In late 2023/early 2024, well before I started writing the space regency, I was trying to brainstorm it on Sudowrite using the free starting credits, and…didn’t get really anywhere with it. This was I think my first experience with AIs other than the image generator Midjourney, and that probably had more to do with my lack of success than anything in particular about Sudowrite. So, I got curious about Novelcrafter, partly because I heard good things about its abilities to store and organize world-building notes, and partly because it could integrate with the Claude AI family, which I use fairly heavily on the free plan; mostly for dictation cleanup and sometimes brainstorming. So, I opened an account on Novelcrafter and one on Openrouter.ai, because it was one of the options for bringing an AI into Novelcrafter, bought a few credits on Openrouter to pay for the AI usage, and imported the space regency (now at 16000 words) into the free trial of Novelcrafter…

Basically, Novelcrafter is a sort of web browser-based competitor to Scrivener, with a more polished interface and the ability to talk to AIs. Even moreso than Scrivener, I feel like the ability to keep the supporting info on hand paralyzed my ability to actually write fiction in this tool, and if I went to Novelcrafter full time, I would probably do the actual writing the same way I do now: dictation (or longhand to dictation), followed by AI transcription and cleanup, followed by human cleanup and expansion in a traditional word processor like Word, followed by copy/pasting into Novel-Wrangling Widget. Or the occasional Word document with a freshly typed fragment of story, copy-pasted into Novel-Wrangling Widget.

I’m not wild about Novelcrafter being web-based rather than desktop-based, and it doesn’t have Scrivener’s ability to import any old documents, webpages, or images that you find into your Research area as references: the only images you can use in Novelcrafter are cover images for specific projects or thumbnails for Codex entries. The Codex’s tendency to insist on tidy entries (Characters, Locations, Lore, etc) may be necessary to help the chosen AI cope with your project, but I found it more intimidating than Scrivener’s Research area, where the classifications tend to feel more like guidelines.

After some online research, I ultimately dealt with the Codex by asking the AI (Claude Haiku 3 at this point) to create summaries for all characters mentioned in the text, then all locations, then all political entities and factions, and then I singled out a key concept (the videos the characters are always making) for Claude to summarize, and then I copy-pasted these summaries into individual Codex entries. I had to do some tweaking along the way, and this was 1-2 hours worth of work even with the AI help. Also, Claude initially didn’t seem to recognize the WIP text in the “Write” area of Novelcrafter, and started listing off characters who don’t exist in the WIP (Jane Bennet, Mr. Phillips, etc). I ended up copy-pasting the whole WIP text into the chat window and referring back to that when prompting. (With the low end Claude Haiku, this took surprising few credits/tokens, maybe thirty cents worth, American?)

I then switched to the more advanced Claude Sonnet 3.7 for outlining, critiquing and brainstorming and came away with some useful stuff that I copied over to Scrivener’s Research area and Novelcrafter’s Snippets area.

The short version is that Novelcrafter is most useful to someone planning to write the next four-million-word epic fantasy with a cast of thousands, who is open to AI help in brainstorming, outlining and organizing his work, and is willing to pay for his subscription to a web-browser tool and separately pay for his AI usage.

That’s not me. I found Novelcrafter fun and interesting, but can’t at this time justify dropping $140 per year for the Novelcrafter tier that would be most useful to me, or switching Novel-Wrangling Widgets with two works in progress going on, one of them being book three in a projected trilogy (with possible spinoffs). After I get the third Hunter Healer King book done, I might be in a better position to burn a bunch of Openrouter credits to organize the known details of the HHK setting with AI help, in preparation for any potential spinoffs, and do the same for the space regency setting. In that situation, I would probably at least think about revisiting Novelcrafter. Or, I might just do it through the chat function in Openrouter, which is kludgy but doable.