Initially, I wanted to share this blog along with the announcement that The Novelist hit its first stable release. That plan changed after getting all that useful feedback, love, and ideas from folks all around the world who’ve trusted my application for their books and novels. Since I was waiting for some extra feedback for the newest release, I took the time to quickly finalize the website and blog and share a few details of how the development goes, my thoughts for the future, and what you should expect from this place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whether you landed here by accident or because you’ve been using The Novelist for worldbuilding or writing, let me quickly introduce myself. My name is Panagiotis Sakalakis, or Panos for short, and I’m a developer and writer with almost two decades of experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Since I was 18, I was running my own company that offered web development services, 24\/7 technical support, and server setup and maintenance to hundreds of people around the world. It was a very demanding job, one that could wake you at 3:00 AM because a server was down, a website had gotten hacked, or because a client forgot to connect their phone to the internet and they thought their e-commerce store wasn’t working. I also used to work during holidays, when I was at the beach, or on New Year’s Eve. Work never stopped, and after years of being there for all my clients, I started getting more and more exhausted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Since I was a teenager, I had this crazy idea of building my own fictional world. That idea came the moment my father took me for the first time to the Cinema to watch the first Harry Potter<\/em> movie. It became stronger when I watched The Lord of the Rings<\/em> movies, and even stronger when I started reading their books. J. K. Rowling’s<\/em> work was mind-blowing, and I have no words for Middle-earth and what Tolkien<\/em> has managed to create. I mean, the guy created his own freaking languages, and that’s more than enough. But it wasn’t until I read the first Mortal Engines<\/em> book after watching the movie that I knew I had to finally start chasing that dream I had since I was little.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One morning I couldn’t sleep. I started pouring my first cup of coffee and was thinking of a dream I had seen just minutes before I woke up. “Damn, I’d definitely have watched this dream if it was a movie or a TV show”<\/em>, I thought to myself, and that was enough to start up my PC, open a blank document in Google Docs, and start writing the first words. I finished the first chapter, then the second one, then the third one, and as I was writing the sixth chapter, that’s where things started to become a bit more complicated than I originally thought. I mean, writing is the easy part for me; worldbuilding, on the other hand, isn’t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At some point, I had so many characters, locations, factions, events, and other things that my book included that I ended up with hundreds of documents all organized inside folders. Each document also had lots of comments and notes, and somewhere along the way I started getting lost and forgetting important little details. I knew that if I wanted to write a truly good novel, it had to be flawless and without any severe mistakes. Unfortunately, as I continued writing it, it became more complex, and I needed to make sense of everything my world had.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Like many authors, I started looking around for worldbuilding and writing software, and that’s when I found out about Scrivener<\/em>, Vellum<\/em>, Atticus<\/em>, Ulysses<\/em>, and many other similar solutions that people had been using for years. They were all strong, powerful tools that any author in this day and age will appreciate for their books – but they just didn’t cut it for me. Even with these, I still had tons of documents and was constantly switching between apps for different purposes. That’s when I found out about Obsidian<\/em>, a note-taking app that supported third-party plugins and themes made by its community. As a developer, I knew I could code my own plugins and build my own workspace for worldbuilding and book-writing, and so I did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A few months later, I shared that little vault on my Medium<\/em> blog<\/a> in case anyone else wanted to use it for their own novels, and little did I know that vault would bring me new subscribers and, the most important of all, supporters who wanted to say ‘thanks’ by donating. I won’t lie, I wasn’t expecting so much love and support. I called that little vault ‘The Novelist Obsidian Vault’<\/em>, and it was the closest thing that my mind could look at every morning and feel like it had its world under control. Then feedback started landing in my inbox, and I used that to improve the vault even further by offering new updates and more robust versions of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While I loved Obsidian<\/em>, there was only so much I could do with plugins and themes. On the other hand, I had to closely follow the team and update the plugins whenever necessary to avoid breaking the app after an update. It didn’t feel as stable as it should have been, and there was too much work to be done in order to transform it into a true, robust worldbuilding app. Under the hood, though, I was developing my own Markdown-based text editor. It was very simple in the beginning, just offering a simple text editor along with two sections: one for my characters and one for my locations. As months passed, that little experiment ended up being a full solution for any fiction writer who wanted a place for worldbuilding and writing their novels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That little experiment was The Novelist<\/em>, but this time, it wasn’t a vault based on Obsidian<\/em>, but rather a native application for Windows, macOS, and Linux – and the rest is history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the most common questions that people keep asking me is if I have a roadmap for The Novelist<\/em>, so let me start with that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yes, there is a roadmap for the application with many great features that I’m currently building, including more ways to export<\/strong> and move your books elsewhere, automatic synchronization<\/strong> that supports multiple cloud hosting providers and your own custom NAS setup, and robust features for formatting your books<\/strong> without having to deal with another app for that purpose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Currently, the most important part is to make sure that The Novelist<\/em> hits its first stable release, and once that’s done, the second phase will include distributing it to multiple different app stores, including the Microsoft Store<\/strong>, Apple App Store<\/strong>, Arch’s AUR catalogue<\/strong>, and Ubuntu App Center<\/strong>. More will follow in the future and based on user demand and feedback.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I’d also have to sign the app first, and that will eliminate most warnings that current users get when trying to download and install the app for the first time, since operating systems don’t know who built the app and what its purpose is. I’ll create a roadmap page along with options for people to vote, and I’ll share it here once it’s done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And yes, I do have plans to release The Novelist<\/em> for Android, iOS, and iPadOS, but it’s still very early, and making the desktop version as stable as possible is the number one priority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I’ve been having a hard time finding the words for two things: One is the description of myself, since I’m really bad when I try to describe myself. The second one is the early supporters who didn’t just invest their time answering my questions, sending me screenshots and useful feedback, and sharing their ideas and thoughts of what The Novelist<\/em> could eventually become, but also for donating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Since I’ve been unemployed and the app is still in Early Access and only has a total of 3 sales, each donation matters more than most people might think. I wanted to thank every and each of. you who helped me, and the best way I could do that is by building a section specifically for those who’ve been funding the first versions of the app. It’s available in the app’s ‘About’ section and on the Donations page on this website<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If people are donating on their own, that means I’ve done something right, and that brings a smile to my face.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n And heck, that’s not even close to what other people were offering. Some asked to handle the design of the logo, others to help test it with hardware I don’t own, a few to handle some UI inconsistencies, and a couple of people asked if I was open to selling a percentage of it – which I had to respectfully decline. People have also been sharing it on forums and online communities, and to say thanks, I also launched an affiliate program through Gumroad<\/em>.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n So, yeah, finding the right words to thank these people is the hardest thing. There aren’t any that I could think of, apart from giving you a million thanks and the promise that, as long as I live, The Novelist<\/em> will stay a privacy-focused and local-first app with a free version that anybody will be able to use for worldbuilding and book-writing without having to open their wallets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With that in mind, welcome aboard, and feel free to share your thoughts, ideas, and feedback in the comments section. I have already written a few guides and stories that I want to publish here in the upcoming days, so stay tuned for more news, updates, and behind-the-scenes information from the development and ongoing plans of The Novelist<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I will also start promoting all the books that people wrote using the app, their experiences, and what they learned during their worldbuilding and writing phases. Interviews with authors and editors are also along the way, but for the time being, I’m focusing explicitly on releasing the first stable release.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thank you for reading! This is going to be one of the many stories that will follow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":53,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-updates"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenovelistapp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenovelistapp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenovelistapp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenovelistapp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenovelistapp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/thenovelistapp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68,"href":"https:\/\/thenovelistapp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40\/revisions\/68"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenovelistapp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/53"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenovelistapp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenovelistapp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenovelistapp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Behind the scenes – October 18, 2026<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
A huge shoutout to all my supporters<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Welcome to The Novelist’s blog!<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Till soon,
Panos<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"