Customer Reviews

NewNovelist 2.0 [Novel Writing Software]

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

This program is really good for organizing your thoughts. If that was all I wanted to use it for I would have given it 5 stars. However, there are some vast deficiencies. The biggest problem in my opinion is with the text editor. There is no spell check, you cant tab to begin new paragraphs, you can't change your font or write anything in bold, italics, or underline, cant set margins, cant indent, etc. Basically the text editor is non existant. Its a shell and thats all.

Aside from that I feel like it doesnt really fit for all kinds of writing. The descriptions in the story creation part are vague. They say that they are like that to give you room for imagination. But the problem is that they are so vague its almost as if it told you nothing at all. They kind of dont make any sense.

It seems to only offer one view point to a story. Their process is stuck on Hero vs. Antagonist. There is no story line for two heroes or two antognists. Plus the antagonist is assumed to be bad when not all books have a bad character in that sense. For example, this doesnt really work for romances.

I found that as I wrote and then moved on to the next stage, that stage turned out to be what I thought I was already writing, or that I wasnt sure what stage what I wrote belonged in. I ended up abandoning that part of the program all together and went back to using MS Word. Now I just use it as a place to store ideas and organize my characters.

Their website says you can get a full refund if you arent satisfied but they offer no phone number or email address to do that and the support people dont write back. I started trying to get my money back over a week before the time ran out and no one contacted me. Now its past the date and I'm stuck with a program that doesnt quite do all it boasts.

In my opinion its not worth the money.

newnovelist isn't worth anywhere near fifty dollars. The story types/categories are extremely limiting and don't even come close to portraying the full range of possible genres that a novel can fall into. Once you finish the "wizard" (which is where you title your story and choose a category) the program isn't interactive at all. There are no prompts and the help is vague and doesn't cover more than the most basic principles of how a novel is structured. You learn more about writing a novel by reading good books than you do from newnovelist's help sections. There's no text/grammar editor. There's not even a spellcheck. The one saving grace is that it does allow you to take extremely detailed notes about every possible element of your novel, and to access them conviently while you're writing. However, it doesn't offer any help in creating a timeline or outline for your story, so there's no real way to bring those notes together. All it has is a universal notes section where you can write your own timeline without any help from the program. It's slightly more convienient than keeping your notes in Windows Notepad and having it minimized while you work, but outside of it's organizational properties, it does virtually nothing. Microsoft Office 2000 offers more in depth and useful advice about writing structure and style than newnovelist does. Because I already have it, I'll keep it just because it DOES help me with my notes, but given the choice again, I wouldn't buy it.
EDIT: I would like to add that when I emailed the people at newnovelist to complain, their response was fast and courteous. They actually went to the trouble of calling me on the phone to remind me that newnovelist comes with a money back guarantee. When I told them that I had done too much work on my story with newnovelist to return it, they offered me a free copy of the upgrade, which is coming out later this summer. They also told me that the 30 day guarantee is basically a guideline and that if I still wasn't happy when they send me the upgrade, I could return both for a refund. I've never encountered a company that took the satisfaction of its customers so seriously. Although I haven't gotten the upgrade yet, I've been told that it not only has a spellcheck and editor, but that it also addresses several other concerns that I had directly. I look forward to using the new program, and I'll come back and let everybody know if it's any better.

I ordered this a few days ago, the package arrived yesterday and I'm absolutely thrilled with this program. I consider myself to be an experienced writer, but it has taught me many new things and I'm very pleased with it.

It takes you right from the beginning of writing any kind of story, and takes you through each step. It doesn't give you all the answers, and the finished result won't be a clichéd or formulaic story. Don't think that this program will just hand you the skeleton for your story. Rather, it shows you examples of other skeletons and informs you about what pieces you might think about including. At no point does the program restrict your creativity.

The software is divided into sections, where you can design the book's different worlds and locations (including sections with everything from economical history to creatures to the smells of the place), your own characters (with lots of helpful hints to get you started and many different screens to develop your characters in), the storyline and much more.

I'm very glad I bought this product and I think that any future author needs this useful piece of software. It's turned about two hundred documents of scrappy, disorganised notes into one neat file and my writing is storming ahead. I fully recommend this product.

I purchased this software approximately 1 month ago. It shipped quickly and I received it within a week of purchase.

The layout is simplistic, more of an organztional tool for the scatterbrained among us, rather than one of those restrictive plug-your-own-character-into-a-generic-plot-line programs. I was looking for software that would gently provide me with a loose structure instead of forcing me down narrow alleyways of predicability, and this program does just that.

Some of the previous reviews mention the lack of spellcheck, ability to bold, italicize, etc., but the version I have includes these features. It also includes an audio readback feature which I find extremely helpful with sentence structure and flow.

I can not give this product five stars because in the process of transferring Word files into NewNovelist however, I encountered a bug that caused me to be unable to open a specific saved 'novel' without the program closing inexplicably. While the online help fAQ provided little help, the customer service folks were very attentive and apologetic. Although they were unable to offer me a fix for my specific problem, and assure me this is an anomaly, they did refund my purchase price (including shipping) without my even asking them to do so.

So while I'm a bit skittish to lose any more work should such an error repeat itself, and will no doubt back-up all of my writing with Word, I look forward to giving NewNovelist another shot.

A fine product from a company with an almost unheard of level of dedication to its customers' satisfaction.

I had been toying with the idea of writing my own Novel for pretty much most of my adult years, but never knew that apart from sitting in a darkened room for a year or so and wracking my brains for ideas and poetic prose all by myself, that indeed there could be such a thing as software to help me actually compose, develop and complete my novel to publishing standard.

Enter - New Novelist - what a brilliant - well thought out and completely revolutionary invention!!!

When I found out that help is out there, I assessed 3 or 4 different types of software that claim to help you write a book or novel. Hands down - I found New Novelist be the Best of The Lot!

The software asked me to firstly outline my characters, their backgrounds etc, then moved onto the setting of my novel, locations and situations, it added critical elements to any thriller such as suspense, suggestions for endings, suggestions for beginnings and truly guided me all the way through my novel. Unbelievably I am half way through a 400 page novel beginning from scratch just three weeks ago. I'm so excited that I've already started contacting publishers to take on my Novel which I am confident of completing within the next two weeks - Thank you New Novelist!!!

If anyone out there has ever used Macromedia Director to create digital movies - you will know the degree of depth that this software goes into to create the perfect masterpiece - Just Imagine New Novelist to be the same thing but applied to writing books - What a breath of Fresh Air!

Good Luck
M.Seth
UK

This software "New Novelist" is not at all practical for anyone who is trying to write. It also does not run well with Vista. I definitely would not recommend it to anyone. What it mainly lacks is the ability to see and put all the information you entered together. It's more like hide and seek or out of sight, out of mind. I tried to print what I wrote so I could peice it together on paper but it didn't have the ability to conform to my needs. Sorry! Just not realistic.
L Laverriere, Amazon customer

I work as a professional copywriter and have a lot of usage of scripts and copywriting material.

I am now thinking of a storyline for a book I want to write and found newnovelist software on Amazon which I thought may help me out.

This software is really fun to work with, and exciting too as it enables me to formulate my thoughts and provides lots of ideas on improving the storyline. I thought I had everything planned perfectly until I started to use newnovelist. I found so many new ways of thinking about the structure and outline of my book and now feel that it has improved my writing immeasurably

Delivery was swift and I sincerely cannot put a price on how much it has helped me with my masterpiece.

I would recommend this software to anyone

D.Broadrick

This review is for NewNovelist 2.0 running on XP.

Summary: NewNovelist 2.0 is a type of writing software known as "story development software" that aids in the proper structuring of a novel, short-story, or even a screenplay. Other examples of story development software include Dramatica, StoryWeaver, John Truby's Blockbuster, Power Structure, Blake Snyder's Save The Cat software, StoryBase, TotallyWrite, and WritePro.

In addition to NewNovelist2.0, I own Dramatica, StoryWeaver, Save The Cat, StoryBase, TotallyWrite, and WritePro. I've evaluated the others in great detail.

My Reviewer Qualifications: I've written a few yet unpublished short stories and screenplays. To my surprise, the screenplays were highly praised by Hollywood analysts for the writing and the strong structure. I successfully completed several college writing classes, LongRidge Writers Group (short stories and articles), Writer's Digest School (short stories), and Writers Bootcamp (intense 18 month online screenwriting course).

Now on with the review already:

General Comments: NewNovelist 2.0 is really geared more for intermediate to advanced writers. That's not to say that beginning writers won't get anything out of the software. However, to really appreciate the powerful story development concepts underlying this software, you must first become a student of story development and structure.

Hint: Google the story development software titles that I listed above. Read the websites' materials. That will help you to understand deep story development concepts. Two of the best sites are John Truby's Blockbuster and Blake Snyder's Save The Cat. Their software is slanted at screenwriters but the concepts really apply to good storytelling in general.

Ease of Use: NewNovelist 2.0 is simple to use. Pick your story category. It's based on selecting a specific story category and from one of several story types. After that, the software auto-generates a template with the key steps to your story. Each step includes relevant educational text and an expandable area to write as little of much as you want for that story step. Writing is exactly like using MS Word.

Features: There are several nice "resource" features for developing detailed characters, places, objects, and research. Also, I'm very impressed by the audio readback feature. That's right! NewNovelist 2.0 can actually read back what you wrote. It's extremely helpful to hear the words out loud (and not my own) because you get an instant sense of how it sounds to the reader. Very nice!

Help: I can't really comment on help too much. Fortunately, I haven't had to rely on the software or company help. I think the educational text within each story step is a good start. But as I noted earlier, this software was built on some very powerful story development concepts. NewNovelist 2.0 doesn't teach those concepts but it's best to learn them first to get the most out of this software.

Flexibility:
1) Let's say the software generates a ten-step story, but you know your story should have twelve steps. You can change that.

2) Let's say the software generates a ten-step story, but you know that step 7 should occur earlier. You can change that.

3) Let's say you want to use your own story structure. You can do that.

4) Let's say you don't believe in story structure and just want to write what comes to mind. You can do that too.

Issues: I've used the software extensively for about a month. There's one very minor bug in which a character's type (e.g. hero, antagonist, etc.) is displayed via an icon and a radio button after saving. After I saved, the icon represents the correct character type that I selected but the radio button doesn't. As far as I'm concerned, this is a cosmetic bug.

Overall: This is a very nice story development software. For all that you get, the price is great! Intermediate to advanced story writers will really appreciate the many nice features and flexibility of this story writing tool. And beginning writers will get the most if they do some research and self-education before buying.

Do not bother to buy this product if you are running Windows Vista, especially on a new PC with a 64 bit operating system. I emailed the company prior to purchase to make sure it would run on my PC. They would not say whether or not it would work on my PC or not, just that if it did not, they offer a money-back guarantee.

How could I lose, right? Where is my money? The money-back guarantee turned out to be only as good as their word, which was worthless. I am now out $60 for software I cannot use. All I can do now is warn other potential buyers to stay away from this product.

If you're running Vista and you purchase newnovelist 2.0, be prepared for the window "NewNovelist 2.0 has stopped working" and "please wait while windows searches for a solution to this problem" to pop up.

You click ok, and then another window pops up "A problem caused the program to stop working correctly. Windows will close the program and notifty you if a solution is available." The software absolutely will not run.

I have been using windows based computers since 1990, I uninstalled and reinstalled the software correctly, same result. I checked the FAQ's on Newnovelist's website, and my user account control was turned on, as specified in their FAQ. I am an experienced computer user, this should not occur with software that is truly compatible with Vista.

It notes on the box "Vista Compliant". I'm guessing that's marketing-speak for "not really compatible, but something close."

I then sent them an email explaining this problem. And now I'm just waiting.

I'll let you know if I receive a satisfactory answer or a solution to the program not functioning on a Vista computer, but if you are running Vista, I would not recommend you purchase this software.