Novelist
Novelist is a writing app for planning, drafting, organizing, and exporting novels on Apple devices with tools tailored to long-form fiction work.
What is Novelist?
Novelist is a productivity app for fiction writers who want to plan, draft, and manage a novel in one place. It helps authors build story structure, organize scenes and chapters, track characters and other story elements, and write manuscripts with fewer interruptions between outlining and drafting. The app supports long-form writing workflows with tools for notes, comments, search, version history, progress tracking, and export to common book-friendly formats. A companion web experience is also available for writing in a browser, which can help users move between devices and continue work from different locations. On Mac, the app is offered through the App Store as an Apple-silicon-compatible app based on its iPad release. Novelist is published by Returntrue.
Key features
- Plan story elements on a board-style workspace with notes, tags, metadata, and images.
- Write scenes and manuscript sections with rich text editing tools.
- Organize a project into acts, chapters, and custom story structures.
- Track daily writing progress and review project statistics.
- Search and replace text, add comments, and restore earlier versions from history.
- Export manuscripts in EPUB, ODT, and HTML formats.
- Use reference panels while writing to keep story details visible.
- Back up and restore projects locally or with Google Drive.
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Safety overview
Status: Mostly safe
This is a legitimate writing app for creating and managing novels. Access to your documents, local storage, or cloud backup is consistent with its purpose if you choose to use those features. As with any writing tool, your main practical concern is protecting unfinished work, so keep backups of important manuscripts and confirm your preferred export format before making major changes or removing the app.
Recommendation: Keep Novelist if you actively write or organize fiction projects with it. Remove it only if you no longer use it and have already exported or backed up any manuscripts, notes, and project data you want to keep.
Common paths
/Applications/Novelist.app
Container paths
~/Library/Containers/it.returntrue.novelist
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