The premise

The premise screen is short, and everything after it reads from what you put here. The AI uses it for every outline and every chapter; the typesetter uses it to decide the shape of the page.

Required fields

Title · Author · Description. They are marked with an asterisk and the continue button stays disabled until they are filled.

The description is the one that matters most. It is not marketing copy — it is the brief the AI writes from. A description of two vague sentences produces a vague outline. Say what happens, to whom, and what is at stake.

Genre and audience

Genre steers tone and structure. Audience steers vocabulary and content. Both travel with every AI call.

Length targets

Chapters and target words per chapter multiply into the book you are planning to write. They are targets, not limits — nothing stops a chapter running long.

They do two jobs beyond planning:

• The writing statistics compare your real word count against them.
• They floor the estimated page count, so a book you have just started still shows a plausible spine in the Cover Studio instead of a wafer.

Print format

Platform · trim size · binding · paper · margins · line spacing · body font.

This is the physical book. Changing it re-typesets everything — the editor sheet, the preview and the exported PDF all update together, because they are one layout engine rather than three that can drift.

You can change it later from the ⚙ Format button in the editor toolbar. What you cannot do is change it after you have published a listing and expect the page count to hold: a different trim re-flows the whole book to a different length.

See Print format and platforms for what each setting does.

Front and back matter

Behind a collapsed section: dedication, epigraph, acknowledgments, about the author, copyright year, rights text, edition and ISBN.

These are rendered properly — the dedication and epigraph as unnumbered pages before the table of contents, acknowledgments and about-the-author as numbered pages after the last chapter, and the ISBN onto the copyright page and into the EPUB's metadata.

What to watch for

• The cover preview on this screen is the real cover, drawn by the same engine as the Cover Studio. It does not follow later title or author renames on its own — re-apply a template in the studio if you rename the book.
• A thin description is the single most common cause of a disappointing outline. If the outline comes back generic, the fix is nearly always here, not in the model.