Thomas Muirhead

Written by

Thomas Muirhead

4 March 2022

Co-Ownership

The Future of Novlr: The Creator Economy, Rewritten for Storytellers

Future of Novlr

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 Consequently, some of the information below might be outdated.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.


We’ve had amazing feedback from the community after our announcement that Novlr will be making the switch to a cooperative. It’s just the first step on the journey to making Novlr the home of creative writing and the first writer-owned creator economy platform. 

We’d like to take you through some of the exciting changes that are in the works and get your thoughts, ideas, and feedback on them. Over the next couple of weeks and months, we’ll be releasing a series of blogs in the Reading Room discussing some of the opportunities we see for Novlr to better serve the needs of you – our writers. Today, we want to give you a little taste of what’s to come.

First up:

Helping writers build and monetise an audience

How to build a readership is probably the question we get most at Novlr. It’s such a crucial part of being a creative writer. The creator economy and platforms like Patreon and Substack have changed the way we think about earning as creatives. We are determined to give you the tools you need to build a readership, to communicate and engage directly with your readers and crucially, to provide ways for your readers to reward you for your work.

Our working title is Novlr Audience and we’ve built a proof of concept, but we need your ideas and input. Have you considered using a subscriber model to fund your work? Do you currently use Patreon or alternatives? What are the main obstacles you see? What tools would you love? 

Please comment below, but also come talk to us about this at our drop-in session this coming Monday 7th March at 10pm GMT / 5pm ET.  You can obviously ask us questions about anything else in the drop-in session too.

Coming soon:

The Start.Coop Accelerator

As we touched on in our original coop announcement, we’ve been accepted onto the selective start.coop accelerator program. Through them, we have access to a world-class mentorship community so we can learn from the best to make the Novlr cooperative a successful and profitable space for creative writers. Their goal is to encourage ownership equity by promoting and supporting the cooperative business model. 

Providing writers with the services they need

We know writers need support. Whether it’s editing, cover art, audiobook recording, or writing coaches, like any other vocation we need support to be as good as we can be. We know from what you’ve told us that you find it hard to identify quality suppliers to work with. So, we’re keen to do that job for you and curate or directly provide as many of the services you need as we can.

What services do you need? How did you find them? What would you like to be built into your Novlr?

Building a flourishing writer community

Writing is often a solitary activity, but it doesn’t have to be. We want to build a thriving community of writers who are there to support and cheer each other on. Whether you want writing sprints, ask other writers for critiques of your work, or even just organise accountability meetups and write-ins, we want to help bring you together. Let us know what you’re looking for in a community, and how we can help.

What does Novlr being writer-owned mean for me?

We realise that becoming a cooperative is a big change, and lots of you have questions on what that will mean for you as Novlr users both in the short and long term. We want to answer some of those questions, so please reach out. Ask us anything or share your concerns. We’ll be here to answer them.

Helping creative writers get published

For writers who have either traditional or self-publishing as their ultimate writing goal, we want to be able to bring you the tools you need to make that happen. There are lots of avenues we can pursue to facilitate it, so let us know what services or integrations you want to see us prioritise in future. We hope to work on strategic partnerships to publish your work directly from Novlr.

Helping learn the craft of creative writing

The Tim Clare Couch to 80k creative writing BootCamp that we integrated into Novlr has been a huge success, and we want to bring you more of the same quality learning resources. We recently released a short course on writing a non-fiction book proposal as a series of free blog posts in the Reading Room, but we plan to develop lots more structured educational tools that we can offer both as free and paid-for services. What would you like to learn?

The first creative-writer owned platform – what is community ownership?

Community ownership is of course the biggest change we’ll be bringing to Novlr, and one that has the most immediate effect. We’ll be talking more about what the means, the future structure and governance of Novlr, and also how you can get on board and become one of Novlrs governing members.

All of that is just a taster for what we’ve got in the pipeline. We’ll talk about each element of these in more detail, and hopefully release accompanying videos to make everything as accessible as possible to the majority of our users. 

Come and talk to us

We’ll be hosting another drop-in user meeting this Monday, March 7, at 10pm GMT / 5pm ET that you can join. You can ask us anything, but we’ll use the opportunity to discuss Building a readership and subscription tools. As always, if you have any questions, thoughts, suggestions, or feedback, you can email us at [email protected] or leave a comment down below.

If you’d like to register your interest in becoming one of the owners of Novlr, you can do so here.