Canon comes aboard

Ahoy, good morrow, well met!

Welcome to the first-ever newsletter on Noveletta, the whirligig journey of how I'm crafting Noveletta, gleaning wisdom from authors, and uncovering secret mysteries of the new age of publishing. I'll be sharing it all, from the fun creative misadventures to the crucially imperative, yet boring, technology tribulations.

Today I'm sharing what's new, as it's been quite exciting! Noveletta has grown by leaps and bounds over the last few weeks: a whole integrated writer/reader in-app, shiny new features, new team-wide permission handling, a fresh-off-the-presses trademark, and our new blog with a newsletter!

Canon: an integrated reader/writer!

Canon is the reading and writing side of Noveletta, and it's woven into the knowledge graph of the work!

This lets authors write and read their work tied to the intimate knowledge of their series, and it even lets them publish it on the site as a web novel!

• It's pretty! Like really pretty! This is the UI we all wish our Kindles had, with both a scroll UI and a page-turning UI, plus all the core settings for colors, fonts, sizes, etc.
• Full-view writing: character mentions while you type, focus mode, and chapter-aware rails of your world-building to fact-check yourself as you write!
• Integrated reader: all your characters, places, and plot points linked in the text to see snippets, last appearances, and more, to follow the story whatever chapter you're on.
• Fluid writing: autosave, revision history with word-level diffs, with teams and editor collaboration on deck!
• Start from scratch or from Book 19: website, EPUB, DOCX, and Markdown imports!
• Publish however you want: draft, scheduled, or live, chapter by chapter, privately, or publish away!

This is a first test of this feature, and not everyone will use it, but we have our first couple of authors toying around with it, so I'm giddy to see what comes next. This may turn into letting authors integrate this into their sites for their own readers, or become another place for new authors to grow, but I'll leave that up to what authors need most. Step one: help writers write and track their stories!

Permissions: editors, contributors, and publishers!

Authors, while the stars of the show, are almost never alone; their teams and partners play critical roles in bringing their work to life and to their fans. So now authors can manage teams, editors, contributors, and publishers with discrete permissions and controls.

Now, authentication and permissions are not sexy stuff, but they're foundational. Now invite anyone by email from Manage → People and pick their role.

• Beta reader — reads unpublished drafts and comments. No writes.
• Curator — also maintains the knowledge base and your author notes.
• Writer — also drafts and edits chapters. Cannot publish.
• Editor — also publishes and schedules.
• Manager — also series settings, ontology and ingestion.

This keeps the author in the driver's seat, but it's also the first pass. As authors add and manage their teams, I'm looking to learn how every member of the network needs access so we can make easy, customizable roles to fit any-size story and team.

We got our registered trademark!

Noveletta® is officially a registered trademark!

It's on the site, in the footer, at the bottom of emails, and buried in the Terms where all good legal sentences go to die.

I'll be honest: filing trademark paperwork was not high on the list of things I fantasized about when I started this, but it's a really important step and makes it feel that much more real!

This is big because Noveletta is eventually supposed to hold some super special important stuff for authors, and there is a meaningful difference between "Aaron's elaborate fantasy side project" and "a product owned by a real protected legal entity that can sign agreements and be accountable for what it does."

Worth the paperwork, worth celebrating, so YIPPIE!

Blog: how this sausage is made!

You're reading the newsletter, so congratulations, you found it. I talk about transparency in how I'm crafting Noveletta, reviewing the tools, and putting in the work to make ethically aligned decisions for the authors I hope to serve, protect, and empower… this is where I show how that sausage is made! It may not always be exciting, but it will be real and human-written.

The blog is at noveletta.com/blog, and four longer pieces live there already:

• Noveletta isn't an AI product, but it does use AI — behind the curtain on exactly where, what, and why I'm using AI. Spoiler: use it safely and only where it's truly novel, under 5%.
• Navigating if AI is for or against creatives — the sword, the pen, and the LLM. How a tool's ethics are up to its wielder, and the guidelines I hold myself accountable to keeping.
• The Difference Between Noveletta and a Wiki — wikis are documents, Noveletta is a graph. One evolves with the story, keeps its history, and makes its understanding of the world usable.
• Ink to Parchment — a detailed dive into the creative decisions I made on the brand and UI of Noveletta to pay homage to the magical literary history it originated from.

I'm a fervent enemy of email spam, so unsubscribe anytime — but if you enjoy my not-so-elegant escapades, please follow and share!

Other goodies!

• Private knowledge bases and a public ceiling. A knowledge base can now be private or unlisted independently of the series, and you can cap what readers see at a specific chapter. The knowledge base can never know more publicly than the story allows.
• Follows and a Library. Follow a series and pick up where you left off from one place.
• Discover. One shelf for everything on Noveletta, whether the story lives here or Noveletta is just carrying the knowledge base.
• Entity colors that you can actually read. Every type badge now clears WCAG AA contrast. Some of them absolutely did not before. My apologies to your retinas.

Alrighty, that's the gist from the last few weeks! I'm still a solo-dev grinding away, committed to keeping this puppy employee-owned, author-first, and getting it self-sufficient first!

Tally ho!

Aaron solo-dev and storm captain of the S.S. Noveletta