On the Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast, Howard Lovy speaks with Cameron Sutter, founder of Plottr, about how visual planning tools can help authors organize ideas, structure their books, and move more confidently from concept to finished manuscript. Sutter explains how Plottr’s timeline, scene cards, templates, and series planning features allow writers to see their stories at a glance, spot gaps in plot or character development, and rearrange scenes as their ideas evolve. The conversation also covers tools for capturing ideas on the go, integrating with writing software like Scrivener and Word, and maintaining consistency across multi-book series.
Listen to the Podcast: Using Plottr to Plan, Structure, and Finish Your Book
Thoughts or further questions on this post or any self-publishing issue?
If you’re an ALLi member, head over to the SelfPubConnect forum for support from our experienced community of indie authors, advisors, and team. Simply create an account (if you haven’t already) to request to join the forum and get going.
Non-members looking for more information can search our extensive archive of blog posts and podcast episodes packed with tips and advice at ALLi's Self-Publishing Advice Center. And if you haven’t already, we invite you to join our organization and become a self-publishing ally.
Read the Transcript
Howard Lovy: Hello everybody and welcome. I'm Howard Lovy and I'll be your host for today's ALLi partner member webinar: Visually Crafting Your Story — Using Plottr to Plan, Structure, and Finish Your Book. We're pleased to welcome Cameron Sutter of Plottr. Cameron will show how Plottr's visual planning tools can help you organize ideas, structure your book, and move more effectively from concept to finished manuscript. After the walkthrough we'll have time for your questions. Cameron, thank you for joining us.
Cameron Sutter: Hey, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Howard Lovy: That's my spiel. Take it away, Cameron.
About Cameron Sutter and Plottr
Cameron Sutter: Thanks everybody for having me. I'll try and use the time effectively. I'm going to tell you a little bit about me, learn a little bit about you so I can tailor the message to what would actually help you, show you Plottr and what it can do, and then we'll answer questions. I think this could be the tool that changes your writing career — and that may sound a little exaggerated, but we hear it so many times from people that this is the best investment for their writing career that they've ever made.
First, about me. I'm a writer. I made Plottr because I was writing books for myself and wanted to be more organized. I could see my story in my head in this visual way and there was nothing that existed like that. Being a software engineer by day, I just started building it. It turns out a lot of writers think the same way — they want to see the threads of their story weave together. Now over 40,000 writers have used Plottr. But at heart I am a writer. I'm still writing, still trying to become a bestseller. I live in Oklahoma — kind of in the middle of nowhere, but there are a lot of writers around here, which is cool. I have six kids, a couple of acres and a pond. I write sci-fi fantasy and young adult generally, and I've published three books with more that I haven't gotten to yet — you probably know that feeling.
I'd love to hear in the chat where you are in your writing journey, what genre you write, how much you know about Plottr or whether you've ever heard of it, and what you came here to learn. So please go ahead and pop that in the chat.
The Timeline: Visually Crafting Your Story
Cameron Sutter: Before I move on, a quick note on AI: Plottr doesn't have any AI in it. We say that proudly. This is not going to help you write the book. If you're coming here hoping for that, this is the wrong tool. We specifically created this to help you craft better stories, and we're not putting AI into it in any way, shape, or form. It doesn't do any of the work for you. This all comes from you.
So let me share my screen and show you the main screen in Plottr. We call it the timeline, and this is where you're going to visually craft your story. For so many people this just clicks — this is where you can see your story and think about it in a different way than you maybe ever have. If you use sticky notes on your wall or index cards or post-it notes, this is like a digital version of doing that.
To give you a quick overview: your scenes run across the top and you can have as many as you want — hundreds if you like — and your main plot or your different character arcs or plot lines run down the side. Everything is drag and drop so you can just move things around. You change colors when you move them, which makes it easy to visually arrange your story and think about it at a high level. The idea isn't that you write your story in Plottr — it's to think about the craft, the story structure, and for nonfiction, the flow and organization. This helps you in so many ways.
The Three Little Pigs: A Demo
Cameron Sutter: I'm using a simple demo of The Three Little Pigs. The three pigs leave home — mom kicks them out or something — and then each one has their own character arc. We've got a line for the wolf, a line for each of the pigs. Pig one builds a house out of straw, pig two out of sticks, pig three out of bricks. The wolf comes by, smells the pigs, starts blowing down the houses. They run to pig three's house and they beat the wolf.
But seeing this visually immediately reveals some important things — the holes. There are holes here for the wolf, holes for the other pigs. It's not that you have to fill in every spot for every character, but seeing these holes will make you think: what is happening here? The wolf doesn't come in until later in the story. Why is he there? What's his motivation? Is this a drunken bet by his buddies? Is this his job? Has he got three kids starving at home and this is his last effort to find food for them? We don't know. It's really important for you as a writer to know that, because it matters for the end of his character arc. Right now all we see is that he got burned when he fell down the chimney. What's the end of his story?
Same thing with pig three. When the wolf is blowing down his brother's home, what is pig three doing? Is he laughing at his brother? Is he trying everything he can to save him? That matters a lot for why they end up with a happily ever after. Maybe they left home because they were sick of each other and this story actually brings them back together — a redemption story about their brotherhood. Being able to see this visually really changes the game for thinking about the why and what's going on for each character at each point.
Here's an alternate version I filled in with more detail. The wolf has more of a backstory — he lost his job and he's looking for food for his family. Pig one actually has cancer and wanted to live out the last part of his life. Pig three's character arc is about his confidence and courage building. There's a relationship arc between the brothers where things fall apart and then they band together like never before. I've layered in running jokes, themes, and more. That's another power of the timeline: layering in important details about your characters, their relationships, their arcs. You turn a surface-level fairytale into a very detailed emotional story where you care about the characters.
Story Structure Templates
Cameron Sutter: The third thing I want to tell you about the timeline is templates. Here's an example: the Hero's Journey. How many of you know all 12 beats of the Hero's Journey by heart and could tell me each one right now? I bet none of you — and that's not shade, because I can't either. But if you asked a carpenter how many screwdrivers he has, he'd know each one and what it's used for. Writers have these story structures — the Hero's Journey, the romance beat sheet, the mystery formula — and I bet we don't know them well. Plottr makes it so you don't have to have them memorized.
Not only does it have the structure for you, it tells you in great detail about each beat. So there's the ordinary world, the call to adventure, beat six where there are tests, allies, and enemies — it tells you about them. It's almost like paint by numbers: it gives you the formula and you fill in your pieces. You'll need to add chapters in between each beat, but it gives you a baseline. We've got templates for all sorts of genres — children's, poetry, limericks, haiku, short stories, playwriting, screenplays. And these aren't templates I created — they come from people who are experts at writing stories, or in the case of the Hero's Journey, directly from the book about the Hero's Journey.
The templates are really powerful both if you're new to writing and if you've been writing for a while and just want the structure in front of you. It speeds up your process. For a lot of people this is life-changing — if you write romance and there are your romance beats right there, you can just focus on making the story good instead of trying to remember each beat.
Notes, Characters, and Places
Cameron Sutter: Now I'm going to move on to these tabs up here: notes, characters, and places. This is an area for all your research, backstory, brainstorming, character sheets, world building, magic systems — any of that can go in here. And the great thing is each Plottr project is for the whole series. So if we have a Three Little Pigs series — book one, book two: Wolf Strikes Back, book three: The Return of Mother Pig — each one has its own separate timeline and you can switch back and forth between them. You can see all the books for the whole series in one place, with all characters and their character sheets organized and searchable, all connected to your visual timelines.
The Series View
Cameron Sutter: The other cool thing about Plottr's series capabilities is the series view — a bird's eye view of the whole series. We've got book one, book two, and book three, and in between them you can note things that happen between books. As a writer you'll often keep this stuff in your head, but with Plottr you can put it down in writing and see it visually. You know that between book one and book two the wolf hatches a plan, but it's easy to forget that detail when you're on book seven or have been writing for fifteen years.
I talk to so many writers who say they're on book seven and they don't remember that one character from book one who they'd like to bring back. They'd have to reread all their books to find them. Or readers will email saying ‘why did you change the eye color of so-and-so?' — that happens all the time. My favorite: ‘Why did you change the gender of the dog? It was a girl dog, then a boy dog, now a girl again.' Somebody told me that. Plottr helps you stay organized so that doesn't happen.
The Idea Board and Idea Threads App
Cameron Sutter: The next thing I want to tell you about is what we call the idea board. As you're creating your story, ideas are going to come to you — and most of the time it's not while you're at your computer. It's when you're in the shower, taking a walk, standing in line at the store. We've made that really easy to capture. Within Plottr, the idea board is meant for random ideas, totally disorganized, as you think of them. You can add ideas with a keyboard shortcut from wherever you are in the software. Later, you can convert any idea into a note in your research, a character, a place, or a scene card. The idea board helps you take disorganized things and eventually organize them when you know where they go.
And if you're not at your computer, we have a free app called Idea Threads. You can type out an idea, take a picture, or speak it into your phone. You can have different threads for different books or for marketing ideas. Just two taps: open the app, create a new note. Your ideas then show up in your Plottr idea board if you connect your accounts. That app is completely free for anyone — whether you have Plottr or not. Just search for Idea Threads in your app store.
Questions and Answers
Howard Lovy: A lot of what you've shown is useful in the planning phases, but in the actual writing phase — and I've interviewed enough authors on my podcast to see how many people work this way — once you start writing, a lot of the plot goes out the window because the characters take on a life of their own. You plotted for something to happen in scene three but your character says no, I want to do something else.
Cameron Sutter: That's so true, because that happens to me all the time. I'm not very much of a plotter actually — somewhere in between. As I'm writing, my story is changing and I'll have both Plottr and Scrivener open. Either I'll make changes in Plottr as I go so I remember what's changing, or when I'm done with a draft I'll run it through Story Snapp and it'll put it into a new Plottr file for me.
Howard Lovy: I have an existing novel that I want to write a sequel to. Is there a way to upload my existing manuscript and have it generate these cards? Or would I have to start from scratch?
Cameron Sutter: Great question. Within Plottr you'd have to do it yourself, but we created a separate tool that'll do it for you — and the reason it's separate from Plottr is because it does use AI. You upload your manuscript and it will pull out all the characters, outline the story, and build a Plottr file for you with a line for each of your major characters and all sorts of character information pulled directly from your book. It does cost money per book. It's called Story Snapp — story snap dot ai — and it'll do that for you.
Howard Lovy: Does Plottr work with writing tools that many writers already use? Someone's mentioned Scrivener specifically. Is there something native in Plottr for the actual writing, or does it partner with Word or Scrivener?
Cameron Sutter: It's not optimized for writing within Plottr — though I do write nonfiction in it. For fiction I use Scrivener. We actually integrate with both Word and Scrivener. You can export to either. For Scrivener, it'll take your Plottr structure and for each plot line create index cards on the corkboard. You can customize where things in Plottr go in Scrivener and whether it makes separate folders for each chapter. Same idea in Word, where chapter headings become Word outline headings so you can jump to chapters easily. And yes, you can also import a Scrivener file into Plottr — it may not be perfect because everyone organizes Scrivener a little differently, but we've done our best to understand how you've organized it and pull everything across.
Howard Lovy: Kay asks: if you create a scene card from an idea, where does it go? Will it show in the timeline straight away?
Cameron Sutter: Yes. When you save an idea as a scene card, you choose where you want it to go and then it's there in the timeline. You can drag it around wherever you want. If you know right away where it belongs, put it there. Otherwise just put it anywhere and move it around later.
Howard Lovy: You mentioned this is also useful for nonfiction. How does that look in practice?
Cameron Sutter: For nonfiction I use it a little differently. You might have a main topic as one line and subtopics for each chapter. Depending on what you do in your nonfiction — maybe you have an assignment or an example in each chapter — you'd have different parts to a chapter represented as different lines. I'm more of a plotter when it comes to nonfiction anyway, which I think is common. If you have six core ideas you want in chapter one, you'd put those in as scene cards for that chapter.
Howard Lovy: Are there templates specific to short stories?
Cameron Sutter: Yes — we've got a ton of templates. All sorts of genres, children's books, even poetry — limericks and haiku are in there. A couple of different short story templates, playwriting, screenplays. All sorts of different types.
Howard Lovy: You said there's no AI, but is there any kind of analysis of what's lacking? If you want to write a romantasy, it has to have certain elements — will Plottr tell you if you're missing them?
Cameron Sutter: Not in Plottr. The templates will help you manually do that — here's this beat, here's this beat, oh, I didn't really have this beat — but you'd have to do that analysis yourself. There are other tools that do great analysis with AI, but in Plottr there's none.
Howard Lovy: Putting on my journalism hat — do you feel any pressure to go AI with some of these features?
Cameron Sutter: Yeah, definitely. A year or two ago we really started exploring that and there were some cool things we could have put in — generating ideas for characters, analyzing what parts are missing. What became of that exploration is Story Snapp, which does give you some analysis and builds a book bible for you automatically. But the more we've been using AI and seeing how the industry is going, and listening to our customers, we just felt that keeping Plottr free of AI was the right choice. We know we could probably make a lot of money with those features, but it just feels like it wouldn't serve writers well in the long term. We hear from so many writers: please don't put AI in Plottr. It's on everything. Please just leave it free of it. And that's where our heart is.
Howard Lovy: I just want a tool, not a friend, you know? Let me be a good writer — don't try to do it for me.
Cameron Sutter: Right. It is meant to be a struggle to write a book, I think — so that you can learn and grow as you're writing. If a tool does that for you, it kind of cheapens it or takes something from you. There are probably valuable things AI can do in the publishing process, but writing the story needs to come from you.
Howard Lovy: And I think most people at ALLi would agree. We have differing opinions on the role of AI, but when it comes to plotting your own story, having a neutral tool without AI advice is very useful.
Upcoming Features
Howard Lovy: Speaking of plotting — what are you plotting at Plottr? Any features in the works you'd like to tell us about?
Cameron Sutter: One we just created is called the Family Tree. You can visually see your characters and their relationships — not just family relationships, but love triangles, military organizations, whatever makes sense for your story. It's a really cool way to visualize those relationships and use them in your marketing. You can print it out, put it on your marketing website, use it as a reader magnet, or put it in the back of your book.
Another feature we just created is the ability to pin things. You can pin characters and keep them visible while you're working on a scene, so you can reference their details without navigating away. If you're writing out details about a scene and want to check your character's traits, they're right there.
As for what's coming this year — we're taking a broader view of Plottr overall. Instead of adding more and more specific features, we're thinking about the lifecycle: how do you start using Plottr, how do we make that better? What do you do when you're stuck? We want to make the whole experience better rather than just piling on new features.
Pricing and Discount Code
Howard Lovy: And pricing — that's an important one.
Cameron Sutter: So there are three tiers, and you can get each monthly, annually, or as a lifetime purchase. We've tried to make it super easy for people to get Plottr at whatever price point makes sense for them.
The base tier is Plottr, which you install on your computer and save as files locally — just like Scrivener or Word, nothing in the cloud, no internet connection required. Plottr Pro saves everything in the cloud, backed up automatically, so you can move between devices easily and collaborate with other writers in real time. Plottr Pro Plus Community includes everything in Pro, plus a paid Discord community with beta readers, accountability groups, and group coaching.
The most common choice is the Plottr lifetime plan at $150 — pay once, get all future updates and features for life, never pay again. The most affordable entry is $10 a month for Plottr Pro. If you don't use it for six months, you can pause rather than cancel — all your data stays there and you can restart whenever you're ready. Plottr Pro can also be used directly in a browser, which I forgot to mention earlier.
We do have a discount code for ALLi members — 15% off any plan. I've also put together a free PDF with hints and tips for using Plottr effectively, including how to use the family tree, tips for your characters, how to use different plot lines for relationships, and more. And the Idea Threads app is completely free for anyone — search for it in your app store or scan the QR code. If you use Plottr Pro, your Idea Threads ideas will sync directly into Plottr.
Closing
Cameron Sutter: So many people have told us this is the best investment they've ever made for their writing career — we hear that all the time. It's a very small team, eight or nine people. There's a husband and wife team in Oregon who answer your emails, and they're just the nicest people. They'll hop on a Zoom call if you have questions or get stuck. We really want to serve writers and we want you to succeed in getting that book written.
Howard Lovy: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Cameron, for appearing on SelfPubConnect. We're all going to get busy plotting our next books.
Cameron Sutter: Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure getting to know you all and talk with you, and I hope we can serve you in the future.
