I was going to link to a post about how I have all my books for a series in one LibreOffice Writer file, but when I went looking I couldn’t find one. I still feel like it’s here somewhere, but since I can’t find it, it might as well not exist. So here’s a substitute.
The primary way I’ve used to find information I might need that’s in a previous book in a series isn’t a series bible. It’s a document that contains the text of every book and story I’ve written in that series. Yes, the file size is large—these documents for each series have a lot of words in them! One of them has almost one million words. But LibreOffice Writer doesn’t give me any trouble with it, and when I need to know something, I just search and find it.
Well, actually, to be exact, I make an EPUB from that file and I search it in Calibre.
Calibre’s EPUB viewer has some really powerful search abilities.
The type of search I use most often is:
Nearby words – Searches for whole words that are near each other. So for example, the search calibre cool will match places where the words calibre and cool occur within sixty characters of each other. To change the number of characters add the new number to the end of the list of words. For instance, calibre cool awesome 120 will match places where the three words occur within 120 characters of each other. Note that punctuation and accents are not ignored for these searches.
(Calibre User Manual, https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/viewer.html#id6, accessed 7/30/2025)
This is how I find what I want when I need it, straight from the source documents (even if it takes a while and a little extra reading). But it gives me context. And I try to copy anything out that I might need to reference later into my series notes file so I don’t have to look it up again.
That’s it. That’s my “series bible” substitute.