State of the Pen

Nearly every writer I know has a haphazard way of keeping track of their worlds. Sometimes it's all contained in one app (using a file and folder structure they had to painstakingly build themselves), but more often it's a document editor for the draft, a spreadsheet for the timeline, and a folder of character notes that stopped matching the manuscript somewhere around chapter nine. And in this age of "everything is a subscription," authors have to pay every month just to keep access to their own work. Penpoint keeps all of it in one file, offline and local, so the world stays current with the book while you write it. And you only pay for the core app once.

I built Penpoint because I wanted a better place to build my own book. I'm delighted to have found like-minded authors who are willing to help me make Penpoint into something even better than I could have imagined. Let's take a look at where we are now and what's on the horizon.

Book Series, the Corkboard, comments on prose, custom calendars, Chapter Drafts, Tag Groups, and countless others were all requests from real writers in the Discord before they were features in the app. You can follow every change, release by release, in the changelog, and see just how fast Penpoint has grown since launch.

Since launch, writers have put 2.6 million words of story into Penpoint across 260 books, in more than 3,400 hours of writing and worldbuilding. Behind those words sit 2,664 chapters, 819 locations, 470 items, and 336 characters. And four times as many devices run Penpoint today as on launch day. That's huge growth in such a short time!

Penpoint Cloud is the big one. It backs up your books automatically and keeps them in sync across your computers. A small group of testers has been running it in closed beta since August, and the public launch is planned for mid-October. Thank you to every one of them. This is Penpoint's first entirely optional subscription service, built to make writing on more than one computer, or keeping a secure backup, more convenient. The core Penpoint experience is not affected by Penpoint Cloud, and your books are always available offline by design. Use Penpoint Cloud if you want it, or skip it if you don't. Penpoint stays the same.

The Minipen Mobile Companion App is planned to arrive with the launch of Cloud. Minipen is the sidebar that keeps your worldbuilding open beside your manuscript, and the companion app puts it on your phone. The app works alongside the desktop app, but only with a Penpoint Cloud subscription. The subscription is required because iOS and Android apps can't sideload .penpoint files, so a secure, encrypted server is the only way to move books between devices. Personally, I find the app to be an incredible way to edit a few lines of my manuscript or jot down ideas about my characters while on the go. I'm excited to see how people will use Minipen!

None of these four has a ship date yet, and each one ships when it's ready.

Custom Character Sheets are a long-overdue upgrade to characters, letting you choose a different character sheet for each character. A primary character gets the full deep-dive, a secondary character gets a focused middle ground, and a background character gets a light card, so the tavern keeper no longer needs the same sheet as your hero.

Scrivener Import is being built to bring a Scrivener project across with its structure intact, so nobody has to copy chapters over one at a time. The Reimagined Timeline runs on the calendars you already set up in your book, invented ones included, and will be the biggest upgrade yet to the Events system, tying your entire book together into one linear series of events. More Languages is a first pass at translating the Penpoint interface out of English, with Chinese releasing first.

These are ideas from the public roadmap that I'm exploring. None of them are currently scheduled, so hearing which ones you want is part of how they get picked.

Have your own feature ideas you want to share? Tell me about them in the Discord, and they might end up on this list!

This has been a big dream of mine since I first shared Penpoint on Reddit back in January. One thing I've noticed when talking with other authors (and from my own experience) is that most of writing a book happens alone. We work on our book or our series in isolation, and we often struggle with the motivation to keep going, to push through writer's block and get words on the page. Often, writers turn to other communities online, from Discord and Reddit to user forums and pop-up writing sprint sites. I envision something that brings authors together, right inside the app they use to write their book. I'm calling it Penpoint Hub.

The Hub is a planned home for writers to gather, set goals together, take part in global writing challenges, and cheer each other on.

It will likely start with anonymous statistics (the same kind behind the writing numbers above). You'll be able to join sprints, contribute to goals, and see completion rates from authors around the world who are working on their own books and hitting their own milestones. Every word you write and every milestone you reach pushes the community goal a little further, so finishing that chapter you've been stuck on moves everyone forward, one bit at a time. It feels good to see those goals get crossed off, both for yourself and for others.

This is something I've been really excited about. I want to invite real authors to share their wisdom and experience, with a targeted goal at the end. You could join a writing sprint on "Writing Better Conflict," "Cutting Down on 'He Said, She Said,'" or "Outlining Your Book from Day One to Day 30." Not only do you get instructions on how to complete the sprint, but Penpoint tracks your progress as you work, because each goal has a target that can be tracked and measured. Authors who create these shared goals in the Hub will be paid to produce them, supporting their talent and hard-earned experience financially. These are working writers sharing what worked for them, not celebrity authors, and you'd be able to start a sprint whenever you're ready.

If you're interested in helping create guides for the Hub, please reach out on Discord or at support@penpoint.app. I'd love to have you contribute!

I'm also really excited about this one. Today, Penpoint helps you write the book. The dream is for it to help with what comes after the draft too: sharing your work securely with beta readers, then working with an editor, and finding an audience, all without leaving the app.

Three pieces could make this work (it's still an untested dream, but I'm dreaming big, right?). A beta reader exchange would let fellow Penpoint writers swap chapters and trade feedback. You'd know the feedback is quality, because the pool is people who paid $40 for the app: serious authors offering serious feedback, without the risk of polluting your book with notes from people who have no real skin in the game.

Web reading would let you send a link (revocable at any time), so a reader can read and comment in their browser with nothing to install. We'd work to disable easy copy-and-paste in the browser, though nothing on the internet is ever copy-proof. The best part: comments left in the browser would stream back into your desktop app behind a filter, so beta feedback shows up right in your manuscript.

Finally, trusted editors, verified professionals you invite in, could see your manuscript, your worldbuilding, or both together, with the characters, places, and timeline behind the prose, and leave notes right where you work. Multi-user collaboration is next: working in real time with others on your content, just like in other online apps, except that all your data stays on your own computer, not in the cloud.

Put together, the Hub could match writers with beta readers and authors with editors. Writers and editors who own Penpoint would find each other there. Web readers, meaning anyone you invite, could read and comment in a browser without buying anything. A whole ecosystem, all in one place.

None of this is set in stone. It's the big vision, right? It will change as we learn what writers need, and a lot of that learning happens in conversations like the one we had on Discord. Without your help and shaping, none of this would be possible.

The way to get to all this big, crazy stuff is to start small. Novel November brings the first pieces together in one event. It has a shared goal (a 50,000-word novel is something everyone will be working toward), and it doubles as the first version of the Hub. I'm calling it the "v0" version, because it'll launch bare-bones, but we have to start somewhere, and this event feels like a good place to start.

The Hub is the home base where a shared word goal, guided sprints from fellow authors, and Author Progress tracking all run together for the first time.

It's a real test of the whole idea, with a clear finish line. We'll see if I can get it all working by then, but it's an exciting thing to aim for.

October is Preptober, for planning your plot, building your world, and meeting your cast. November is for writing 50,000 words. We want Penpoint to be the home for both months.

Two offers are planned to help. New writers get a 45-day free trial, timed to cover the second half of Preptober and all of November. And to celebrate the launch, every Penpoint writer (including all existing ones!) gets a free month of Penpoint Cloud in November, so the novel is backed up and on every device while it's being written, and you can write from your phone.

I'll be covering the cost of the Penpoint Cloud infrastructure during that period. Afterward, people can choose to buy the app and sign up for a paid Penpoint Cloud subscription if they want, and they can always export their book content either way. So essentially, every new writer gets a completely free, fully integrated writing tool to craft their book for Novel November. No strings attached. I hope this brings a lot of new faces into Penpoint.

The 45-day trial will arrive with a dedicated Novel November page. Until then, the regular trial is 14 days.

For Penpoint to grow, it all starts with something like this, here and now. If you have writing friends planning a November novel, invite them: once the Novel November trial is live, they can write free through Preptober and November. A dedicated Novel November page on penpoint.app is coming soon, so there will be one easy link to share.

Answers to the question on the sticky note go in the Discord. I'm collecting them.

In the meantime, I'm honored to have you here with me: reading this page, sharing this app with your friends, suggesting ideas and feedback to make it better, and generally being so positive and encouraging. I couldn't do any of this without you.

All the love, and happy writing,

-Joel