Where Your Words Came From — Imported, Typed, and Pasted, Counted Separately

Most novels don’t start in Novvler. They start in a Word file, a notes app, an old project folder, a notebook. When you bring that draft in, the words you wrote somewhere else shouldn’t be mistaken for anything they’re not. And they shouldn’t make your numbers look stranger than they are.

Earlier this month we put authorship on the page: typed text marks green, accepted AI marks pink. (If you missed it, see See Which Words Are Yours.) This update handles the other half of the picture: words that arrive in Novvler instead of being written in it.

The problem with one big number

Until now, Novvler had two buckets: words you typed, and words AI helped with. That works if you start from a blank page. It gets muddy as soon as you import a 60,000-word draft or paste in a chapter you wrote last year. Those words aren’t AI, but you didn’t type them here either. Wherever they get lumped in, the numbers end up less true.

Now there are four

AI Stats now opens with a section called Where the words came from:

Imported / baseline: a manuscript you imported, starter prose from a genre template, or the first big paste (100 words or more) into an empty section. This is the draft you brought with you.
Typed in Novvler: what you wrote at the keyboard here. Novvler counts characters and estimates words from them, so read this as a close estimate, not an exact tally.
Pasted after import: anything you add from the clipboard later, like a paragraph from your notes, a scene drafted on your phone, or a line from an email to yourself.
AI-assisted (weighted): text you accepted from AI tools, weighted by how much the AI actually did. A spelling fix counts for far less than a generated paragraph.

Imported drafts are never scored as AI. The authorship bar underneath (typed, pasted, AI) is worked out only over new writing inside Novvler. Your imported baseline is counted and shown right alongside it, but it isn’t folded into the percentage.

Why keep pasted text apart from typed text? Because Novvler can’t know where clipboard text came from. It might be yours from another app. It might not. So instead of guessing, Novvler counts it as its own thing and leaves the interpretation to you. For the same reason, pasted text isn’t marked green on the page.

Chapter Manuscript joins in

The green on-page marks now work in the Chapter Manuscript view too, just as they already did in the detail panel and the Writer Window. Type in a chapter and your words are counted and marked, whichever view you’re in.

A report you can download

AI Stats now has an Export report button. It downloads a plain Markdown file for the project with:

total manuscript words, split into imported, typed, pasted, and AI-assisted
the human and AI share of new writing in Novvler
your AI accept rate: how often you kept an AI suggestion versus discarding it
a chapter-by-chapter, section-by-section table

It’s a readable summary of what Novvler recorded, handy for your own records or for seeing how a draft came together over time. It isn’t a certificate, and it only covers what happened inside Novvler.

A few caveats

In existing projects, sections that had words but no typing on record now count as imported. That’s the fairest reading we can give older content.
Paste counting starts with this update, so pastes from before today aren’t in the numbers.
Only the first large paste into an empty section counts as baseline. After that, pastes count as pasted.
Like the on-page marks, this counting lives in the web editor for now.

Why it matters

If you’ve ever been asked how AI figured into your book, or just wondered yourself, a single percentage is rarely a useful answer. A better one sounds like this: here’s what I brought in, here’s what I wrote here, here’s what I pasted, and here’s where AI helped. Novvler now keeps those apart so you can see each one clearly.

We’re not grading your whole writing life, and we’re not certifying anything. We’re just counting what happened in Novvler, as plainly as we can.

Dive deep. Stay you.