Draftwell Pro

Draftwell Pro is a writing app for novelists that keeps the whole book in one place and never leaves your machine. You write your scenes, manage chapters, track character relationships, build story timelines, store research notes per scene or entity, and even draft your query letter, all without juggling a dozen separate tools.

It tracks your work for you. Time spent writing and words added each session are logged automatically with no setup. The clock starts the moment you type and stops after a few minutes of inactivity, and every session records your word-count change, so your goals stay accurate even on the days you forget to track anything.

Where it goes deeper than most is analytics. Beyond word counts, you get readability scores (Flesch, Fog, SMOG, grade level), vocabulary diversity, sentence rhythm, dialogue ratio, a pacing index, and adverb, filler, and glue-word density. You can see which scenes drag, which chapters are unbalanced, and how your style shifts across the whole manuscript.

Privacy and ownership are the foundation. Everything is 100% local: no cloud, no account, no subscription. Your manuscript lives in a single file on your machine, automatic tiered backups guard against accidental loss, and nothing needs an internet connection. You own your data completely.

There are useful extras too: an offline thesaurus for looking up synonyms mid-draft, full-text search across the manuscript including scene notes, direct export to DOCX and PDF, per-scene revision history so you can roll back overwrites, and a library for managing a whole series from one place.

Be clear on who it is not for. It runs on Windows and macOS, but there is no Linux or browser version. It is single-user on a single machine, with no sync or co-author sharing. And because it assumes long-form narrative structure, it is not the right tool for screenwriters, poets, academic writers, journalists, or technical writers, who all need formats and features it does not offer.

Draftwell Pro is a one-time purchase, regularly $19.99 and currently 50% off at $9.99 while the maker builds an early user base. There is a usage-based trial of around ten working hours so you can test the workflow before buying. It was built by a solo developer for his wife, who has refined it over years of her own writing before it went public.