Amazon's Free Online Notecards Tool for Screenwriters

Amazon has just debuted their Storybuilder, a free online notecard utility for movie and TV writers. It’s still in beta, but you can use it right now if you have an Amazon account.

I’ve only played with it a little, but if you’re looking for a basic corkboard tool, Storybuilder might be a good option. Here are some of the features:

• Built-in templates for Save the Cat! and TV sitcom story structures

• Templates for Alice in Wonderland, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Romeo and Juliet

• Ability to save notes and images in your “Drawer”

• Ability to color-code your notecards

• Easy drag-and-drop reordering of notecards

• Everything is saved on the Amazon Cloud

You can find more information on the Storybuilder FAQ.

One drawback I’ve noticed is that you can only order your notecards from top to bottom, unless I’m missing something. If you like to order notecards from left to right, you may be out of luck.

As with anything cloud-based, you should read their privacy notice before signing up. It says that Amazon can use Storybuilder to collect personal information to “improve the services [they] offer.” It then directs you to Amazon’s overall privacy notice, which hasn’t been updated since April 2012. If that’s a dealbreaker, you may have to stick with an offline notecard program, or just use real notecards.

Let us know what you think about Storybuilder in the comments or on Twitter!