[kazinator]

Out of those people, the only ones with money to blow on software are lawyers.

Most of your target audience does not grok branching, merging, diffs and pull requests.

Google Docs allows for collaborative editing and is free to use. Collaborative as in, as you edit, your collaborators' cursors appear, labeled by their names, and you see their edits in real time in the same document.

Users who know about this are not going to go to diffs, pull requests and merges; they simply don't know the computer science behind why those things would be advantageous.

Texts which are not code are very difficult to branch and merge because you can't just test them to see whether they work. E.g. if two authors take a partially written novel, and continue it in different ways, good luck merging it into one cohesive whole whose plot makes sense. Maybe with the help of AI it could be pulled off; it could tell you things like why has the chsaracter of Dwight re-appeared in chapter 7, after being killed in chapter 5.