AI Authoring and Self Publishing: A Complete Manual for the AI-Assisted Author

This book is a working operator's guide to writing and publishing novels with AI assistance — drafting, review, editing, format generation, identifiers, distribution, audiobook, platform, launch, and the series-scale automation that makes the operation sustainable past Book 1. It is calibrated for prose novelists. The pipeline holds across genre — Regency mystery, hard SF, epic fantasy, contemporary romance, middle-grade adventure all use the same scaffolding — and four reader paths (single-book cut-and-paste, first-novel scaling, series operator, hybrid traditional-published author) are routed at the start so each chapter knows who it's talking to.It is honest about what AI cannot do. The AI-tells catalogue (Chapter 1 §5) names fourteen specific failure modes you will catch and remediate manually. The human-editor chapter (Chapter 7) treats the four editorial roles at trade-comparable rates and refuses to pretend AI replaces them. The labor-displacement framing (Chapter 1 §13, applied again to cover artists in Chapter 12) names what indie practice can defensibly do in 2026 and what remains contested.Production is documented end to end. The Longleaf House toolchain — Pandoc + XeLaTeX for headless format generation, EPUBcheck as a CI gate, Skills + MCP servers as the agent's reach into project files and retailer surfaces — produced this very book. Every chapter ships a quick-reference table; the appendices include the working templates (FDD, Chapter Matrix, Beat Sheet, Decision Log entry, Continuity Map, Skill file, AI-disclosure boilerplate), a complete toolchain reference, and a 192-term index. Read more