Managing books

Creating a book is as simple and straightforward as it can get. In fact, the first time you use Novelitist, creating your first book is the only thing you can do. There are currently no restrictions on the number of books you can create and hold in your library at any one time.

You can then edit your book, backup your book on your computer, restore it as you please, or delete it definitively.

Let's see how that entire process unfolds with a simple example. We are creating a new book, then we backup it, then we delete it, and finally, we restore it from the backup. (Note: you cannot see the file open dialog box in the screen capture, but it's there).

Deleting books is hard

Sometimes you need to delete a book. Maybe you've created it by mistake, with the wrong template, or you just can't bear the sight of it anymore. It happens.

Like with sections, we make it difficult for you to accidentally delete a book. Even after you've done it, if you followed the best practice of regularly backing-up your book as a file on your computer, recovering and restoring your work is trivial.

Backup as a file

Backing up your work as a file on your computer deserves a few words. The ability to download any of your books as a simple single file on your computer means that, at any time, even when offline or after you've decided to stop using Novelitist, you are firmly in possession of your work. Also, should anything go awry with our systems (it happens), your data is safe with you.

The counterpart of the file backup is its restoration. You can restore a book from a backup at any time. Note: the restoration will overwrite the live version, if it's still there.

The Novelitist file format is a simple, human readable file (straightforward JSON, for the tech savvy). You can extract your work from it using any text editor.

TIP: Copying the backup files to your local Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, etc. folder, thus automatically saving them in your private cloud storage, provides additional guarantee that your work is safe.

NOTE: currently, backups do not support images. Only your text content, with the image references in it, will be backed up, not the actual binary image data.