Author It
AI skills for writers who don't want AI writing their novels for them...
Overview
This repository contains Claude Code skills for authors. These skills help you plan, develop, and refine your book — but they never write your story for you. Using these skills will classify your work as AI Assisted because these are NOT generative AI skills.
Requirements
Claude Code version 1.0.33 or later. Check your version with:
claude --version
To upgrade: brew upgrade claude-code (Homebrew) or npm update -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code (npm).
Install as a Plugin (Recommended)
Installing as a plugin is the easiest way to use Author It. Skills are available across all your projects with a single install.
Step 1 — Add the marketplace:
/plugin marketplace add design1online/author-it
Step 2 — Install the plugin:
/plugin install author-it@author-it
That's it. Skills are immediately available.
Note: Plugin skills are namespaced to prevent conflicts with other plugins. Invoke them with the author-it: prefix (e.g., /author-it:create-story-bible).
Manage the plugin
/plugin disable author-it@author-it # Disable without uninstalling
/plugin enable author-it@author-it # Re-enable
/plugin uninstall author-it@author-it # Remove completely
Manual Installation (Alternative)
If you prefer not to use the plugin system, you can copy the skills directly into any project.
Global (available in all projects)
cp -r skills/* ~/.claude/skills/
Project-level (available in one project only)
cp -r skills/ /path/to/your/project/.claude/skills/
Note: Manually installed skills use short names without a namespace prefix (e.g., /create-story-bible instead of /author-it:create-story-bible).
Skills
/author-it:create-story-bible
Usage: /author-it:create-story-bible [book-title] [premise]
Guides you through a systematic, question-driven process to build a complete story bible for your book. It never writes your story — instead it asks targeted questions to help you clarify your premise, characters, world, and market positioning until everything is crystal clear.
The skill creates a structured set of files in a story-bibles/[book-title]/ folder (or story-bibles/[series-title]/[book-number]-[book-title]/ for series). Files created include:
| Folder | Files |
|---|
story/ | premise, genre, tropes, recommendations |
characters/ | protagonist, antagonist, relationship, distraction, emotion, reason, support, opposition |
world-building/ | geography, flora-fauna, politics, religions, resources, culture-conflicts |
outline/ | plot-centered, character-centered, romance, mystery, horror, or short-story beats |
marketing/ | analysis, similar-books, ad-copy |
The skill works iteratively — it asks 1–3 targeted questions at a time, states its assumptions, and waits for your confirmation before moving forward. It will not generate final documents until all gaps and ambiguities are resolved.
/author-it:create-scene
Usage: /author-it:create-scene
Creates a standardized template for scenes and helps you write a compelling scenes or evaluates an existing scene.
The report includes:
- Story Beat - which beat this scene covers
- Characters In Scene - a list of all characters in the scene
- Story Question - also known as the promise of the premise, how this scene contributes to the question this story is asking
- Story Pitch - how this story is being marketed in a single sentence
- Theme - the theme of this story
- Story Beat Sentence - a sentence that helps you align what happens in this scene with the scene goal, story beat and story question
- Day - what day this scene takes place in the timeline of the story
- Location - where this scene takes place
- Scene Goal - the ultimate goal of this scene (ie inciting incident, character introduction, character growth, world building, plot development, foreshadowing device, etc).
- Hook - how the first sentence will grab attention, make the reader ask questions, introduce conflict, tension or stakes.
- Escalation - a setback or minor problem
- Pivot - a change of pace, breather, introduction of something new or a change of direction
- Conflict - a major problem that arises preventing them from reaching their goal
- Consequences - fallout of the conflict and sets up the strong hook for the next scene or chapter
- Key Points - a list of events, items, or important information that must happen or be included in this scene to help setup later scenes or sub-plots
/author-it:dev-editor-recommendations
Usage: /author-it:dev-editor-recommendations [book-title]
