Keep your research, ideas, and character faces right beside your manuscript

Writer Studio gives you research notes for novelists that live inside the project instead of a separate app: book-level notes for research, ideas, and cut passages, plus image references — a cover, character and location boards — attached to the entities they describe. None of it touches your manuscript's word count; notes and media are writing aids, kept deliberately apart from the text you're actually writing.

What makes these research notes for novelists different from a stray file?

Proximity and connection. A note is a free-standing document that belongs to a book — open it from the Notes section in the Explorer, below that book's structure, and it edits like prose: an editor tab, autosave, the same typography as a scene. Create one from the command palette, or right-click a scene, chapter, or part and choose Add Note to get a note already linked to it.

A note can also link to structure items and story entities on its own — these are navigation links, not anchors: clicking one jumps you there, and nothing about the target changes. That's the boundary that keeps a note a note: for confirmed story knowledge, use the Book Wiki instead. A note that grows entity-shaped is a sign to turn it into a wiki card by hand.

Do note words count toward my goals or export?

No — never. A note can run to a couple thousand words of poison-lore research or a cut scene you're not ready to lose, and it moves your daily word count, your book totals, and every writing goal by exactly zero. Notes are also excluded from every export format, so nothing you jot down accidentally ships in a reader's copy.

That separation is what makes notes safe to use freely: dump a full worldbuilding tangent, park a passage you cut mid-revision, or draft ideas for the sequel, without second-guessing what it does to your stats. Notes still count for something that matters, though — they're part of project search, so a search across your book returns matches inside your notes alongside your scenes.

How do I keep character faces and location boards beside my writing?

Attach an image where it belongs. A book gets one cover — the only image carried into export. A character, a location, or any custom entry type with media turned on gets an avatar plus an ordered reference board of multiple images, so you can see a face or a place while you write about it. And any note can hold one or more images inline, for a moodboard next to your research.

Uploads accept PNG, JPG, and WebP. From there you can replace an image, reorder a reference board, add a short caption, or remove an image to Trash — the same handful of actions everywhere media shows up, whether it's a built-in Character card or an entry type you defined yourself. See the full media reference for details.

Are my reference images safe, local, and out of my manuscript?

Yes on all three counts. Images are ordinary project files, not cloud uploads: they travel with the project folder to another machine, survive a database rebuild, and are covered by Trash, backups, and whole-project restore, the same as the rest of your manuscript structure. If a file ever goes missing, the surface shows a placeholder instead of breaking.

And only the cover reaches your exported book. Avatars, reference boards, and note images stay writing aids on your side of the project — they never enter scene prose, so your manuscript stays text, exactly as you wrote it.

Download Writer Studio and start keeping your research and references where you actually write — it's free.