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 Shared chapter links now show the chapter's actual title in previews (in messages, social posts and the like), and outdated links now land on a friendly explanation page instead of an error.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

Sync & reliability

• Your writing now recovers itself if sync goes wrong. If your device ever drifts out of step with our servers (for example after a flaky connection or a laptop waking from sleep), Novlr now spots the mismatch and quietly re-syncs your work, rather than carrying on and risking words going missing. If the editor fails to connect on the first try, it now retries automatically instead of silently not syncing.

• Extra resilience for cross-device syncing. In very rare circumstances, a device that had been offline for a long stretch or on a patchy connection could end up holding a copy of a chapter that was slightly out of step with the server. Novlr now recognises that situation the moment it appears and quietly rebuilds the local copy in the background, with every word intact. Almost no one will ever see this happen, but it's one more layer of protection around your writing.

Billing & subscriptions

• Upgrading is more reliable. The subscribe button could previously spin forever without telling you anything went wrong. Now, if a payment page can't be opened, you get a clear message and the button comes back so you can retry.

• Lifetime members migrating from old Novlr keep their Lifetime status. A bug could briefly downgrade migrated Lifetime accounts to the free plan during migration. That's fixed, so your subscription arrives intact.

• Smoother billing management. If a payment ever doesn't go through (an expired card, for instance), your Subscriptions page now takes you straight to your billing details so you can update them in a couple of clicks. Your plan and account status stay perfectly in step with your payment provider, so what you see on your account page always matches reality.

Bug fixes

• The "Try again" button actually works now. When we release an update while you have Novlr open, you could occasionally hit an error screen where "Try again" didn't fix anything. It now genuinely reloads the fresh version and gets you back to writing.

• Novlr Sites polish. The editor header now sits properly on mobile screens, and a rare error that could stop the Sites editor loading has been fixed.

Desk cards

• Fresher, more relevant desk cards. The announcement cards on your desk are now managed live by the team, so you'll see timely news that's relevant to you (and no stale announcements hanging around), without waiting for an app update.

• More current cards above your desk. The cards that appear above your desk (tips and news) now always reflect what's genuinely current, even if your connection hiccups while they load. Retired announcements stay retired.

Every writer needs a home online, so we built one that takes minutes, not weekends to build.

Novlr Sites gives you an elegant author website with no code and no fuss and is included in Novlr Studio plans. What you get:

• Editorial themes in light and dark, with accent colours to make it yours.

• A live editor where every change previews instantly. No templates to wrestle with.

• Sections that really sell your writing: a featured-book hero, your story, your bookshelf, reader praise, press and links, and a built-in blog. All optional and customisable.

• Your own domain hooked up (or a free yourname.novlr.site address included).

• Fast, privacy-first, and mobile-friendly out of the box.

Pricing:

• Free with every Novlr Studio plan, including Lifetime.

• Sites-only users: Free to build and preview. $6/month or $60/year (two months free) for published websites.

Word counts that match Microsoft Word

• Your word count now matches Microsoft Word's, so the number you see is the number editors, agents and submission guidelines expect. It's the same everywhere: chapters, project totals, words written, and your stats all agree. No more two counters disagreeing on the same document..

Smoother, faster writing

• Typing in long chapters is fluid again, no more lag or stutter as a document grows.

• Switching between a project's tabs (Manuscript, Notes, Plan) is now instant.

• A rare sync glitch that could duplicate or scramble text has been fixed, so your words stay exactly as you wrote them.

Sign in and security

• Password reset now works even if you open the reset email on a different device or browser, no more "session missing" dead end.

A better writing editor

• Bullet and numbered lists sit at a natural, comfortable spacing instead of being spread too far apart.

• Press Shift+Enter inside a list and only that line becomes a bullet, not the whole paragraph.

• Press Enter after a section title and you drop straight into the body, ready to write.

• Indent individual paragraphs with Tab (and outdent with Shift+Tab).

• Accidentally moved a section? There's now an undo, plus a clearer drop target when you drag.

• "Hide inline comments" now hides just the highlight, your actual text stays put.

• Tighter line spacing for poetry and verse.

• The button to add a section between two others is now reliably clickable.

Find and Replace

• The Find box stays on screen, even on narrow or split-screen windows.

• Highlighted matches are now easy to read in dark mode.

• Find and Replace matches both straight and curly quotes, and can convert between them.

• Highlights stay put on the right matches as you edit around them.

Notes and Notebook

• Removing a tag from a note now sticks, deleted tags no longer reappear.

• Sort your notes by most recent or A to Z, in both the sidebar and the Notebook.

• Pin notes in the Notebook independently of your sidebar pins.

• The notes list loads noticeably faster.

• Tag chips no longer clip the last letter of italic tags.

Projects and lists

• Tidier Projects and Notes tables: clearer headings, a select-all checkbox, and an always-visible actions menu.

• Get a heads-up if you're about to create a project with a duplicate title.

Importing your work

• Clearer "Import from Scrivener" flow with plain-English steps and a choice of your .scriv project or a.zip.

• Scrivener imports are more reliable, with friendlier messages when something isn't right.

• Smarter chapter detection on import, so your manuscript splits into the right chapters instead of hundreds of fragments.

• Import a document straight into an existing project or section, with a nudge to start a fresh project when an import is very large.

Exporting your work

• Exports keep your paragraph indents and start each chapter on a new page.

• Titles with accented or non-Latin characters now export without breaking the file.

• Fixed a blank first page that could appear in PDF exports.

Writing stats you can trust

• Trends only appear once there's enough data to be meaningful, instead of jumping around on day one.

• "Words removed" averages are now reported honestly, and stat tooltips display properly.

Account and billing

• You can correct or cancel a pending email change if you mistyped your new address.

• A clearer, less intrusive upgrade prompt that fits naturally into the sidebar and menus.

• More accurate plan status, so paid accounts reliably show as paid.

Novlr Sites (currently only available to co-owners)

• Name your works section "Books" or "Works", with the menu and heading updating to match.

• Add Discord as a social link.

• Feature one book at the top of your site, with a prompt when you switch which one.

• Pull quotes and the closing-card mini heading only show when you actually add them, no more empty blocks or stray labels.

• Your blog index pages neatly and loads faster once you have lots of posts.

• Published sites now list every blog post in their sitemap, so search engines can find and index them all.

• Subtle styling polish on book covers and the "Built with Novlr" footer.

Accessibility and polish

• Improved text contrast in dark and evening themes, so headings, labels and icons are easy to read.

• Tooltips stay open on touchscreens until you tap away.

• Modal buttons are no longer blocked by iPad controls in landscape, and the page no longer drags the navigation out of view.

• The mobile formatting toolbar docks neatly under the header straight away.

• Novlr remembers whether you left the sidebar open or closed, per device.

Comments can now be edited on mobile.

Comments can now be edited on Desktop.

If you have your note open in sidebar and you change the title of your document, the document title will now update too.

We reduced desk load lag while background processes were running.

If you get the "update novlr" prompt you will be able to pause that update for a day. We have limited this, as having an out-of-date version of Novlr can cause issues down the line.

We have fixed an error that caused Google Drive backups to fail if the contained a non-standard symbol in any of the titles. The integration should now complete, even for non-standard symbols and will also complete for all other backups, even if one section fails for any reason.

When you verify your email, we now show the input email address that the verification email will be sent to. This is so that you can see if there is a typo and can correct the address in order to verify.

Habit streaks are now stored in your history when you finish them naturally, allowing you to check your historical streak data.

The confetti popup when you reach your habit goals no longer triggers twice if you write on two devices.

We fixed and bug in the sidebar that could cause an app crash/forced logout.

Projects and cards on your desk will now load faster, as will your notebook and note library.

We fixed an error that allowed some users to create and pay for two subscriptions.

We added three days of version history to the Novlr Free plan to allow all users to restore changes.