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 sign-in page. Confirm your address when the mail arrives — it is what lets you reset a password later.
2. Add an OpenRouter key
This is the one fiddly step, and it is a one-off. webnovellm does not run the AI models; you bring a key for a service that does, and you pay them directly for what you use. Full walkthrough with screenshots →
Your key is stored in your browser, sent with each request, and never written to our database.
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 →