Your Words Are Yours

📄 Your content is yours. Novel Engine is AGPL-licensed open-source software, but the license applies to the application code only. Manuscripts, pitches, outlines, story bibles, and exported books you create with it are your exclusive property and are not covered by the AGPL. Nothing about using Novel Engine open-sources, licenses, or encumbers your writing in any way. Publish on Amazon, sell the film rights, keep it in a drawer — it's yours.

Getting Started (from an installer)

1. Download and install

Grab the installer for your platform from the Releases page.

macOS (.dmg) — ⚠️ The macOS app is currently not signed or notarized by Apple (no Apple Developer account yet). The first time you open it, macOS will warn you and refuse to open it the normal way. This is expected. To open it:

1. Drag Novel Engine to Applications
2. Right-click (or Control-click) the app → Open → Open
3. If macOS still blocks it: open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down, and click "Open Anyway" next to the Novel Engine message

You only have to do this once.

Windows (installer .exe) — Windows SmartScreen may show "Windows protected your PC." Click More info → Run anyway. (Same reason: the installer isn't code-signed yet.)

Linux (.deb) — install with your package manager, e.g. sudo dpkg -i Novel-Engine-*.deb

2. Connect an AI

Novel Engine doesn't ship with an AI inside — it drives one you connect. You need one of these:

That Terminal step is the most technical thing you'll ever have to do — the app handles everything else. (More backends — llama-server and any OpenAI-compatible endpoint — are covered in the technical guide.)

3. First launch

The Onboarding Wizard takes it from there:

1. Welcome — what you're looking at
2. Provider Setup — the app checks for Claude / Codex / Ollama and tells you what it found
3. Model Selection — pick the AI model to write with (you can change it anytime in Settings)
4. Author Profile — a short "who you are as a writer" note the agents read (or skip it)
5. Ready — name your first book and go

A guided tour starts automatically, and a floating Help assistant (bottom of the icon rail) can answer "how do I…" questions at any time.

Getting Started (from source)

If you'd rather run it from code — this is the whole thing:

git clone https://github.com/john-paul-ruf/novel-engine.git
cd novel-engine
npm install
npm run download-pandoc   # optional — enables DOCX/EPUB export
npm start

You'll need Node.js 18+ installed first. Full build and packaging instructions are in the technical guide.

Meet Your Editorial Team

Every agent's instructions are a plain text file on your computer that you can read and edit — no black boxes.

From Pitch to Published: the Pipeline

Your book moves through 15 phases, each with a clear deliverable. Nothing advances until you confirm it — the app never runs ahead of you.

What Else Is In The Box

• Query Manager — after your book is published, Quill can research agents and publishers using web search, auto-populate submission targets, generate personalized query letters, and track your submission status — all in a dedicated view with filters and per-field AI fill
• Web search for all providers — every AI backend (Claude, Ollama, llama-server, Codex) can search the web for research, so Quill's query-target research works regardless of which provider you use
• Pitch Room — brainstorm freely with Spark; keep, shelve, or discard ideas before they become books
• Write in it yourself — the chapter editor is yours too; your edits get an EDITED badge, you can see a diff of exactly what you changed, and Verity is shown your edits so revisions respect them
• Import your manuscript — bring an existing book (Word or Markdown) in; chapters are detected automatically, and the AI can backfill the outline, bible, and voice profile from your text
• Version history everywhere — every change to every file is snapshotted; view any two versions side by side and restore with one click
• Hot Take — a one-click gut-reaction read of your whole manuscript
• Motif Ledger — tracks recurring imagery, foreshadowing, and overused phrases across the book
• Series support — group books into a series with a shared series bible for cross-volume continuity
• Statistics — word-count growth, usage, and cost estimates in friendly charts
• Command palette — press ⌘K (Ctrl+K) and jump to any chapter, phase, or action
• Works offline-ish — with Ollama, the entire pipeline runs on your machine with no internet at all

(The full feature reference, with all the machinery underneath, lives in the technical guide.)

Screenshots

Common Questions

Do I need to pay for AI? If you use Claude (recommended for prose quality), you need a Claude subscription — Novel Engine drives the same Claude Code CLI your subscription already covers. If you use Ollama, it's completely free and runs on your own hardware.

Where is my book stored? As plain Markdown files in a folder on your computer (shown in Settings). No proprietary format, no lock-in — you can open your chapters in any text editor, forever.

Is my writing private? Novel Engine has no cloud, no accounts, and no telemetry. Your text is sent only to the AI backend you connected — and if that's Ollama, it never leaves your machine at all.

Will using this affect my copyright? No. See Your Words Are Yours above — the open-source license covers the app's code, not your writing.

Something broke / I'm confused. Click the Help bubble in the app, open an issue, or email [john.paul.