Creating Your First Book

Creating your first book is the first step in organizing your writing project. A book in Penpoint represents a single story, novel, or series volume, containing all your characters, locations, chapters, and other writing elements. (Writing a series? Several volumes can live together in one series file: see Writing a Series.) Penpoint saves your work automatically as you go.

Starting a New Book

To create your first book, click the Create New Book button in the Book Library. This will open a window where you can set up your new project.

This window lets you fill in a few details about your book:

• Book Name: Give your book a title (up to 50 characters). You can always change this later.
• Description: Add an optional brief description to help you remember what the book is about (up to 100 characters).
• Book Color: Choose a color for your book's cover in the library. This helps visually distinguish between multiple projects.
• Book Template: Select a starting template that determines the initial structure of your book (character traits like appearance, role, or background; location types; item categories; and more).

Choosing a Template

Templates provide ready-made setups for different types of writing projects. The Standard Template is a good starting point for most projects, offering a balanced set of character traits, location types, and item categories. See Understanding Book Template Types for a detailed comparison of all available templates.

You don't need to find the "perfect" template: picking one doesn't lock you in. You can add, remove, or change any trait, location type, or category after creating your book. Templates simply give you a head start with commonly-used fields so you don't have to build everything from scratch.

After Creating Your Book

Once you click Create Book, Penpoint will set up your new project and show a success screen. Click Open Book to jump in. You'll land on the Characters page, where you can start adding your cast.

From here, you can explore all the sections of your book using the navigation menu on the left side of the screen:

• Characters: Build your cast with customizable traits and relationships
• Items (the objects and props in your story): Track important things like weapons, letters, or artifacts
• Locations: Map out your world with locations within locations (e.g., a room inside a castle inside a kingdom)
• Chapters: Organize your story structure and assign characters
• Arcs: Map out your plot arcs and see them laid out visually
• Notebook: Jot down research, worldbuilding notes, and loose ideas
• Tags Viewer Page: Add labels (tags) to any character, location, or item, then view everything with that tag in one place
• Relationship Map: See your entire character web as a visual map
• Timeline: See when every character appears across your chapters
• Compendium: An alphabetical reference of everything in your book (called the Compendium)