🪡 Improvements

• Scroll with your keyboard: Page Up/Down, Home, End and the arrow keys now move you through your manuscript, lists and dialogs anywhere in Novlr.

• Notes on mobile: the formatting bar now rides above your keyboard, so bold and italic are always within reach.

• Delete warnings are now clearer that it's permanent.

🪲 Bug Fixes

• Changing your email address in Account settings now updates your billing and Novlr emails at the same time, so everything follows you to your new inbox. It also handles changes in upper/lowercase better.

• Improved pluralising so the app doesn't say things like "Write 1 words this week."

• The Community Stat on Writing Progress emails is fixed and showing correctly.

⚡ Performance

• Notes now save as you type rather than waiting for a pause, and the save status under each note is clearer about where things stand.

• Writing Progress Email calculations are now much lighter on the backend.

💳 Billing & Subscriptions

• Upgrades and billing changes now apply to your account more reliably right after checkout, and if one needs a moment longer, we'll say so.

• Your next billing date is now shown on your account page.

• Starter and Studio users now have a way to upgrade straight to Lifetime.

🧹 Behind the Scenes

• The What's New link now takes you straight to the changelog rather than the old updates page.

• Deleted some old code as part of ongoing cleanup.

🪡 Improvements

• Planning notes fixed to show both the project and section where linked.

• Notes now save as you type rather than waiting for a pause, and the save status under each note is clearer about where things stand.

🪡 Improvements

• Share pages are tidier; your synopsis appears once rather than twice when it's already on the cover, and your "show cover and synopsis" preference now carries through to link previews when you paste a share link into social media or chat.

• Novlr Sites has a nicer demo/default site.

• RTF and Scrivener imports now better distinguish the line wrapping inside the file itself from the line breaks you intended, so your paragraphs arrive the way you wrote them.

• Search now looks inside your synopsis too, so you can find a project by what it's about.

🪲 Bug Fixes

• Very large manuscripts are now divided between paragraphs when imported, rather than sometimes splitting mid-sentence.

• Share links now always show your current synopsis, picked up from wherever you've written it.

• Pulling a book from your Novlr library into your Novlr Sites now brings your synopsis across with it.

🪡 Improvements

• Copy and paste from version history. You can now select and copy text directly from an earlier version while previewing it, then paste it back into your current draft.

• Your website's social media icons are now the real logos for each platform, including X, Threads, Goodreads, Substack, and Bluesky.

🪲 Bug Fixes

• Splitting a chapter into two used to briefly flash a blank white screen. That's fixed, so the transition is now seamless.

• Fixed the Pricing, Themes, and FAQ links on the Novlr Sites menu, which were leading to page-not-found errors.

💳 Billing & Subscriptions

• Novlr Sites now appears on the novlr.org pricing page, both in the plan cards and the full feature comparison, so you can see it's included with Studio ($6/month or $60/year on other plans).

• Clearer wording in the Sites editor and FAQ about what upgrading unlocks.

🧹 Behind the Scenes

• We merged the "Planning" and "Outline" note types into one - Planning - in preparation for the new planning tool.

🪡 Improvements

• Retired author websites now show a friendly notice instead of just going blank, with a link to set up a new site on Novlr Sites.

🪲 Bug Fixes

• Weekly Writing Progress emails now reach addresses with a "+" in them (e.g. name+tag@gmail.com).

• Fixed a versions bug stopping smart pruning over time (so you don't get thousands of versions with almost no change).

🔒 Reliability & Security

• We tightened how certain internal database functions are called behind the scenes.

🧹 Behind the Scenes

• We deleted old code we used to migrate accounts from the previous version of Novlr.

🪡 Improvements

• Every note now shows its word count: on notebook cards, in the writing screen's notes panel, and in a new sortable "Words" column in the Note Library. These are not counted toward your project word count. A live count now runs in the note editor's footer as you type, bottom left, beside the save status.

🪲 Bug Fixes

• Outline notes created from the Notebook or Note Library used to stay hidden in the editor's notes panel because they weren't linked to a chapter or section. They now show up alongside your other notes.

• The formatting bar (bold, italic, and more) is now fully tappable when editing notes on your phone. Taps no longer land on the text behind it.

• Synopses were missing from project cards, and where a project had more than one, the oldest was shown instead of the newest. Cards now reliably show your latest synopsis.

• Progress emails will more reliably arrive due to some behind the scenes optimisation.

🔒 Reliability & Security

• Private comments stay private on shared links. Comments, proofreader suggestions, and older imported annotations are all stripped from shared links now.

• Author websites are are more secure.

🪲 Bug Fixes

• Fixed an error that blocked subscriptions to Novlr Sites

🪡 Improvements

• Version history now works on your phone and tablet. You can open a document's version history, scroll back through earlier versions, preview them, and restore, all from a mobile or tablet screen. Until now this was only available on larger screens.

🪲 Bug Fixes

• Words in notes stay where you put them. We fixed a rare but frustrating bug where typing in the middle of a note could send your new words to the bottom of the page, causing an error. Your cursor and your words now stay exactly where they belong.

• Note word counts improved. Notes now keep an accurate word count however they are written or imported, and we are refreshing the counts on your older notes too.

• Your project word count shows up first time. Opening a project straight from a bookmark or a new tab sometimes flashed "0 words" until you visited your projects list. Your real total now loads immediately.

• Your Monday progress email is back. We rebuilt the engine that gathers everyone's weekly writing, so your Monday progress email arrives reliably as Novlr grows.

✨ New Features

• Weekly Writing Progress emails are here. Every Monday you'll get a recap of your week's writing: words written, your streak, goals, and the project you worked on most. You can turn it off or adjust it any time in your notification settings.

🚀 Big Releases

• Version History, improved.

  • Save a version any time, and name it (like "Draft one complete"). Versions you save are kept for good.

  • "Load more" lets you browse all the way back through your writing history, not just the most recent changes.

  • Big rewrites are now flagged, so the turning points in your draft are easy to find.

  • A clearer timeline: every change from the last 24 hours, then hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly snapshots, so you always have milestones to return to.

🧹Behind the Scenes

• We’ve released a small infrastructure update to start testing writing progress emails

🪲 Bug Fixes

• The proofreader got a tune-up. Suggestions now land in exactly the right place (no more highlights drifting mid-sentence), adding a word to your dictionary immediately re-checks the page, and old suggestions clean themselves up properly after edits. Fewer false alarms, tidier margins.

• No more surprise formatting while you type. A few of you noticed that typing certain characters (like backticks or a # at the start of a line) could suddenly change your font or turn a line into a heading — that's fixed, so your formatting stays exactly as you typed it.

🪡 Improvements

• Sharing looks better. Shared chapter links now show the chapter's actual title in previews (in messages, social posts and the like), and outdated links now land on a friendly explanation page instead of an error.

🧹 Behind the Scenes

• A round of behind-the-scenes improvements to keep everything fast and dependable.

🪡 Improvements

• Searching the Reading Room now pages through all matching posts instead of stopping at the first 30.

• Author Sites: custom icons for custom links. Adding a custom URL to your site's social links? You can now pick from 14 icons (newsletter, podcast, shop, coffee, book and more) instead of the default globe.

🔒 Reliability & Security

• Writing Tips and Publishing Advice in Studio are now served from our new backend engine, so they load reliably and stay in sync with the Reading Room.

🧹 Behind the Scenes

• We've updated our Terms of Service to cover Novlr Sites.

⚡ Performance

• The Note Library is now much faster and more reliable. Notes appear almost instantly when you open your library, however many or few you have, and searching and filtering your notes is snappier too.

• Faster loading across the app. Your projects list, your dashboard's "Resume Writing" shortcut, and search results all load noticeably quicker.

🔒 Reliability & Security

• Smoother writing on slow connections. If your internet is having a bad day, Novlr now copes much more gracefully while loading, and if something does need a retry, you'll see a clearer, friendlier message about what's happening.

🪲 Bug Fixes

• Proof Reader is back and more stable. Proof Reader had been failing under heavy use as more writers joined Novlr — that's fixed, so it now works reliably no matter how many people are using it at once.

🪡 Improvements

• Better support if you change your email. Your account now keeps a note of previous email addresses when you update yours, which means our support team can find and help you faster if you ever get locked out or forget which address you signed up with.

🧹 Behind the Scenes

• Behind-the-scenes improvements to keep Novlr fast, tidy, and secure as more writers join us.

Billing & subscriptions

• A chance to upgrade before picking your active projects. If you downgrade, or log back in having previously been on a paid plan, you'll now get the option to upgrade again before you're asked to choose your 2 active projects.

Roadmap

• A fix to how single sign-on connects to our roadmap tool means you can now comment on and add feature requests without being sent in a log in loop.

Behind the scenes

• We've made changes behind the scenes to retire the legacy app.

• Various backend updates to our admin tools, helping our team support you more efficiently.

Export improvements

We've polished document export so your manuscripts come out clean and ready to share:

• Tidy file names. Exported files now download with their proper title (for example,The Heiress and the Guardian.docx) instead of a garbled string of extra characters. Titles with accents or special characters come through correctly too.

• Correct text size. Word documents now export in a standard 12 point body text, so your manuscript looks right the moment you open it, with no reformatting needed.

• Working page numbers. The "include page numbers" option now actually adds page numbers to your Word and OpenDocument exports, matching how it already worked for PDF and RTF.

Overview improvements

• The "Recently Edited" list on your project overview now surfaces both chapters and notes together, ordered by what you actually touched last. Previously it wasn't  showing some of the things you recently edited. Now the things you're actively writing are right there at the top where you'd expect them.

• Better timestamps. We also tidied up the "time ago" labels. Instead of squinting at something like "1012d ago," you'll now see readable spans like "2y ago," "7mo ago," or "3w ago." Recent edits still show in minutes, hours, and days, but anything older rolls up naturally into weeks, months, and years.