Draftwell Pro is a local writing app that organizes your book, tracks your time, analyzes your prose, and manages your submission pipeline — all on your own machine, with no subscription and no AI.
Most writing software was designed by product managers, not writers. You end up managing the tool instead of the book.
No record of when Elena first appeared, what she looks like, or why she's afraid of horses. It's in your head — somewhere.
You've been "working on it" for eight months. How many actual writing hours is that? You don't know. You've never known.
Forty agents, each with different portals, response windows, and statuses — tracked in a Google Sheet that hasn't been touched since March.
$79/year to fight a compile step that does nothing but remind you the interface was designed for screenwriters in 2007.
Your book lives in a clean three-level hierarchy: Book → Chapter → Scene. A sidebar shows your full structure at a glance. Click a scene, write in it. That's the whole interface.
Real formatting — bold, italic, headings, lists.
Changes saved automatically whenever you've written something new. You will never lose a sentence.
A built-in Notes tab on every scene, plus unlimited custom tabs for research, character beats, or reference material.
Right-click any word for synonyms. Offline-first — works without internet.
Known characters, locations, and items glow in the editor as you type — continuity problems become impossible to miss.
Six analytical dashboards. No guessing whether your second act is thin, your protagonist is underwritten, or your prose reads like a legal document.
Six industry metrics on one screen. See where your prose excels and where it needs work — at a glance.
Includes: Flesch, Flesch-Kincaid, ARI, Coleman-Liau, Gunning Fog, SMOG, MATTR, Dialogue Ratio, Pacing Index, Adverb Density, Filler Word %, and more.
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Every character, location, item, and event in your story — tracked in a live panel alongside the editor. When you're writing a scene, Draftwell Pro surfaces exactly which entities appear in it. No digging.
Link any entity to any other — with a direction, a label, an in-story date, and a description.
Auto-detects recurring capitalized names in your prose you haven't formally defined yet. Surfaces the characters you forgot to track.
See which scenes mention each entity and how often. Reveals the chapters where a character goes completely dark.
One search bar. Scene prose, scene names, chapter names, notes, outlines, brainstorming, entity names, relationships, and every custom research tab — all indexed, all searchable, all click-to-navigate.
Searches the body text of every scene, plus chapter names, scene names, scene notes, book outline, brainstorming, and all custom tabs you've created.
Every tracked character, location, item, event, and entity relationship is searchable by name — surfaced alongside prose results in one unified view.
Every result links directly to its location. Click a scene result — you land on that scene. No hunting through the sidebar.
A full submission pipeline built as a drag-and-drop Kanban board. Every agent, publisher, and contest — tracked with dates, follow-ups, and a complete paper trail.
Drag cards between columns to update status · Status changes log automatically in the comment thread · Archive old queries without losing history
Draftwell Pro tracks every writing session automatically. Open a book, start typing — you're clocked in. Step away for 30 minutes — you're clocked out. No buttons to push. No logging.
The timer starts when you start writing. Elapsed time shows live in the top navigation bar.
Step away from your desk and the session ends cleanly. No runaway timer logging three hours of you staring at the ceiling.
Derived automatically from word count snapshots at clock-in and clock-out, across all sessions.
Session goals are simple: pick a word count target, watch Draftwell Pro track your progress in real time as you write. Confetti fires when you hit it.
Set a word target. Watch the bar fill as you type. As simple as it sounds.
Because finishing deserves a moment. Confetti fires when you cross the line.
Every goal stays on record. Total words written toward goals, tracked across all sessions.
A Kanban board for writing-adjacent work: research to finish, scenes to rewrite, people to email. Anything with a status and a deadline.
Write a character name in a task and Draftwell Pro surfaces a direct link to that entity's detail view · Start & due dates generate a progress bar that turns amber at 80%, red when overdue
When you're ready to get your book out of Draftwell Pro and into the world, the exporter gives you full control over how it looks.
Draftwell Pro runs entirely on your own computer. Nothing is ever sent to a server. No account required. No cloud. No telemetry.
All data stays on your machine. No internet connection required to write. No sync. No server. No outage that costs you your manuscript.
Each book is a single .auth file. Back it up, move it, copy it to a USB drive — it's just a file.
Draftwell Pro runs a GFS (Grandfather-Father-Son) backup system automatically. Every time you open a book, a timestamped snapshot is created. If you blew up a chapter at 2am — it's still there.
Last 5 opens · 7 daily · 4 weekly · 12 monthly. Never an infinite pile — capped at ~28 backups per book.
Browse your backup history and compare any snapshot to the current version before restoring.
Worth being direct about.
Draftwell Pro does not generate, suggest, or rewrite your prose. There is no autocomplete. Every word in your manuscript is yours.
Buy it once. No monthly fee. No annual renewal. No "your files are locked until you upgrade" gotcha.
No account required. No data leaves your machine. No server outage that loses your work. No company with access to your story.
No compile step. No corkboard. No snowflake method wizard. No 47 preference panels. A sidebar, an editor, and a lot of data about how you're actually writing.
