Which World Anvil subscription do you need? Writers Edition

World Anvil is the best place to keep a book bible, series bible or world bible. Best-selling authors like Brian McClellan and Chris Fox, as well as renowned worldbuilding professor Dr. Trent Hergenrader, have told us so! It’s also an excellent tool to help you market your world and find new readers. But which World Anvil subscription do you need as a writer? And how exactly are writers and authors using their World Anvil memberships?

Whether you want to use World Anvil as a private series bible to organize your worldbuilding, a public platform to gain new readers and fans, and even as a revenue stream, we’ve got you covered!

Imagine if you had a private Wikipedia and custom Google maps, entirely for the world setting of your own book or series. All your ideas linked together, new notes created in seconds, and everything totally searchable. Now imagine you could write your book in there too. That’s how World Anvil helps writers and authors.

In World Anvil, you can create your characters and put them into family trees. Then, write plots, and link in all the important people, places and things. And you can upload maps, and link in articles about the geography and settlements of your world. Of course, you can reference, search, and edit everything directly in the novel-writing software, so you never have to change tabs! If you can imagine it, you can create an article about it in World Anvil. And each worldbuilding template has prompts to help you expand your ideas.

Check out all our book bible features on our writers and authors page here!

For a private book bible, you’ll need at least a Journeyman Tier World Anvil subscription, so you can keep everything private. With a Master Tier World Anvil subscription, you can access our most popular writer’s features, like our integrated novel writing software, Family Trees and Diplomacy webs! They’re super useful for visualizing and keeping track of your world, and for writing and publishing your stories too!

2. A public website for your world – even one which looks like your own website!

Attract new readers and keep your fans hooked, by sharing the public parts of your worldbuilding!

As well as keeping your book bible private, you can also put anything you like public on World Anvil. Create the flavor of your world with our visual themes (or make your own using CSS!) to match the unique look and feel of your world. And you can even embed music or audio tracks, pictures and more! So why would you show off your worldbuilding?

Create an interactive experience for your readers

Well, first of all, there’s maps. Any fantasy reader knows that fantasy maps, family trees and all those supporting visuals are awesome. But you’re lucky if they’re printed as a two page spread in low resolution black and white. And they’re even more impossible on e-readers!

With World Anvil you can share your map images as interactive maps, allowing readers to explore layers and pins on your map, jump from a region map to a city map, and more. Our interactive family trees are a fantastic way to share your royal families and sprawling dynasties with your readers. And diplomacy webs are the perfect way to show which organizations are on good terms, and which ones hate each other!

Interactive maps are part of all World Anvil subscriptions, but higher membership tiers come with more storage space and more map features. For Family Trees and diplomacy webs, choose a Master tier membership. 

Readers love your world – let them explore!

Plus, readers love exploring the worlds behind fiction. Whether its Scifi, Fantasy or even historical fiction, readers enjoy our work because of WHERE it takes place. That’s part of the charm. Sharing some details of the setting, even just the most superficial parts, like the general regions which have been discovered so far, will have them scrolling your pages. If you want, you can turn comments on, so readers can let you know what they enjoyed, and ask questions.

Of course, you can customize everything from the way it looks to the way it sounds, adding pictures, images, and changing the visual themes. And if you want to, you can make World Anvil look like your very own website, removing the World Anvil branding and using your own URL (e.g. www.yourworld.com). It’ll look like your own website, but runs with all the power of World Anvil!

All World Anvil subscriptions allow you to share things publically, and all paid subscriptions give access to visual themes! A Sage Tier World Anvil subscription – our professional tier – gives access to custom URLs and white-labeling, which strips the World Anvil branding from your pages. Here’s an example of that, Mythoversal by Greg Fishborne. 

Advertise your books or projects

Worldbuilding articles make AMAZING social media content! It’s a great way to fill your feed with material that you’re making anyway, and you can easily show part of an article and keep the rest private! Sharing short articles about how birthdays are celebrated, flash fiction, or even just your main character’s favorite food, is a great way to intrigue readers, and attract new ones!

And you can let your readers know about the next installment! Chances are, if readers are scrolling through your world, they’ve enjoyed your book. You can easily point them to your website to buy the sequel, or even to other series or short stories you’ve written. The Global announcements and global content blocks are great for this too!

World Anvil is a great way to build a community around your world, update your fans on upcoming books, and soon we’ll have forums, polls and community achievements too.

Any World Anvil user can share their articles to social media, and add external URLs to their pages. Global World Announcements are available with a Master Tier World Anvil subscription. Community features are a Sage Tier feature.

Hide series spoilers from new readers!

We all know how painful it is to read spoilers! On World Anvil, you can denote spoilers easily, and trust the honour system. But if you want to really give your readers, an amazing experience, why not allow them to select which books they’ve read, to show them what they need to know! You can do this easily using self-assigned subscriber groups. Then you can hide any spoilers from people who haven’t read those books yet! You can even use self-assigned subscriber groups so readers can choose which team they’re on (Ravenclaw or Hufflepuff?) and show different supporters different information. It’s a fun way to interact with your readers and gives an extra level of creativity and immersion to your worldbuilding.

Any World Anvil user can use the Show Spoiler function, but self-assigned subscriber groups are available to Grandmaster World Anvil subscription holders. 

3. Earn money as an author with a Sage subscription

World Anvil can help you earn money as an author, whether it’s through Patreon, a bolt-on product, or your own storefront!

If you have a Patreon, Kofi or other fan service, you know how hungry those fans are for extra content! You can present character profiles, flash fiction, deleted scenes, and worldbuilding tidbits all through World Anvil. It’s easy to set up different tiers of access (e.g. 5$ patrons and 10$ patrons) with graded amounts of content. Not only does this content look stunning, it’s all integrated into your world. And you can easily prevent Patreon Scalping, too.

Patreon scalping is a common practice – fans back for a month, download all available content, and then drop their subscription immediately. By using World Anvil as your rewards platform, it’s easy to remove those who no longer pay. Unlike with PDFs or other services, they’ll no longer have access to your extra content this way!

A bolt-on product

Many of our authors provide extra content, like cut scenes, alternative endings, character profiles, art, or even journal-style updates about their writing process for their super-fans. This might be a bolt-on to your ebook or paperback in your store, or even a separate subscription to extra world content as a product, like Wanted Hero’s in-world Field Licence subscription.

A Grandmaster Tier, the semi-professional World Anvil subscription, is perfect if you’re just starting out! It gives you 100 slots for your Patrons, superfans or others. If your Patreon or paying customer base is bigger, then our Sage Tier membership – our professional tier subscription – will be for you! The Sage tier also allows you to make World Anvil look like your own website, with your own URL and without any World Anvil branding! (See Wanted Hero’s landing page as an example!)