The orchestration layer for book-scale writing.
One chapter at a time.
Writing a book with an AI agent breaks the moment the project gets too big to hold in one prompt. Book-Writer is the SHAPE skill — chapter architecture, beats methodology, workspace structure, book mode. It owns how the project is organized. It delegates how each paragraph sounds to Author's Voice.
Free skill. Fiction and nonfiction. Works with Author's Voice for prose, OpenWriter for the actual editing.
A Book Is Not One Doc.
The skill organizes a project around the units that actually exist — chapters, beats, vignettes, research notes. Each lives in its own doc, scored and reviewed independently.
Chapter Architecture
Per-chapter beat sheets, scene/science splits, cold opens, callbacks. The skill walks the agent through assembling a chapter from beats instead of asking it to one-shot 5,000 words of nothing.
Beats Methodology
Each beat is a self-contained 400-800 word unit with its own argument, scene, or vignette. The book is an assembly of beats, not a stretched outline. Easier to revise, parallelize, and re-order.
Workspace Management
Containers for chapters, research notes, beats v1/v2/v3, vignettes, decisions log. The agent always knows where a doc belongs and where to find related material.
Book Mode
Whole-project context loaded at session start — TOC, voice spec, decisions log, working chapter. The agent knows the entire project shape without re-explaining it every conversation.
From TOC To Manuscript.
The skill is the SHAPE pipeline. Each stage produces an artifact in OpenWriter as a separate doc — reviewable, revisable, version-controlled. Voice arrives last, via Author's Voice, so structure decisions never get tangled with prose decisions.
book-writer
chapters, beats, workspace
TOC, decisions log, book mode
authors-voice
anchor, NEVER rules, fingerprints
minion writes every word of prose
openwriter
edit surface, pending review,
workspace tree, version history
Fiction Or Nonfiction. Same Architecture.
Books are books — narrative arc, scene/argument, vignettes, callbacks. The skill works for both because the underlying SHAPE primitives don't care about genre.
Nonfiction
Chapter = argument arc. Beats = self-contained claims with evidence. Research notes attached per chapter. Author's voice strict, structural rigor first.
Fiction
Chapter = scene sequence with stakes shift. Beats = scenes with concrete sensory anchors. Vignette library for short-form preserved material. Voice tighter, structural rigor still load-bearing.
Pairs With What You Already Use.
Book-Writer is one skill in a stack. The agent picks the right tool per task.
Author's Voice
Owns voice. Every paragraph entering the manuscript runs through the anchor system — NEVER rules, fingerprints, minion architecture. Book-Writer never writes prose itself.
OpenWriter
The edit surface. Chapter docs, pending changes, version snapshots, the right-rail review panel. Every doc Book-Writer creates lives in OpenWriter as plain markdown.
Your MCP Host
Claude Code, OpenCode, anything that speaks MCP. Book-Writer is a SKILL.md the host loads — no daemon, no separate process, just markdown the agent reads.
Install Book-Writer. Stop Losing Chapters To Context Limits.
The orchestration layer that makes book-scale projects survive a session. Free skill, pure markdown.
Install Skill