Novelist
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NovelistalphaWhere your story comes first
Manuscript software for writers.
Designed to help writers keep the full scope of their work in view while they draft, revise, and review.
Novelist is currently in private alpha. Reserve an account and we will let you know when your Studio access is ready.
Creating a novel means keeping the story moving while the manuscript stays readable, each character's timeline remains visible, and every review change stays close enough to accept, reject, or rethink. Novelist keeps those threads present through every iteration of your ideas.
Where did that file go? Rather than managing several small documents, such as one for each chapter or scene, Novelist was carefully engineered to be able to open and display your entire manuscript at once, while remaining fast, even if it's hundreds of thousands of words long. You can quickly jump to any location and edit the text there easily without being slowed down by file management, allowing you to stay in your creative flow.
Point Anchors are like bookmarks for important events in your manuscript. You can create a collection of anchors in order to craft a timeline. Timelines allow you to get a bird's eye view of your plot threads, character development, story arcs, worldbuilding lore, editing tasks, and any other custom events you may want to manage. Use anchors for quick navigation while you keep the big picture in mind. By organzing the logic of your manuscript into timelines you're able to pick one thread at a time to work in without losing track of the whole story.
Because Novelist is designed to keep you from being slowed down by managing windows, documents, and notes, it autosaves your working draft for you. However, when you reach a acceptable stopping point or a major milestone, you can create a snapshot of your work. A snapshot backs up your work locally, which you can later restore and compare with your working draft
Novelist was designed with fast navigation in mind while helping you maintain the big picture context of your work. Use the minimap scroller to see an exact preview of several pages near where you're working and to quickly scroll to where you need to go. It can be resized to your liking, or hidden entirely if you don't need it. It's up to you.
What changes did I just make and where did I make them? The review mode allows you to see diffs of your text in red (for deletions) and green (for additions) while you edit. When you enter review mode, Novelist will create a separate snapshot so you can test an idea without changing important work in your working draft. This is essential for prototyping ideas and edits before deciding if you want to keep them. It's also useful when working with reviewers, editors, and publishers. They can make suggestions as markup, and vice versa, without modifying your working draft,and you and they can accept or reject them, as needed, edit by edit.
Forget about complex cloud syncing configurations. With Novelist, your work is always backed up and available on all your devices. If you have more than once device, simply open Novelist on it, sign in, and all of your manuscripts, snapshots, timelines, and anchors, will be automatically synced. Make an edit on one device, and it'll immediately appear on the other device. This allows you to switch between your desktop, your laptop or tablet, and your phone without any worrying that your manuscript may be out of date across devices. After all, when you have an idea, you want to get it into the app right away!
Start with one manuscript for free, explore the complete writing workflow, and build your book without losing track of the threads that make it yours. Reserve your account during the private alpha to request access.