When I dive into writing a novel, I quickly realize that it's not just about stringing words together. There's a whole world to manage—chapters, scenes, characters, and all those intricate details. Regular writing tools? They just don't cut it for me. But guess what? There are amazing apps out there made just for us novel enthusiasts. One gem I've come across is Bibisco.
Now, Bibisco isn't free—it's tailored specifically for novelists like me who crave the perfect space to bring our stories to life. If you're considering investing in it, let me share everything you need to know before taking the plunge!
- What Bibisco Is
- The pros of Bibisco
- The cons of Bibisco
- Whether we think you should use it
There is actually another tool that we recommend more called Atticus. It's not just a great writing program built for authors, but it's also the best book formatting platform on the market. If you want to know why it's our favorite, check out our comparison of the best writing software on the market, of which Bibisco ranks #12.
What Qualifies Me to Review Bibisco?
This is an excellent question. The bottom line is that I've been in the publishing industry for well over 10 years, and I have a lot of experience working with various writing tools like this one, Scrivener, and a lot of others.
Plus, I've worked with hundreds of authors, many of them well known, and have a decent sense from what they've told me, and what others in my audience have mentioned in surveys, about what book writing tool they like the most.
So with that, let's take a closer look at Bibisco.
What I Liked About Bibisco: Important Features
1. Device compatibility
I've found that Bibisco works smoothly on Windows, MacOS, and Linux. But, to my disappointment, it's not available for mobile phones. It's a bummer, especially for writers like me who love jotting down ideas or tweaking our projects on the move.
2. Price
I was on the fence about getting Bibisco, especially since it's not free. But here's the cool part—they offer a 30-day free trial. It doesn't unlock all the features, but it's a great way for folks like me to dip our toes in and see if it's the right fit before committing. If you decide to get the full version of Bibisco after signing up for the free trial, you can visit their website bibisco.com and purchase the software for 23€ (excluding VAT).
The following table includes all of the features you can enjoy in both the Community Edition (free) and Supporters Edition (paid):
- Community Edition (Free):
- You can make an infinite number of projects.
- You can make scenes and chapters.
- You can make locations.
- You can make bios for your characters.
- You get to use sections for making your premise, novels, fabula, narrative strands, and setting.
- Analysis of your word count and books is available.
- You can export your work to different formats, including archive, TXT, PDF, and DOCX.
- Your work is protected by the software’s automatic backup
- Supporters Edition (Paid):
- You can make an infinite number of projects.
- You can make scenes and chapters.
- You can make locations.
- You can make bios for your characters.
- You get to use sections for making your premise, novels, fabula, narrative strands, and setting.
- Analysis of your word count and books is available.
- You can export your work to different formats, including archive, TXT, PDF, and DOCX.
- You can export your final project to EPUB.
- Your work is protected by the software’s automatic backup.
- You get to enjoy additional objects like a gun, wand, map, magic, and treasure.
- You get to enjoy additional fonts.
- You can create relations diagram to help you evaluate any problem.
- You can create sequels.
- You can write an infinite number of notes.
- You can have profile pictures for your objects, places, and characters.
- You can use distraction-free mode to help you focus more on your work.
- Dark mode is unlocked, and you can switch between it and light mode
Both the Community Edition and Supporters Edition are available on Windows, MacOS, and Linux.
3. Available Languages
One hurdle I've seen fellow writers face is the language barrier. It's disheartening when many top-notch word processors cater only to English speakers or just a handful of other languages. It feels like a missed opportunity, especially when there are so many talented non-English speaking writers out there, longing for tools that truly understand them.
Bibisco solves this problem by offering many languages to choose from, including English, French, Czech, Spanish, German, Dutch, Polish, Italian, Portuguese (Portugal), Portuguese (Brazil), Serbian, Turkish, Slovenian, and Russian.
4. Writing Features
In my experience, it can be a bit puzzling when you first create a project in Bibisco. You might expect to dive right into writing your novel, but instead, you're greeted with a plain page. No worries though! Just look at the top of your Bibisco screen. There's a handy menu there with everything you might need, like Locations, Characters, Objects, and Architecture. Let's get writing!
While your novel’s content is typed in the Chapters section, you can begin by developing your timeline, locations, and characters before actually starting to add content. Additionally, if you’re eager to begin writing your novel and type in the Chapters section, it’s not possible to do this right away; creating and describing your first chapter is the first step to writing a novel in Bibiso. Then you create your scenes. Bibisco does not allow you to do that via menus, instead, you can access these features when you click buttons.
You can use Bibisco’s formatting options like alignment, lists, italic, and bold, when you begin writing your novel. Unfortunately, Bibisco doesn’t allow formatting using block quotes, headings, or titles.
5. Distraction-free Features
Bibisco, like many other paid writing tools, provides you with a distraction-free writing environment. When you get the paid Supporters Edition, you get to enjoy Dark Mode and Full-Screen Mode, which increase your focus and enhance your overall ability to write.
6. Organizational Features
I've found that Bibisco does a great job when it comes to organizing your work, which is a great quality that even some paid writing apps don’t enjoy. The app organizes your work on the basis of chapters. As you write your novel, you can drag and drop your chapters in various orders. You can also do the same with your scenes that constitute the chapters.
Writing novels is different from writing anything else—there are many elements and there’s a lot to take care of, including locations, characters, bios, objects, among other things. All of these elements need to be well-organized to help you work more efficiently and with a clear mind. Bibisco definitely assists you in keeping track of everything, providing you with 5 distinct places for storing your content:
| Section Name | Content Type |
|---|---|
| Locations | This is the place that allows you to develop all of the locations in your novel. you’ll have to give details about everything related to the locations included in your novel, including its city, state, and country. |
| Characters | This is the place that allows you to develop all of the primary characters in your novel, as well as the secondary ones. Their identity, their origins, their looks, their thoughts—you’ll have to give details about everything related to your characters. |
| Architecture | This is the place that allows you to put the definition of your novel, put the narrative of any event in chronological sequence, and put a description to the setting of your novel. |
| Relations | You can’t use Relations unless you get the Supporters Edition. Relations gives you the ability to make charts that help you develop the relationships between your characters. |
| Objects | Just like Relations, you can’t use Objects unless you get the Supporters Edition. Objects gives you the ability to add descriptions to any object in your novel. |
7. Exporting Options
Once you complete your novel in Bibisco, you can export it to different types of files, such as TXT, Microsoft Word, and PDF. You can also export to EPUB if you have the Supporters Edition, which allows you to have an ebook version of your novel.
Okay, here's a little hiccup I noticed with Bibisco. I can't do any formatting before exporting, which means I can't tweak my novel just the way I want. And another thing? When I export, it includes everything, even my research notes. So, I end up having to remove some stuff to get my novel ready for publishing. A bit of a hassle, but worth mentioning.
8. Word Count
Keeping track of the word count is crucial when writing your novel because you want to reach a certain word count and don’t want to exceed a certain word count at the same time. You also want to keep track of the word count of chapters separately, not just the word count of the whole novel.
Bibisco includes useful tools that assist you in hitting your word count goals, including a daily goal and deadline. The project tab displays both features. You can also view the words you write in a 30-day period if you want to track your long-term progress. While the Community Edition does not offer goals, it still provides you with the word count of your novel.
The Final Verdict: Should You Buy Bibisco?
I do not recommend that you get Bibisco, as you can easily get all of the same features with better programs like Atticus or Scrivener. Atticus in particular lets you have a lifetime purchase, is available on virtually all platforms, and also doubles as a robust formatting program, the best of its kind.
Therefore, we recommend you go with Atticus first.
That said, Bibisco isn't a bad program. There’s little to hate about Bibisco and tons to like. Getting Bibisco will definitely help you write better novels as it’s designed solely for this purpose. It has almost all the features and tools a novelist needs to write a great novel, including a distraction-free environment, fantastic organizational features, and other helpful features like goals.
However, for most writers, we do recommend Atticus instead.
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