What is Notebook.ai?

Most writers have at least one old notebook lying around somewhere, full of old story ideas, interesting characters, enchanting locations, or a myriad of other margin-scribbled thoughts. Some writers have piles of old "story idea" documents in their favorite cloud storage. Others still have their brilliant, rich worlds fermenting in their heads.

Notebook.ai is a worldbuilding tool that organizes, saves, and helps in fully fleshing out your fictional world, your way.

Your digital notebook takes full advantage of being just that — digital. Instead of fitting notes in the margins of pages past, you'll always have space to expand every idea. Instead of reading backward in your story to find out how old you said that one character was, every little detail about them is organized and just a click away. You don't need to flip around the pages in your old notebook to jump from a character to their birthplace to other characters born there; every "link" between your ideas is a real link, and lets you click to jump from one to the next.

How do I use it?

It's actually really easy. Just sign up and create something — anything — and you're doing it right.

Most users start by creating a universe to hold everything they create afterwards. You can call it your novel's title, "My Universe", or whatever you want. You'll be prompted to enter a description and a few other questions, but everything's entirely optional.

Once you have a universe, try creating a character or two for your main characters. You'll notice the process of creating a notebook page is exactly the same regardless of what you're creating. You click create, you're presented with a bunch of optional fields to fill out about it, and you're done. You can create a location for where your story takes place, and items for any relevant objects or trinkets in your story.

Once you've got the basics, just expand outward for your story! Right now, there are 28 different page types you can create in Notebook.ai: characters, locations, items, buildings, conditions, continents, countries, creatures, deities, floras, foods, governments, groups, jobs, landmarks, languages, lores, magics, planets, races, religions, scenes, schools, sports, technologies, towns, traditions, and vehicles.

Separate your worlds with Universes

In addition to the page types detailed above, you can also create Universes.

You can think of a universe as a bucket of time or space: a literal universe, a world, a country, a time period, even just the park down the street — your universe contains everything related to the plot you're building, and lets you focus entirely on just what's relevant right now, even when you plan multiple stories or worlds in Notebook.ai.

When you create a character, a location, or anything else within Notebook.ai, you'll be asked what universe it belongs to. When you visit that universe's page in your notebook later, you'll see everything inside it from one convenient place.

Keep your readers engrossed with a rich world of consistent details

Having an in-depth reference while writing lets you quickly look up even the smallest of details when you need them and then keep writing uninterrupted. You'll never again have to read backward to find out what shirt color Simon was wearing, or what city you said Elise was from. Everything you need is organized and at your fingertips.

If you're not the type to build your world out completely before writing, Notebook.ai can also be used while writing for the same kind of reference. Each time you introduce a new character, simply create a character page for them (it's fast!). When you describe anything about them, you can jot it down in its rightful place and you can then refer back to it later.

And, of course, if the default fields don't cover every little detail of your world, you can always create new categories and fields on any content type, like "biggest weakness" on characters or "tallest skyscraper" for locations. It's your world — track anything you want!

Build family trees and organization hierarchies with ease

Because Notebook.ai is smart, we help out whenever we can when you link two pages together.

Family trees are a great example of this. If you created a small family of three — say, Alice and Bob and their son Carl — you can link them together with each character's Family tab. The fields there allow you to select from other characters you've created in that universe and set relationships, like father, mother, sibling, spouse, or child.

When you're editing Alice and say Bob's her spouse and Carl's her son, we automatically edit Bob and Carl's pages also. For Bob, we know (and save) that Alice is his spouse; and for Carl, we automatically detect what gender Alice is and note that Alice is his mother. It all happens automatically, so your family trees almost build themselves.

You'll see similar "deep linking" when creating Locations or Groups. Creating sub-groups will automatically create parent groups, alliances and rivalships will automatically save to all groups involved, and nesting locations within each other will automatically link back to the parent location as well.

How much does it cost?

How does it compare to other worldbuilding software?

Who owns the ideas I store in Notebook.ai?

You do, 100%. We've written more about this in our privacy policy.

Additionally, all content is private by default and only accessible by you. When you click the "share" link on any content, you're given the option to mark either that individual page or the universe it lives in as "public" or "private". A public universe allows viewers to click around and see every page in that universe, while a public page in a private universe allows only that page to be viewed. You can mark anything private again at any time and it will be instantly applied.