🪡 Improvements
Small polish to the app header height so icons and menus sit more comfortably.
Following a link straight into your account settings, slike the one after checkout or in our emails, now opens the settings panel as soon as you arrive.
Course and Academy Course have been merged as project types and are now available from the project type selector.
🪲 Bug Fixes
The parchment theme's paper texture now continues all the way down your manuscript instead of stopping after the first screen, and the grain is finer.
Fixed the Novlr logo being slightly cut off in the sidebar, and aligned it neatly with the app header.
The sidebar and header now share a clean, consistent divider line in every theme, where it was previously invisible or mismatched in some.
Short story now shows as a project type in the selector when creating a new project.
The project status will now show all available, rather selecting a random ten to display on selection.
🪡 Improvements
Getting around the Planning grid with a mouse is now much easier: click and drag any empty part of the grid to move around in any direction, the scrollbars are bigger and easier to grab, and if your grid only stretches sideways, your scroll wheel now moves it sideways too. You can also click the grid and scroll with your arrow keys. Trackpads, tablets and phones work exactly as they did before.
Show/hide planning notes in notebooks now persists. The app remembers whether you last had it checked or unchecked, so it's more likely to be selected the way you need it.
🪲 Bug Fixes
New notes no longer copy the note before. If you created a few notes back to back, your new note was picking up the text of the previous one. Every new note now starts properly blank.
Switching notes could sometimes overwrite one note with another's text. In some cases, switching straight from one note to a much shorter one could leave the first note's text on screen and then save it over the note you'd just opened. That's now fixed.
✨ New Features
There is a new Invite friends tab in your account settings. Inside it you will find your own invite link and a short code. Copy either, share the link straight from your phone, or type in a friend's email address and we will send the invitation for you.
When a friend signs up through your invite they appear in your list, and when they subscribe to any paid plan you both get a month of Studio free (co-owners earn 10 credits when an invited writer joins and 40 more when they subscribe).
You will get a note in Novlr and by email when a reward lands, and a reminder a few days before a free month ends.
If you're already a subscriber, any additional time will be added to your account as credit. You can check the status of any credit applied to your account in your account preferences.
🪡 Improvements
A tidier account menu. Account settings now group your account, subscription, and notifications together, with Invite friends and Support in their own Extras section.
🪲 Bug Fixes
Your word count graph now ends on today's total. The graph on your Analytics page finishes on the exact number your manuscript stands at right now, whatever range you're looking at, and the final minutes of every writing session are kept in your history. We've also brought earlier history into line with the counts your sections hold today.
âš¡ Performance
Your writing streak now refreshes as soon as the words that hit your target are saved, on every kind of habit, and it does it faster, so the celebration and the streak arrive together.
Novlr does less work in the background while you type, so your word counts, habit card, and analytics stay fresh with far fewer refreshes.
💳 Billing & Subscriptions
If there's credit waiting on your account, the Subscription tab tells you how much and that it comes off your next bill.
🪲 Bug Fixes
Importing a section no longer forces the document to be added as a whole new project.
🚀 Plan your project in Novlr
Cards on a corkboard. Tabs in a spreadsheet. Sticky notes on the fridge. Writers have always found ways to keep a plot straight, but the plan usually ends up living somewhere separate from the manuscript itself, and every time the story changes, the two drift further apart.
From today, planning lives inside Novlr: a plotting grid built directly into every project.
The grid method
Every scene, beat, or reminder is a note pinned to a section. Read across a row and you follow a single thread as it travels through your book. Read down a column and you see everything included in that section. Empty cells show you the gaps and crowded ones show you where pacing might need work.
The Planning tab sits in every project, between the Overview and Manuscript tavsm and it's included on every plan — including Free, with no limit on how many ideas you can track.
Open the Planning tab
The first time you open the Planning tab in a project, Novlr lays the grid out for you: every section and subsection of your manuscript becomes a column, with its live word count in the header, and you get two starter rows — Main Plot and Secondary Plot — ready to rename or extend.
One heads-up for longtime Novlr writers: Outline notes have been renamed Planning notes, and any you'd already pinned to a chapter will already be sitting in the grid for you.
Make the rows yours
Rows are throughlines. Click a label to rename it, hover over a row separator for a + to add another, and drag to reorder. Use rows for anything from an A or a B plot, a character's point of view, a timeline in a dual narrative, clues and red herrings in a mystery, or foreshadowing you'd otherwise forget.
Fill the grid
Every cell has a + button. Click it to create a Planning note, give it a title, and write as much as the beat needs. It's linked to that section, so it's waiting in the notes sidebar the moment you open that section to write.
Planning notes are notes like any other, so you'll also find them in your Notebook and Note Library, filtered as hidden by default so they don't crowd your view. Notes created in the grid pick up their row's name as a tag automatically.
Drag and drop until it flows
Cards are draggable within a cell to reorder beats, or across the grid to move an idea from one section to another. Every move is reflected into your manuscript.
Columns are your section. Hover between two headers for a + to slot in a new section on the spot, click a title to rename it, or grab a column's grip to drag whole sections. Subsections travel with their parent, and a live label tells you what's about to happen before you drop. No copy and paste required.
A holding pen for homeless ideas
An Unassigned tray at the bottom holds Planning notes that don't have a place yet or you're not sure you can make work yet. Drag a card down to shelve it, and back up when you're ready. Notes from archived section land here too, and slot back into place if you unarchive.
Plan from anywhere
On phone, the grid becomes a section-at-a-time view with collapsible plot lines and a "Move to..." option. Tablets get the full grid with touch drag. On desktop, the whole thing also works with just a keyboard and screen reader.
✨ New Features
Export a chapter and everything nested inside it in one go. Just pick "Include subsections" when you export.
Tick several sections in your manuscript tree and export them together as a single file, in reading order.
Add projects to multiple collections and delete them. You'll get warnings before deletion that shows every project that has the collection tac applied.
Your collections now appear in the Analytics word count dropdown, so you can see a whole series' totals in one place.
Bulk export, archive, restore and delete sections from the left-hand sidebar.
🪡 Improvements
Bringing in a Scrivener project is clearer: your .scriv is now selectable, and we point you to the route that works best for your browser.
Better Collection select, remove, and create.
A tidier co-ownership dashboard. It's now reserved for co-owners, and your membership card shows your wave and co-owner number.
Tab now inserts a tab space when you're mid-line, and still indents when you're at the start of a paragraph. This works in notes too.
Press Escape to hop out of the editor when you're done typing.
🪲 Bug Fixes
Paragraph indents now carry through to your exports and shared links exactly as you set them.
Dictating on your phone now counts towards your Words Written, so your daily goals see every word you speak.
Comment highlights now stay with in the section their comment belongs to when you copy or move text. The pasted text will be clean so that comments aren't duplicated unnecessarily.
If you told us why you became a co-owner, your 10 credits for that now show correctly in your activity and total.
Academy progress is now tracked properly. Every lesson you've ticked off shows as complete when you reopen a course, however far through you are.
Dropbox backups now work with titles containing emoji, dashes or non-Latin characters.
🪲 Bug Fixes
Fixed broken Writing Progress numbers in the progress emails.
💳 Billing & Subscriptions
Starter plans now have a 10 project limit. If you were subscribed to Starter before September 1st, this change will not affect your currently active subscription.
🪡 Improvements
Writing Progress emails now show large numbers with commas so they're more easily readable.
🪲 Bug Fixes
Fixed edge cases showing incorrect totals in Words Written analytics.
Archived sections are now hidden from the Planning tool (currently visible only to co-owners).
🪲 Bug Fixes
Opening a note no longer focuses the cursor on the title, instead it places the cursor at the end of the content once the note loads.
🔠Coming Soon
We've laid groundwork for a new Planning tool, coming very soon!
🪡 Improvements
Notes keep your cursor where you left it.
Searching notes now prioritizes the title over note content, so searching the exact name of a note puts it at the top.
Note Library type chips have been brought in line with the coloured note chips that show everywhere else in the app.
Planning notes are now hidden by default in the Notebook and Note Library, with a new "hide planning notes" filter ticked by default (currently visible only to co-owners).
If a project only has planning notes and no other type, the notebook now tells you that's why it looks empty and offers to unhide them (currently visible only to co-owners).
🪲 Bug Fixes
Organising your desk now works with drag and drop, on tablet and phone. This has also improved reordering sections, planning cards, and website blocks.
Your Favourite Writing Time now reads your whole six months, so it reflects when you actually write.
Fixed the Reading Room links on the Desk so that they open straight to the article.
Becoming a co-owner shows only once in your activity and your co-owner credit total now comes straight from your ledger rather than showing placeholder numbers.
Book pages on author websites show your formatting properly, and read cleanly in search engine results.
🔒 Reliability & Security
Password reset links are no longer prefetched by Microsoft-managed addresses resulting in an expired link. They now stay ready until you're the one who clicks them.
🧹 Behind the Scenes
Reading Room posts an improved designs for tables, buttons, and images.
🪲 Bug Fixes
Setting or completing a goal now confirms only once it has safely saved, rather than sometimes confirming before the save had gone through.
The comment count in the sidebar now correctly matches the comments shown beside it.
If you have over 500 notes, you can now see them all in your library, rather than needing to find the rest by search.
Scheduled backups now work steadily through your whole library, so one very large project no longer holds up the rest, and each run picks up where the last one left off.
🪡 Improvements
Find and Replace now matches curly and straight apostrophes as the same character across every chapter, so searching for "don't" finds all of them wherever they are.
🪲 Bug Fixes
Your comments now come through a version restore safely.
The comments sidebar now refreshes the instant a restore finishes, so what you see always matches the page.
Deleting a comment now clears its highlight from the manuscript right away.
Renaming a note now sticks reliably, even when the same note is open on another device.
Dialogs now resize around the on-screen keyboard on tablets, so Save and Cancel are always reachable.
Dialogs sit comfortably clear of the status bar and Dynamic Island on iPhone.
âš¡ Performance
Searching a very large project now returns results faster, with a clear indicator when there are more matches than we can show at once.
🔒 Reliability & Security
Scheduled backups now rotate fairly through the queue, so every connected account gets its turn.
When Google Drive or Dropbox occasionally asks us to slow down, backups now wait before resuming.
🔠Coming Soon
We've laid groundwork behind the scenes for the Planning tool, which is coming soon. In preparation:
Planning notes now show a double stroke on their chip and appear at the bottom of lists.
Planning notes now show a count in the note sidebar and can be collapsed.
You can now create planning notes that aren't linked to a section. These show in the sidebar no matter which section you're in, while linked planning notes only show in their relevant section.
🪡 Improvements
The mobile formatting bar now appears only when you've selected text, rather than showing all the time.
🪲 Bug Fixes
Text now displays exactly as you typed it, including any double spaces that were previously being hidden. If you notice spacing you don't remember typing, it was likely already there. Find & Replace can help you clean it up.
Word counts are now more accurate. As a result, some projects may show a slightly lower count than before, since previous totals had been inflated for a portion of writers who had duplicated projects.
🪡 Improvements
Word export now carries chapter and scene breaks through more cleanly into formatting tools like Atticus and Vellum.
Find & Replace can now search for double and multiple spaces.
🪲 Bug Fixes
Capital letters and other anomalies are handled better when you change your email address in Novlr.
🔒 Reliability & Security
Reliability improvements when opening notes.