Wow! It’s been a long and exciting ride in the world of online worldbuilding!

First of all: thank you. I can’t say thank you enough to each and every one of you: from our initial group to a half-dozen alpha testers, to the thousands of beta testers that flocked from /r/worldbuilding, to each and every one of you that has signed up since our launch this time last year — thank you!

And, of course, a very special extra thank you to everyone who has supported Notebook.ai through Patreon donations as well! Your generous contributions have played a huge role in making Notebook.ai what it is today.

Before jumping into new features, here’s some fun stats:

Since October 1, 2016 (exactly one year ago!), worldbuilders using Notebook.ai have collectively created:

Over 5,000 universes

Over 15,000 characters

Over 8,000 locations

Over 9,000 languages

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. We’re getting closer and closer to reaching 10,000 users, and I can’t wait to share way more stats (and a little something extra!) once we hit that milestone. It won’t be long now!

I’m still absolutely blown away that Notebook.ai has blown up so much in just a year. I started working on the project several years ago just to have for myself while writing and had no idea it could help so many others write smarter. Thank you for proving me wrong!

Alright, what’s new?

We’ve been hard at work since we last spoke, and there has been a slew of new features already released that I haven’t mentioned. Here are some quick overviews, but don’t forget to go try them out yourself!

Notebook Search

You can now search your entire digital notebook from a single place — even that character you dreamed up at 2am a year ago. Type as little or as much as you’d like into the search in your navbar and it’ll search across everything you’ve written for any of your notebook pages and surface what you’re looking for immediately.

Search your entire notebook from the magnifying glass in the top-left corner.

Page changelogs

This quality-of-life improvement goes out to all of Notebook.ai’s roleplayers out there, but it’s incredibly useful for creators of all kinds. Every content page in your digital notebook — that is, your characters, creatures, locations, races, and so on — now have a “changelog” section, which keeps a log for you of every single change that’s happened, who made it, and when.

See a log of every change, every time it’s changed — on everything.

Plan your world’s flora, too

We all know every world is multifaceted and incredibly diverse. For those of you who have interesting flora to detail, you can now find a new kind of premium page in your digital notebook for jotting down the details, uses, dangers, and more for your flowers, plants, trees, and other greenery.

Detail every aspect of your world’s nature and wildlife.

A dedicated prompt page

Many of you have asked for more extensive writing prompts set in your world. While we’ve made some solid strides in generating writing prompts about the things in your world, I’m very excited about new kinds of writing prompts coming very soon. To get ready, we’ve created a dedicated writing prompt page that will generate a new writing prompt in your world every time you visit.

Your own personal scratchpad

To help you capture those ideas that aren’t quite ready to catalog into the structured format of Notebook.ai, we’ve also added a personal freeform scratchpad for every user to write whatever they want in. Happy worldbuilding! :)

But wait, there’s more!

Those were just all the features we’ve released since we last spoke! As of today (just in time for our birthday!) there’s one more feature I want to announce to everyone that has been requested over and over since our launch.

You can now invite other creators to collaborate in your universes with you.

You’ll notice universes now have a “Contributors” tab when editing them. From that tab you can invite anyone — by email address — to collaborate on that universe with you. They’ll be able to see its contents, create and edit content within it, and their additions will show up with a “from contributor” tag for you. And, of course, any change they make will show up in changelogs, so you can feel confident that your universe is safe in your own hands.

You can now invite others to collaborate within your universe!

If you invite a user that doesn’t have a Notebook.ai account, they’ll automatically be added as a collaborator when they sign up for an account, or if you invite someone that already has an account they’ll immediately be able to start contributing. So invite your friends and make great worlds together, and don’t forget you can share them with the masses when you’re happy with them too!

And the best part? If you’ve got a premium membership you can automatically share that with anyone you invite to collaborate with you, extending their account at no cost to you to also have every premium feature you have while working within your universe! That means no worrying about permissions or who can do what; everyone can collaborate together and let their worldbuilding juices flow with no limits!

Last words from your humble developer

I’ve already said thank you a million times, and I probably will continue to do so until y’all beg me to stop. I’m incredibly excited about the future of Notebook.ai and can’t wait to see what another year brings us.

Thank you, each and every one of you,

Andrew

Happy worldbuilding!