While looking over the list of sponsor offers for this year’s National Novel Writing Month, I noticed a similarity among them: Subscriptions are dominant. Pay up, writer! And keep paying, forever! [evil laughter here]
Here’s a look at the sponsors that are offering novel-writing editors (ie. a text editor, but tailored for writing fiction):
| Dabble | Subscription |
| World Anvil | Subscription or Lifetime purchase ($650 U.S.) |
| NovelPad | Subscription |
| First Draft Pro | Subscription |
| Campfire Write | Subscription or Lifetime purchase (by module) |
| 4thewords | Subscription |
| Storyist | One time purchase |
| Scrivener | One time purchase |
Monthly pricing starts at $4 at the low end and the high end varies quite a bit, but seems to be mostly in the $15-20 range. Interestingly, Novlr (apparently not a sponsor this year) sent out an email today noting that its pricing is changing, going from $10 a month to $18. Yikes. But you can now also write one full novel for free, so if you think you only have one book in you, you’re set! Otherwise, that’s a serious case of inflation.
Conversely, I got an email recently from Ulysses announcing a drop in price, from $49 per year to $39. They claim research showed it was their “sweet spot.” What does it mean that one company is jacking up their prices while another drops theirs? It may mean the same thing–both are underperforming and they’ve each taken different approaches to shoring up revenue. I don’t know how successful Novlr will be (I think even $10 a month is too much), but their new pricing puts them more in line with most of the subscription software out there (again, Ulysses and a few others being exceptions).
Now, I have previously established that I’m no fan of software as a service (SaaS), so I’m not going to rant about it yet again, just note that it’s a little depressing to see so many developers turn to it. Subscription fatigue is real, not to mention there are plenty of good one-time purchase options that will work just fine. Two of them are in the above list! Also, you don’t need to go full Harlan Ellison and write out your novel longhand on a legal pad, but Macs come with Pages, Windows comes with WordPad and both will allow you to write an entire novel. Want to go minimalist? Try TextEdit and Notepad instead. Notepad even has dark mode now!
The main thing is while these tools may offer nice-looking interfaces and handy tools, Steven Erikson didn’t use any of them, and he’s written like two tonnes of novels, at least. Stephen King has written probably a billion pages, only half of them being the uncut version of The Stand. Don’t pay these people a monthly fee, just write. Write write write. Spend the money on important things, like muffins and a really nice mouse pad.
