means A person who writes novels — long works of fiction that build characters and plots across many pages.

from From "novel," which traces to the Italian novella, "a new little story" — feminine of novello, "new," from Latin novus. The word entered English for the long fictional form, and "novelist" — one who crafts them — followed by the early 1700s, the "-ist" suffix marking a doer, as in "artist" or "chemist." So a novelist is, quite literally, a maker of new things.