Version 4 of Atomic Scribbler was released today and we’ve made some huge changes. The core functionality — everything in version 3 — is now free. No license is required, no payments need to be made. Free in every sense of the word. Tell your friends!
We’ve added SmartEdit — our popular editing Add-In for Microsoft Word — to Atomic Scribbler as an optional paid-for Add-In. Existing licensed users will find that the SmartEdit Add-In is already enabled and active when they install version 4 as their licenses will work automatically with the SmartEdit addition.
New users can download Atomic Scribbler and use the full product to write their novel. All core features are fully active and free.
- Use the tabbed word processor to write your scenes and chapters
- Move your scenes around the Document tree using drag and drop
- Send old scenes or versions to Fragments for storage
- Attach notes to scenes, folders, bookmarks, to anything in your project
- Build up your images, bookmarks and files in the Research tree
- Import and export to and from Word or Open Office
- Switch on automatic zipped backups
- Keep track of your daily word count
And when you reach the editing stage decide whether or not you want to try out SmartEdit.
If you decide to give it a go, you can activate a 10 day trial by going to the SmartEdit Add-In menu inside Atomic Scribbler and clicking Install SmartEdit. At the end of the 10 days, decide whether you wish to buy a license and keep using SmartEdit or simply carry on using the core Atomic Scribbler functionality outlined above without interruption.
Why have we made Atomic Scribbler free?
As strange as it may sound, we’ve made this decision for commercial reasons.
Dedicated software for creative writers is a rich and diverse field. A lot of competition exists in this space and much of that competition is well established. Though we’ve had many sales over the past 9 months, most of those sales have been to existing users of our other products. Atomic Scribbler is not reaching enough users outside this user base, and it’s not being talked about online often enough.
While Atomic Scribbler does have some uniqueness, that uniqueness is not strong enough to make it stand out in a crowded market. It has the appearance of a me-too product with not enough reasons to choose it over one of the many competing products.
Enter SmartEdit.
We’d always planned to add SmartEdit into Atomic Scribbler but it was listed as a possible addition in 2019 or beyond — down the road and not a priority. Our plan was to improve the existing application by adding areas for character and timeline development first.
The decision to add SmartEdit earlier was made to more clearly express the uniqueness of Atomic Scribbler. Here is an app for writers where you can work on the first three stages of the writing process: preparation and research, first-draft writing, and editing. No other product on the market has comprehensive editing functionality built-in.
Sales of our Microsoft Word Add-In have always been strong and our hope is that the new SmartEdit Add-In for Atomic Scribbler will be just as popular if not more so.
The decision to make Atomic Scribbler a free app was made to grow the user base and get the word out about Atomic more quickly. As SmartEdit is an optional Add-In, users of Atomic Scribbler will have to make a conscious decision to install the Add-In, try it out for 10 days and then buy or not buy. Just as they currently do with SmartEdit for Word.
Our hope is that the free version of Atomic Scribbler will prove popular and that feedback from more and more writers will come in, helping us to grow the product and expand the user base even further.
SmartEdit for Atomic Scribbler and SmartEdit for Word share about 90% of their code. The analytical engine that parses your documents and scenes is 99% shared code, which means we will be able to expand and grow both of these products simultaneously, making the development of both faster and richer. User feedback from one will impact the other, bug fixes in one will usually address the same bugs in the other.
Separating out the SmartEdit functionality into an Add-In rather than making it part of the core product allows us to grow the Atomic Scribbler user base more quickly via the free product, and to streamline the commercial side of our product range — now 100% SmartEdit focused.
As already mentioned, current licensed users will find that their license already enables the SmartEdit Add-In. New users who wish to purchase a license can do so by clicking the Buy SmartEdit button inside the SmartEdit menu in Atomic Scribbler or from the SmartEdit website.