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.

The story foundation (novels)

When the genre is Fiction, the premise gains a Story foundation card: the decisions a novelist makes before chapter one. Every answer reaches the outline, every chapter the AI writes and the assistant. All of them are optional; a blank one is planned around.

• Kind of story: romance, mystery, fantasy and so on.
• Story structure: where the turning points fall. Three-act, Save the Cat, the hero's journey, romance beats, mystery / thriller or kishōtenketsu, or let the AI choose for the kind of story. The outline places the turning points in the right chapters, and each chapter is told which beat it carries.
• The central question: what the reader keeps turning pages to find out.
• What the protagonist wants, what they actually need, the lie they believe and the wound behind it: the shape of the character's change. The story tests the lie until the climax forces the truth.
• The opposition, the stakes and the theme.
• The ending: a change for the better, bittersweet, tragic or steadfast.
• Point of view and tense, kept exactly in every chapter.
• Tone and voice, comparable books (for feel; they are never imitated) and what the reader should feel at the end.

Polish each chapter is on by default. After the AI writes a chapter, a second pass line-edits it, removing the habits that make prose read as machine-made: stacked metaphors, characters explaining their feelings, a narrator explaining the scene, a closing paragraph that sums up. It never changes what happens. It doubles the price of writing a chapter, and every price you see includes it. Turn it off here.

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

A novel's dedication, epigraph, acknowledgments, author bio and copyright details are pages in the editor's chapter list, under Front matter and Back matter — see The editor. A layout book (coloring, picture, planner…) still sets them here, behind a collapsed section.

Either way they 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 is not on this screen. The column beside the form sums up the book — chapters, length and trim. The cover is designed in the Cover room, from the room bar. Rename the book after designing a cover and re-apply a template there.
• 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.