Start here
Getting started
From nothing to chapter one, in about five minutes.
There are four things between you and a finished first chapter, and only one of them takes any real effort.
1. Make an account
Email and password at the create-account page. Confirm your address when the mail arrives — it is what lets you reset a password later.
2. Pick how chapters reach a model
The fastest start is one click: Start writing free on the setup card puts you on the free tier — a shared pool of free models, no key and no card. Free models come and go with demand, so expect the occasional slow start; the words cost nothing while you find your feet.
The full catalogue comes from connecting your own key. webnovellm does not run the AI models; you connect an account with a service that does, and you pay them directly for what you use. Press Connect OpenRouter, approve webnovellm, and you are sent straight back — you can create the account on the way through if you do not have one, and switch between the two modes in Settings whenever you like. Full walkthrough with screenshots →
Connecting gives this browser its own key, stored in your browser, sent with each request, and never written to our database. On a second device, connect again rather than copying the key across: each device gets a key you can revoke on its own, so losing a laptop does not mean changing anything on your phone.
The approval screen asks for a credit limit before you authorise. Put a number in it. It caps what this key can ever spend, whatever happens afterwards — and it is far easier to set now than to remember later. We will tell you in Settings if a connected key has no limit.
3. Create a novel
Give it a title and a premise. Put the genre in the premise — “cultivation with ranked realms”, “a LitRPG with status windows”, “slow-burn romance in a flooded port city”. Then pick a writing style, which controls how the prose sounds rather than what it is about. The style is permanent for that novel, so it is worth ten seconds: how to choose →
4. Write chapter one
Type what should happen and press ⌘⏎. A sentence is plenty. The chapter streams in; revise it in plain language as often as you like; accept it when it is right, and you are on chapter two.
If something goes wrong, it is almost always the key or the credit — troubleshooting →