What’s new

The finishing touches landed. The page editor has a more compact pages rail, a cleaner top strip and a neater inspector with layer cards. Your book overview has a Simple or Chaptered switch, side cards for your settings, page and word counts and cast, and pages that are only text now display their words. The credits menu opens on your balance first, and your Settings pages got the same new look.

The app got the same makeover. A fresh Worlds list, a calmer World dashboard with your cast and settings laid out clearly, new sign-in and welcome screens, and one set of buttons, fonts and colors everywhere. The page editor looks new too, and works exactly as before.

We rebuilt storybench.app with a softer, hand-drawn look: a sticky navbar, a scroll-through “How it works”, bigger pictures of the product, and a meadow that moves at the bottom of the page. Same words, same pages, a lot more warmth.

The home page now has a short walkthrough of Storybench, start to finish. It stays quiet until you press play, then plays right on the page, and it pauses by itself when you scroll away.

Your welcome credits are yours to use for 30 days after you sign up. If they run out sooner, or the month ends, we take you straight to the plans page so picking a membership takes one step.

New accounts now start with a handful of welcome credits, so you can illustrate a few pages of your own story before paying anything. It’s one welcome bonus per person. When the credits run out, a membership keeps the illustrating going. Writing and laying out your book stays free either way.

Prop tiles now display the prop’s own reference picture, like cast and settings already did, instead of a blank placeholder. And a long tone description no longer pushes your whole World page down: it folds to a few lines, with a link that opens the full text.

Open Storybench for the first time and you get a short animated welcome instead of an empty page. It walks through the three steps (World, then cast, then book), checks each one off as you go, and points you to the button that creates your first World.

Your Worlds page is now a shelf. Each World gets its own row with its latest illustration, its audience and tone, a count of books, cast and settings, and a mini shelf of its newest covers with a New book button right there. Starting another World is a slim bar at the bottom.

Writing a long name or a long tone description when you create a World could end in an unreadable error. Now the form tells you the limits as you type, with a counter on the tone, and if something is still off you get a plain sentence saying what to fix.

The homepage now shows a book that actually exists: the page editor it was built in, and the finished cover that’s on sale on Amazon. Same book, both ends of the trip. It felt more honest than a mockup, and it answers the question everyone quite reasonably asks first, which is whether any of this comes out the other side as a real book.

There’s a new Resources shelf: long, practical guides to writing, illustrating, publishing & selling a children’s book. They’re free, there’s no upsell, and you don’t need an account to read them. If you’ve ever gone looking for a straight answer about trim sizes or royalties and found ten pages of fluff, start here.

New side-by-side comparisons with the other tools people weigh us against, written plainly, with the trade-offs left in. Plus fresh pages for the different kinds of maker who land here, whether you’re an indie author or a teacher making books for your classroom.

Your billing page was redone. Not a member yet? You see the membership up front with what’s included. Already one? You see your status, a way to manage billing, and the credit packs you can top up with.

No more waiting list. Anyone can now sign up and start building, and there’s a public pricing page that lays out the membership and credit packs in plain words before you commit to anything.

The PDF you send to print now lays out text and pictures the way they look in the editor: the same paragraph spacing, and the same placement inside the page. If you chose a serif font for a page, your PDF keeps it too instead of quietly switching to a plain one.

Exporting for print has its own card on the publish page now, with the channel built in: home print, Amazon KDP or Lulu. Home print is always ready to export, and KDP and Lulu run your print-readiness check first. Finished exports also appear as soon as they’re done, with no refresh needed.

A new World has no cast yet, so we now nudge you to add your first character before anything else, right there on the page. Starting your first book is still one click away if you’d rather jump in.

When you illustrate a page, the reference pictures for your characters, places and props are now treated as the final word on how they look, not loose inspiration. If a page used to come back with a very different-looking character, this is the fix.

Reframe an illustration the way you’d expect to: drag it to move it, scroll or pinch to zoom, and watch a faint outline mark what falls outside the page edge. You can even shrink a picture to sit smaller than the page. It works on full-bleed pages, two-page spreads and covers, and your printed pages match what you see on screen.

You can now export an entire World as a single zip of images, every illustration you’ve made, in one download. It’s your work; keep a copy wherever you like.

Adding the details a real store asks for is now built in: your title, author name, and an ISBN for each format. A print-readiness check looks over your interior and cover (trim, bleed, and a computed cover wrap) before you publish, and you can pick where the book is headed (home print, Amazon KDP, or Lulu) so the print PDF is checked for that channel before you export it.

Chapters got easier to rearrange. In the page editor you can now drag a page out of one chapter and drop it into another, right where you want it, instead of only reordering within the chapter it started in.

A growing library of first-party stickers (animals, shapes, weather, space, and more), editable speech bubbles you type straight into, and text styles with outlines, shadows, gradients, and gentle curves. Little touches that make a page feel like yours.

Have a rough drawing or some art of your own? Upload it and build a character, place, or prop from it, and it picks up your World’s look from there. You can even combine several reference pictures at once when one isn’t enough.

Write a character, setting, or prop by name in your page text and Storybench spots it, no special typing needed, and pulls the right reference pictures into the illustration. Tap a name to choose exactly which reference images should anchor the art.

Two new places to learn: a Help Center with step-by-step guides for building your cast, filling your world, and publishing, and a blog of notes and stories on writing books you actually authored.

A dedicated Publish page keeps a durable history of every file you’ve exported, print PDFs, EPUBs, image sets, ready to download again or clear out whenever you like. Close the tab mid-export and it’s still there when you come back.

Your cast lives in the World, not inside one book. So every new title starts from the same characters, settings, and look you already built. The first book is the work. The second is the easy one, because everything your readers came back for is already waiting.

Add an extra image on top of your page art, a small inset, a spot illustration, a cut-out of one of your characters, and position it right where you want it. More than one picture can share a page now.

Design a front and back cover the same way you design a page, with your art, your title, and your name. Your cover flows through the reader preview and every export, and becomes the cover image on your EPUB.

Let a scene run across the fold. Join two pages into a single spread and one illustration reads all the way across, with a gutter-safe guide so nothing important lands in the seam. It flows through the reader and every export the same way.

Don’t want to design from a blank page? Pick a built-in layout template (art on top with text below, a full-bleed picture with a caption, and more) and adjust from there. A running start whenever you want one.

Lay your words over the illustration itself, with a soft backing behind them so they stay readable against a busy picture. It fades gently into the art instead of sitting in a hard box.

Text blocks are yours to place. Drag your words to any corner of the page, resize them, and set them exactly where they read best. The page is a canvas now, not a fixed template.

A built-in image editor for the pictures you’ve made: crop and reframe, ask for a small change (remove or swap something, or alter the look), and pull a color palette from the art. You can even snip part of a page and save it as a new reference for your cast.

A proper reader preview: the cover opens, real page-turns flip left and right, and you can zoom in to check the details. See exactly how your book will feel in someone’s hands before you export a single file.

Pick your book’s shape once (square, portrait, landscape, or A4) and every page holds it. When you’re ready, export a print-ready PDF for Amazon KDP, a fixed-layout EPUB for Kindle Kids and Kobo, or your pages as individual images.

A real page editor: type your words with the fonts and colors you want, mention anyone from your cast right in the text, and describe the picture you’re after. The art comes back with your characters in it, and you move on to the next page.

The heart of Storybench. Build a character once, with reference pictures that fix how they look, and from then on your cast loads into every page automatically. You write your story a page at a time and illustrate each page, and your characters arrive looking like themselves, in your chosen style, without you typing a single style word or describing them again.

Your cast isn’t the only thing worth building once. Add the settings your story returns to (the meadow, the treehouse, the kitchen) and the props that keep showing up, and they stay consistent every time they appear, the same way your characters do.

Pick a visual style for your World once, from a range of looks (soft watercolor, claymation, storybook ink, and more), and every page you illustrate is drawn in it. One coherent look across the whole book, chosen with a click instead of fought for prompt by prompt.