by line, and — when theirs is the one you want — adopt it. Until that moment, adoption is the only door between their work and yours.
If a collaborator leaves, their copy is kept for thirty days, and re-inviting them picks up where it stopped.
Sharing a scene with someone who has no account
Not everyone who should read your work should be on your team. Right-click a scene, choose Share scene, and you get a read-only link anyone can open in a browser — no Charc account, no sign-in.
The link is a snapshot of the scene as it stands, not a live window into your draft, and you decide how long it lives: seven days, thirty, ninety, or until you revoke it. Images can come along or stay out.
The changes feed
The clock icon in the top-right opens a feed of what’s been edited and by whom, split between manuscript changes and structural ones, with a badge for what you haven’t seen. With a team in the book, it’s the morning answer to “what happened while I was gone” — and it pairs with the version safety net from post six: automatic saves and snapshots mean a collaborator’s change is never the only copy of what came before it.
Roles, limits, and every panel here are documented in the Collaboration reference. One post left in this series — and it’s for the book you’ve already written somewhere else.