Thomas Muirhead

Written by

Thomas Muirhead

18 February 2022

Co-Ownership

Novlr: The Creator Economy, Rewritten for Storytellers

The creator economy

Please note: Our plans for co-ownership are still being formulated and will continue to evolve as we engage with our writers on the best way to implement it. Consequently, some of the information below might be outdated.

For up-to-date information on writer-ownership of Novlr, visit The Future of Novlr, and register your interest to stay in the loop.


There are exciting changes happening at Novlr. We’re becoming the platform for creative writing – and crucially, the first creative writing platform owned by the writers who use it. 

A changing landscape

Kim and I started Novlr seven years ago to solve one small problem and to solve it well. We wanted to create an online writing tool built for writers, because it didn’t exist. We feel we’ve achieved that, and a large part of that achievement is thanks to the thousands of writers who joined us on that journey.

But the world has changed, and the opportunities for creators have changed. To respond to that, Novlr is changing as well.

A bolder vision

To empower writers to succeed, Novlr needs to be more than the best writing tool. It needs to be a place to learn, a place to craft, a place to polish, a place to build a readership and engage with them directly, a place to find your community, and crucially, a place to earn from your words.

We want to provide all the tools and services a writer could need at any point in their journey from words to readers. Whether you just want to write for the love of it, or take your novel on a publishing journey, we’ll have the platform to allow you to do it.

It matters who owns Novlr

The most important change is ensuring Novlr’s mission – empowering writers to succeed – is reflected in who drives and benefits from Novlr. Novlr has flourished because of you, the incredible writers that use the platform. You are the ones who support us with our mission.

We want to take that partnership further. We don’t just mean by asking you what features you would like us to build. It’s much more fundamental than that. We want you to have a choice in taking an active role in governing Novlr and defining its direction.

We want Novlr to be the first majority writer-owned creative writing platform – a massive cooperative of writers. We’ll be a startup owned by its users, rather than external shareholders, and yes, that means when we’re profitable the profits will go to you, the creators that use Novlr. If Novlr makes lots of money, you’ll receive a share of that money, because it’s the users of Novlr who will be creating that value. It also means that on big decisions on the company’s direction etc., it will be the writers who have the majority vote.

Joining Start.coop

In really exciting news, we’re going to be helped through this process by an amazing team of people at Start.coop. It’s an accelerator for businesses that are keen to set themselves up in a way that the people who add value to a platform – like writers using Novlr – are the people who gain if that business succeeds. They will guide us through the process and help us work out the best approach.

Starting a conversation

Today is about a beginning, because exactly how we’ll make all this happen isn’t clear yet. Today is the first of many communications, and we hope to hear from you. We’ll be holding regular video drop-in sessions to hear what you all think, to answer any questions, to learn what would be the most effective way to take the company forward.

Over the next few weeks/months we’ll begin to shape a plan together as to how we can make some of these ideas a reality – and we’ll need your help to do that. 

So please come talk to us about what these changes mean for Novlr, and what it will mean for us to be writer-owned. The details of the video drop-in sessions will be here in the Reading Room, posted in our Instagram stories, and on Twitter.

If you’d like to register your interest in owning Novlr, visit our signup page here.