An end-to-end pipeline for drafting novels with AI agents, publishing them as books, and presenting them on the web.
Books drafted with this kit are not pretending to be human-authored. The brief is the only human input; everything else — canon, outline, draft, edits, cover, audiobook — is produced by agents from that brief. The repo is a demonstration of what becomes possible when you ask AI to do all of this, not most of it.
Live site: https://iaj6.github.io/novelkit/ — the reading room, branded as lantern & page.
novelkit/
├── cdk/ # the drafter — Claude Agent SDK, TypeScript
├── press/ # the publisher — pandoc, WeasyPrint, OpenAI image, ElevenLabs/OpenAI TTS
├── site/ # the reading room — Astro static site (deployed)
└── library/ # the books — finished outputs (each is its own CDK project)
The three subsystems are deliberately independent. They communicate through the filesystem (library/<book>/) — no shared runtime, no shared types, no monorepo tooling. Each has its own README.
brief.md ──┐
│
cdk: researcher (opt-in), architect, │
plotter, threads, │
calibrate-drafter, drafter, │
editor, reader, │
continuity-fact-audit │
▼
library/<book>/
├── canon/ ◄─── world, characters, themes, threads, continuity
├── outline/ ◄─── per-chapter plans
├── draft/ ◄─── per-chapter prose
└── logs/ ◄─── continuity, scene log, run trace, findings
│
│
press: concat_chapters, md_to_html, │
md_to_epub, html_to_pdf, │
synthesize_cover_brief, │
generate_image, prepare_tts, │
tts_openai / tts_elevenlabs │
▼
library/<book>/
├── manuscript.md ◄─── concatenated drafts
└── build/
├── <book>.html
├── <book>.epub
├── <book>.pdf
├── cover.png
├── cover-prompt.md ◄─── the synthesized brief Claude wrote for the image model
├── tts/ ◄─── per-chapter cleaned text + manifest.json
├── audiobook/ ◄─── ElevenLabs MP3s
└── audiobook-openai/ ◄─── OpenAI TTS MP3s
│
│
cdk publish <book> │ ◄─── flips visibility in cdk.config.json
│
▼
site: Astro reads library/<book>/ for any book with visibility="public"
│
▼
the reading room — deployed to GitHub Pages
Requires Node ≥22, Python 3, pandoc, and cwebp (for image optimization).
# 1. Keys.
cp .env.example .env
# Fill in: ANTHROPIC_API_KEY (required), OPENAI_API_KEY (covers + TTS),
# ELEVENLABS_API_KEY (premium audio, optional).
# 2. Scaffold a book and write your brief.
cd cdk
npm install
npm run cdk -- init ../library/my-book --title "My Book"
$EDITOR ../library/my-book/brief.md
# 3. Draft the book.
npm run cdk -- run ../library/my-book
# You'll see a pre-run plan with estimated cost + ETA before anything runs.
# Live cost tally on every result line. Coloured phase labels. Heartbeat
# during long thinking pauses.
# 4. Publish.
cd ../press
./concat_chapters.sh my-book # → library/my-book/manuscript.md
./build_book.sh my-book # → HTML / EPUB / PDF
./generate_cover.sh my-book # → cover.png (Claude synthesizes the brief,
# gpt-image-1.5 paints it)
./build_audiobook_openai.sh my-book # → MP3s (optional, costs OpenAI TTS spend)
# 5. Mark it as public, then stage its files for the site.
cd ../cdk
npm run cdk -- publish ../library/my-book # visibility → public in cdk.config.json
cd ../site
npm run sync # copies build/ → public/books/<slug>/ (public books only)
# Commit BOTH the cdk.config.json change AND site/public/books/<slug>/, then push.
# CI builds only the Astro site (not the press), so public/books/ is the
# deployed source of truth for downloads. (Audiobook MP3s are gitignored — large
# and regenerable — so audio is not served from the deployed site by default.)
# 6. Serve the reading room locally.
cd ../site
npm install
npm run dev # → http://localhost:4321/novelkit/Each subsystem has its own README with the full options:
- cdk/README.md — the drafter
- press/README.md — the publisher
- site/README.md — the reading room
Books are private by default. Nothing in library/ appears on the site until you flip the switch.
cdk publish <dir> # set visibility: public
cdk unpublish <dir> # set visibility: private (default)This lives as a "visibility" field in cdk.config.json, and it gates both layers of the site:
- Pages — the site filters
getBooks()tovisibility === "public"and ignores everything else, so a private book gets no landing entry and no/book/<slug>/route. - Files —
site/scripts/sync-library.sh(thepredev/prebuildhook) copies only public books' artifacts intosite/public/books/<slug>/, and prunes the copy of any book that is private or removed. So a private book never leaks its EPUB/PDF/cover onto the deployed site, andcdk unpublish+ a sync retracts a book's files as well as its page.
Because CI builds only the Astro site (it does not run the press), site/public/books/ is the deployed source of truth for downloads. Flipping visibility alone changes the pages; to also move (or retract) the files, run npm run sync in site/ and commit site/public/books/ along with the cdk.config.json change, then push. library/<book>/build/ is gitignored, so an artifact that isn't synced-and-committed won't appear on the live site even for a public book.
Why: CDK runs produce a lot of in-flight drafts. A draft you're iterating on shouldn't auto-appear on the public reading room — in its pages or as a quietly-fetchable file.
coldwater-reach published 30-chapter literary novel — 1943–45 coastal Maine
the-cold-signal published Antarctic isolation thriller — twelve days at Halvorsen Station
vilcabamba-expedition published 1930s expedition into the eastern Cordillera Vilcabamba
tiny-toy-output published "The Bottle" — minimal 3-chapter demo, fastest end-to-end read
the-long-tenant published two-sided ghost story — two registers, an epistemic ledger,
verbatim records (the world-model showcase run)
the-contingency published quiet far-future novel — two registers, one state dinner;
pilot book for the who-knows-what epistemic layer
the-courier-job published YA road fantasy — the compounding-mechanism middle experiment
the-hollowback published YA ensemble fantasy — motivated POV rotation across four leads
plattsburgh-twosides published "Two Shores" — Plattsburgh Bay, Sept 1814, both shores
plattsburgh-american published "A Line of Smoke" — the same nine days, drafted independently
of Two Shores from its own brief (companion-volume experiment)
everyone-still-alive published mosaic apocalypse novel — six vignettes, six registers
coldwater-reach-* private research re-runs of the coldwater brief (world-model
validation evidence: m6, m7, fm4, mech, v031)
the-cold-signal-mech private research re-run — the compounding-mechanism control test
tiny-toy private brief only — superseded by tiny-toy-output
ya-smoke-test private 3-chapter smoke test
Every published book carries a colophon.md — the press's note on why the book
exists and how it came out — which the site renders on the book's page along
with its opening page and (where one exists) the pipeline reader's letter on
the finished manuscript.
Read order suggestion: tiny-toy-output (13 minutes) → the-cold-signal (~1½ hours) → the-long-tenant or coldwater-reach (~3–4½ hours, the headline outputs).
Calibrated against real run.jsonl data from completed pipeline runs. Per ~80K-word novel on claude-sonnet-4-6:
| stage | spend | notes |
|---|---|---|
| Drafting + editor passes + reader | ~$4 fixed + ~$2/chapter | Pre-run banner shows a band before each run starts |
| Cover brief synthesis (Anthropic) | ~$0.01–0.02 | Claude reads the canon, writes a focused visual brief |
| Cover image (OpenAI gpt-image-1.5) | ~$0.04–0.20 | One call, ~30 seconds |
| Audiobook (OpenAI TTS, gpt-4o-mini-tts) | ~$0.05/1K chars | ~$20 for a 30-chapter novel |
| Audiobook (ElevenLabs eleven_v3) | ~$0.30/1K chars | Higher quality; ~$120 for the same novel |
Skip what you don't need. Text outputs alone (no cover, no audio) are cheap.
GitHub Pages via .github/workflows/deploy.yml. After pushing the repo:
- Enable Pages in repo settings (Source: GitHub Actions).
- Push to
main. The workflow buildssite/and deploys. - Site lands at
https://<user>.github.io/novelkit/.
See site/README.md for the custom-domain swap (drop the base path + add a CNAME).
# cdk
cd cdk && npm test # vitest — 272 tests, ~600ms
cd cdk && npm run test:coverage # >80% on ansi, runlog, estimate, state, world/
# press
cd press && python3 -m pytest # pytest — 78 tests, ~80ms
cd press && python3 -m pytest --cov # 86% across modules
# site
cd site && npm test # vitest — 54 tests, ~200ms
cd site && npm run test:coverage # ~93% on library.tsCI runs all three suites on every push and PR via .github/workflows/test.yml. Dependabot keeps the npm packages (cdk + site) and GitHub Actions versions up to date with weekly PRs.
See SECURITY.md. TL;DR: no user data, no analytics, no third-party scripts on the deployed site. API keys live in a gitignored .env and never reach the repo. Secret scanning + push protection are enabled.
Showcase repo. Not productized. Not on a roadmap. Code is provided as-is for demonstration and for forking by anyone interested in the same approach.
MIT. See LICENSE.