Nowvella

Nowvella is a writing application for novelists and other long-form authors. I set out to build a modern web equivalent of Manuskript, the open-source desktop novel editor, and then go further where it made sense. A book is organised as an outline tree of parts, chapters and scenes, each scene carrying the metadata Manuskript files it under: point of view, status, label, word goal, summaries and notes.

Around the editor sit the story development panes: characters, plot, and a compendium of world items (places, organisations, objects, concepts and events) that can be nested and referenced from the text. Shared universes are supported by treating a shared world as its own project that books depend on, and a series table gives each book a reading position so that continuity flows forward through the series. Every scene keeps a revision history with restore, there is a distraction-free mode, and a Thoughts area lets an author capture loose ideas and link them to anything in the book.

When the book is ready it compiles to Markdown, HTML, plain text, DOCX or PDF, with named compile presets. Nowvella also runs an MCP server, so an author can connect an AI assistant such as Claude or ChatGPT to read, search, reorganise and update their own manuscript.