What up, internet voids and other genders who still read online content allegedly still written by a real life human! Nightstand has some exciting news chock full of emdashes for yall.

Our UI got a big over hall! Are you excited? We’re excited. And by excited, we mean emotionally. And by we, I mean our Founder, currently alternating between first person singular, first person plural, and third person singular. If only his books were nearly half as hilarious as he thinks he’s being right now, instead of whatever ungodly abominations Melpomene has convinced him is art.

The point is, the old UI was “Eh.” Why? Because the important part of creating anything is you have to start somewhere. Get something out. Show it to people. Then suppress the pain inside about how much you actually despise your graphic design skills because it grinds your lifelong complex about being bad with color schemes. The whole editing stuff and polishing and adding things you forgot before can come later.

Is that also how writing books work? No. Books need to be 100% perfect on the first draft, and if you can’t do that, why the hell are you trying to write one? Baka.

(For those bad at detecting sarcasm: That was sarcasm)

Obligatory transparency: Chunks of code were rewritten by AI to merge in modern 2026 Style guides and increase accessibility. And to fix bugs. And to expand our girthy tag tools. Just a fudge ton of editing, refactoring, and boring work in general. You can do whatever you want with that information–and for more on our AI policy, you can refer to our On AI Usage–but I will emphasize here: We are not using AI tools to fully manage our application, security, and so forth. If something we use is, it’s not something we are presently conscious of or have control over. We know a lot of you are getting that shoved down your throat with “AI everything.” Ethical AI usage remains our top priority. Accessibility is something many websites ignore–which we’d like to be exception too (though obligatory, some stuff still in progress).

And also, AI is actually not that great at style consistency. Those needed some adjustments across rewrites and various minor tweaks. You’ll probably noticed a few bugs and oddities yourself. We’re still in the process of trying to stamp them out. Such is the cycle of software development.

But without further ado, here’s some preview screenshots.

Snazzy, Pazzy Dashboard – Currently still in progress, but you obviously need one to look legit and mask your imposture syndrome. Have social media handles? You can add them down on the left button thing. Oh, yeah. This is an “Author Account.” But the “Reader Account” Dashboard looks the same. For now….dun dun DUN!!!

Settings – The usual, though I’d like to emphasize: You can have 2 author accounts and different reader accounts. Easily switch between accounts by going to Top Right Dropdown arrow > Accounts > The “My Accounts” Panel pops up. We’ve never liked how many websites always made this so complicated–especially since all writers are probably readers too.

Author Works Homepage – This is what it will look like if you add a book with a book cover and click the “publish” button. You can add 3 books for FWEE!!! Just like a mother chucking a baby from the nest, your little darlings become available to hungry readers in the area looking for love–or however that works. Did we mention our founder is really bad at marketing as well?

Book Homepage – You get to add a bunch of info about your book, like what it’s about, target audience, and content warning. But wait, there’s more!

The Gloriously Overdesigned Tag Picker – Personally, our favorite feature that helped us feel like we still had the mental capacity to create something new and increase accessibility on our own terms. You can type whatever you want and press enter. This will add the tag. OOOORRRR, you can click the lil’ plus button. This brings up a dialog where you can search and select our prewritten tags. Because spelling is important. And oh boy, is a writer’s capacity to spell and Schrodinger’s cat.

Book Availability – Add your stores, distribution type, and a valid link. Valid links are very important, folks. People are supposed to click on them and go somewhere.

Reader Discovery – This one hasn’t really changed much, tbh. Though the MC’s identity is a little bit more out there for those of you folks who want to go, “Wait, not only is the protagonist another white dude with depression, but he also doesn’t fall in love with the brown-eyed twink simping for him the entire novel? Hard Pass.”

The rest you shall have to discover for yourself! And if you encounter any issues, by all means, please tell us. We got a contact form and social media and talk good messanger pigeon stuff.

Known issues as of publishing this article:

• The Display Settings either don’t work or have weird side effects. This is slowly being improved.
• We just added 20+ new things to search a book for, and are still testing our filters. Expect random errors on the discovery page. Good thing we don’t have that many books on our platform yet, right? RIGHT? (╥﹏╥)
• Our founder is a white dude with depression
• Available links don’t show on the bookshelf, and book profile temporarily disabled

And that’s it for now. Because if you don’t mind, I should be ___________________.

That’s right. SLEEPING!!!

So in case we don’t see you soon on our platform: Good afternoon, good evening, and good night. (- o – )💤