AI Authoring and Self-Publishing

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.