Book Writer — User Manual
A place to organise a book, with an assistant that asks more than it writes.
Chapters and sections you write in, characters, a timeline you can see, and a notebook for the research around it. Free, no ads, no paywall.
aicoevolution.com/book-writer
It does not replace the notebook
Writers have planned books with index cards, notebooks and walls of sticky notes for centuries, and those still work. This is not an argument that they have stopped working. It is the same job kept in one place, for people who want to try it that way — and if the paper suits you better, the paper is not wrong.
Try it without an account
The landing page has a Try it — no account button. You get a page to write on and the real assistant beside it. It lives in your browser only: nothing is saved to an account, and clearing the browser loses it. The assistant will keep mentioning that, because it is the one thing it knows that you might forget.
Anything structural — saving, chapters, characters, files — asks you to sign in. An account is free and exists so your book has somewhere to live.
The three panes
Left — the navigator. Your books, their chapters, and each chapter's sections. Drag a chapter to reorder it. The pencil on hover renames. The pin in the header keeps the panel open, or lets it hide until you hover the left edge; that choice is remembered.
Middle — the page. Where you write. Click into a section, write, and press Save (or Ctrl+S). The header shows the book, the chapter and the section, plus a word count and progress toward the target.
Right — the panels. Five tabs:
| tab | what it holds |
|---|---|
| AI | the assistant |
| Notebook | your workspace files — characters, world, research, thoughts, drafts and more |
| Timeline | story events as a subway map |
| Diagrams | relationship maps and plot structure, as Mermaid diagrams |
| Files | file changes the assistant has proposed, waiting for your approval |
Drag the divider between the page and the panels to rebalance them. The palette icon sets this room's light, independently of the reading room's.
The assistant
It starts fresh every time, on purpose
There is no saved chat. At the start of every conversation the assistant reads your book's current state — chapters, word counts, characters, timeline, your notes — and works from that. Continuity is the book, not the transcript.
This is why closing the tab costs you nothing: come back tomorrow and it knows exactly where the book stands, because it looks.
When it needs the actual text of a chapter, it asks for it by name and the system hands it over mid-answer. You will not see that happen; you will just notice it quoting your own prose accurately.
It asks more than it writes
Its job is to get the book out of you, not to hand you one. So the default move is a question, a set of options, or a constraint — rather than a paragraph of your novel.
In practice that means it will ask about the concrete rather than the abstract ("what does she do for money?" instead of "what motivates her?"), offer you two or three genuinely different directions rather than one answer, and name the structurally interesting thing you said in passing.
If you are starting from nothing, it has a ladder it will walk with you: the seed (one image you cannot let go of), the shape (who wants what, and what is in the way), the people, the spine (the events that must happen), and then the first scene — not chapter one, just the first scene you can actually see.
Slash commands
Type / in the chat for the list.
| command | what it does |
|---|---|
/add-character Name | role | description | creates the character and a profile file |
/add-timeline YYYY-MM-DD | title | description | minor|major|critical | saves a timeline event |
/plot-status | where the story stands |
/continuity-check | timeline, character and plot inconsistencies |
/suggest-scene | what might come next |
/outline | a chapter outline from current progress |
/worldbuilding [topic] | focus on one part of the world |
/character [name] | everything known about a character |
/help | the list |
The first two happen immediately in the database; the rest are questions the assistant answers.
The authorship ledger
The assistant can write prose, and every word it contributes is counted.
Under the chat you will see a split: how many words are yours, how many are the assistant's, and what percentage of the manuscript that is against a ceiling you set. The default ceiling is 15%.
When it drafts, the prose arrives as a draft card with its word cost on the button — not as text already in your book. It enters the manuscript only when you press Insert into section, and that is the only moment the count moves.
Three things worth knowing:
- The allowance is a fraction of what already exists, so an empty book has an allowance of zero. The opening words of a novel have to be yours or it is not your novel. Write first; the assistant's room grows as your book does.
- The ceiling is yours to change, per book, in the book's settings. The assistant is instructed never to argue for more room.
- It counts what came through Insert. If you copy something out of the chat and paste it into the page yourself, that counts as yours — the app cannot see your clipboard, and we would rather have a number with an honest edge than one that guesses.
It is an origin record, not a forensic analysis of your final prose. Rewriting an inserted paragraph does not change the count.
Your work leaves with you
Save book to file (in the book menu) exports the entire project as one .json file: the book record, every chapter and section, characters, timeline, your whole notebook and your project notes. Load book from file reads one back — always as a new book, never over the top of an existing one.
It is JSON rather than a zip because a backup you cannot open without the software that wrote it is a hostage, not a backup. Open it in any text editor and your prose is right there.
Honest limits
- An account is needed for anything to be saved. The trial is real but it is a trial.
- The assistant is a model, and models are confidently wrong sometimes. It has the actual text of your book available and is instructed to fetch rather than guess, but check anything that matters — particularly a continuity claim about a chapter you have not looked at recently.
- It is not an editor or a proofreader. It will not copy-edit your manuscript, and it is not trying to.
- One book at a time in the assistant's head. It reads the book you have open and does not compare across your books.
Questions people ask
Will it write my book for me? Not unless you make it, and the ledger makes that a number you can see rather than a worry you carry. Set the ceiling to 0 and it will never write a word of prose.
Who owns what I write? You do. We store it so you can come back to it, and you can export the whole thing at any time.
Is my book used to train anything? No.
Can I work offline? No — the assistant needs the server. Your text is saved when you press Save, so write in whatever you like and paste it in if you prefer.