The companion guide · For National Novel Conjuring Month (NNCM) — and every month after
How to Write
with ConjureInk
Three ways in, one novel out. Talk it through with the Conjure Agent, write it yourself page by page, or import a book you made somewhere else — then write it chapter by chapter, publish it, and put it in front of readers.
This page walks the whole route for novels, step by step: creating a Story, setting your chapters and your dialogue mix, choosing the Author Persona that guides the conjuring, publishing with your NNCM entry and AI-use statement, and how the reader vote decides the winner.
The whole process, drawn
From first idea to reader votes
Every book on ConjureInk travels the same road. You start through whichever door fits what you already have, everything meets in a Story, and the Story carries you the rest of the way.
Start — pick your door
Talk with the Conjure Agent
An idea, a character, a half-formed premise. You direct; the Agent drafts, questions, and builds with you. How the conversation works ↓
Import a finished draft
A book made on another platform — an EPUB or a manuscript file. Bring it in and keep going from where it already is. How import works ↓
Start from your own pages
Your outline, your opening chapters, your notes. Open a Story and write forward yourself, calling on the Agent when you want it.
Create a Story
Give it a title and write its short description — a Story can't be published without one, so it earns its place here, at the start. The work lives in the Library as a Story with chapters, and everything you write lives inside this one Story.
Set the shape & voice
Set your number of chapters, words per chapter, and dialogue-vs-description mix — and pick the Author Persona that guides the conjuring. Writing guide ↓ · Personas ↓
Write it, chapter by chapter
One chapter at a time — conjured, hand-written, or a mix of both. Loop back and revise as you go.
Generate the ePub, then Publish ePub
Add a cover, generate the ePub — that makes the book — then open Publish ePub, tick the box to enter NNCM, and add your statement of how AI was used. The publish steps ↓
Readers vote
December 1–14, readers who acquired your book in Episodica vote for it. Most votes win. How the vote works ↓
Door A · Step by step
Talking with the Conjure Agent
The Conjure Agent is your collaborator inside ConjureInk. You don't hand it a prompt and walk away — you have a conversation, and the conversation becomes the book. You're the author; the Agent works at your direction.
I want to write a novel about a lighthouse keeper who starts receiving letters from a ship that sank fifty years ago.
Good premise. Before we draft: is this a ghost story, a mystery, or both? And whose handwriting is on the letters — someone the keeper knew?
Both. The handwriting is his mother's — she was supposedly lost on that ship before he was born. Start with an outline, then draft chapter one in a spare, cold style.
Here's a twelve-chapter outline built around the letters arriving once a month — and a first chapter that opens with the mail boat. Read it, tell me what to change, and we'll keep going.
Bring whatever you have
A premise, a character, a single scene, a question. "Help me figure out what this story is" is a perfectly good opening line.
Direct like an editor
Ask for outlines, alternatives, and drafts. Push back. The sharper your direction — tone, stakes, what must happen — the more the draft is yours.
Land it in your Story
When a piece is right, it becomes part of your Story — a chapter, a scene — where you can keep revising it like anything you wrote by hand.
Who guides the conjuring
Author Personas: the voice behind the prose
An Author Persona guides how ConjureInk writes with you — its voice, pacing, and instincts for dialogue and description. Set one persona for a novel and the conjuring stays in that voice, conversation after conversation, chapter after chapter.
Pick a ConjureInk preset
Start from a ready-made persona — a spare, dialogue-led storyteller, a lush describer who lingers on place, a wry narrator with a light touch, and more. Pick the one closest to the book you hear in your head, then write. You can switch or adjust it as the novel finds its voice.
Create your own Author Persona
Build a persona of your own: name it, describe the voice you want — sentence length, tone, how much dialogue it favours, what it never does. Save it and reuse it across novels, so your books sound like you, not like everyone else's.
In conversation and in drafting
Use the same persona in two places: when you're talking with the Conjure Agent — planning, outlining, arguing about a character — and when the Agent drafts the prose. One persona, both rooms, so the planning and the pages match.
Choose before chapter one
Pick a preset or create your persona when you set up the Story. Changing voice mid-novel is possible — but a persona chosen early keeps the whole book in one register.
Talk in that voice
With a persona active, the Conjure Agent answers, proposes, and outlines in that persona's manner — so the ideas you approve already sound like the book they'll become.
Draft in that voice
When chapters are conjured, the persona steers the prose — diction, rhythm, the balance of talk and description — within the chapter settings you chose. Your edits still have the last word.
Door B · Step by step
Importing a book you made elsewhere
Wrote it on another platform — or in a document, over months, the ordinary way? It still belongs here. Import is how an existing book becomes a ConjureInk Story you can publish, enter, and keep building on.
Create the Story first
Open a new Story in Chapters, give it its title and its short description.
Bring the file in
Import your EPUB or manuscript. The text lands inside the Story, in order, ready to read through.
Walk the chapters
Check the chapter breaks and the order. Fix anything the import split or merged — this pass is yours, and it doesn't take long.
Keep writing — or publish
From here it works like any Story: conjure the missing ending, revise a chapter with the Agent, or go straight to publishing.
Writing the Story
Novels are written in Chapters. You set the shape.
No format menu to sort out — a novel on ConjureInk is written in the Chapters format, one chapter at a time, and each chapter can be conjured by the Agent, written by you, or both. What you control is the shape of the book before you start:
For: novels of every genre · The NNCM book
Chapters — the novel
Unit of work: one chapter- Set up the Story: title, short description, the outline you settled on with the Agent — and your Author Persona. Later, in the Publish ePub panel, you'll set the book's genre and subgenre — and the genre is the category your book is voted in at NNCM: Literary, Romance, Sci-Fi, Mystery, Thriller, or Historical.
- Set your three numbers (below): how many chapters, how many words per chapter, and the mix of dialogue vs. description. Change any of them later — the plan serves the book, not the other way round.
- Write chapter one. Conjure it from your direction, write it yourself, or draft it yourself and let the Agent strengthen it. All three are normal.
- Repeat, one chapter at a time. Each finished chapter locks in; the next one builds on what's actually on the page, not on the outline you started with.
- Revise in passes. A chapter that isn't earning its place gets re-conjured, cut, or rewritten — at any point, not just at the end.
- For NNCM: keep going until the novel passes 50,000 words. It can land any day of November — in a day, a week, or across the month.
Working rhythm: decide what the chapter must do before you write it — the turn it makes, the question it leaves open. Chapters written to a purpose rarely need rescuing later.
Try the three settings
This is a working picture of the controls in ConjureInk. Move them and watch the book's shape — and its distance from 50,000 words — change.
How many chapters the novel is planned in. Short chapters move fast; long ones settle in.
Your target length for each chapter.
Slide toward talk or toward telling. The persona and your direction fine-tune it chapter by chapter.
40% dialogue · 60% descriptionDrive every scene
Stay at the wheel for every plot point, character, line of dialogue, and description, with the Agent as your instrument, chapter by chapter.
Draft, then direct
Or let the Agent draft extensively from your direction, then review, cut, and revise until what's left earns its place. Both are authorship. The standard is the same either way: a book worth reading.
The last step
Publish ePub — that is how a Story becomes a book
There is no separate “book” button in ConjureInk. A written Story becomes a store book by generating an ePub from it, and Publish ePub is the book-publishing action. The NNCM entry checkbox lives in that panel — nowhere else. Here is the whole walk, story to entered novel:
Give the Story a cover
Add a cover image to your finished Story in the Library. Until a cover exists, the Generate ePub action stays disabled.
Generate the ePub
Use Generate ePub in the Library, or generate it via Produce. This is the step that makes the book.
Open Publish ePub
Once the ePub exists, Publish ePub is reachable from the Library, from Produce, or from the Publish page.
Fill in the panel, then Publish
Set the book's details, tick the entry box and write your statement (below), then click Publish — the book goes live in the Episodica store.
About this demonstration: the entry section shown here — the checkbox and the statement field — is built and verified on ConjureInk's staging site. It is not on the live site yet: the live Publish ePub panel gains this section with the next release, at which point this demonstration becomes the real thing.
Fill in genre and subgenre — the genre is the category readers vote in — how many chapters are a free preview, a short description and a full description, and tags. Then set the price per chapter, in tokens (the panel suggests 2) and an optional bundle discount. You may charge for the book or give it away free — entering NNCM does not force free. A one-time listing fee of 50 credits applies when you publish. To receive your revenue split, sign up for Stripe Connect in Episodica.
Ticking the box opens the field below — “How AI Was Used in This Book” — right here in the panel, before you publish.
The conjuring statement — about 200 words, in your own words: the tools you used, how you directed them, and how you revised. It is required to enter: if you publish with the box ticked and this statement empty, the publish is refused with a clear message — and a refused publish charges nothing. Readers see this statement, and it matters most for imported books, where the AI work happened somewhere ConjureInk couldn't see it.
0 words · aim for about 200
Starting from an import? Begin with where the book was made:
Click Publish and the book goes live in the Episodica store — entered in NNCM if you ticked the box, with your statement attached. Export it and publish it anywhere else too, whenever you like: it's yours.
Reopen the same Publish ePub panel, untick the box (or tick it, if you skipped it the first time), and publish again. The panel remembers your saved statement, so entering later takes seconds.
The entry checkbox and statement appear only in the Publish ePub panel — not in the audiobook publish panel, and not for any other format. NNCM is for novels.
Beyond the book
Once your story is in ConjureInk, it can become more than a book
And once you've got your story into ConjureInk, you might like to adapt it. The same story that became your novel can be made again for listening, scrolling, playing, and watching — each adaptation built from the story you already have, not started over from a blank page.
A multi-voice audioplay
Your chapters performed by a cast of voices, with an original soundtrack and sound effects — the dialogue becomes a performance, not just a reading.
A vertical-scrolling webcomic
Your scenes retold in drawn panels made to scroll on a phone — the same story, seen instead of read.
An interactive adventure
Readers step inside the story and make the choices — what happens next is theirs to decide, along routes you set.
An episodic vertical video series
Your story cut into short vertical episodes, made for watching on a phone, one episode at a time.
After the finish line
The vote for NNCM: readers decide
There is no judges panel. December 1–14, the winners of National Novel Conjuring Month are decided by the people who actually read the books — registered ConjureInk users who acquired them in Episodica. Votes tally inside each book's genre, across six Best categories — and the most votes overall take the grand prize. Here's how a vote comes to be:
Read it on Episodica
Finished novels sit on the shelf all December, readable by anyone. Browse, open, read.
Acquire the book
A vote belongs to readers who acquired the book in Episodica — picked it up as their own copy, free or otherwise.
Cast your one vote
One vote for each book you've acquired — one vote per book, per account, cast in Episodica during the voting window.
Most votes win
The tally decides it — genre by genre. The most-voted book in each genre takes its Best title, and the most votes overall are crowned Top Conjured Novel 2026.
Your book competes in the genre you set in the Publish ePub panel — and every entry, in every genre, is also in the running for Top Conjured Novel 2026, the most votes overall.
Writing in the event? Then this is your campaign, such as it is: get your book into readers' hands in Episodica. A reader who never acquires it can't vote for it — a reader who does, and loves it, can. That's the whole strategy.
Questions
Asked, answered
I only have an idea. Where do I actually start?
My novel is finished, but I wrote it somewhere else. Do I have to redo it in ConjureInk?
How do I set the length and shape of my novel?
What is an Author Persona, and do I need one?
Does ConjureInk also make reels, adventures, or other media?
How much of the writing has to be mine vs. the Agent's?
What exactly do I tick to enter NNCM?
Do I have to give my book away free to enter?
Who can vote, and how?
The route, on one card
From first idea to reader votes
- Start through your door: talk with the Conjure Agent, or import your EPUB or manuscript
- Create the Story — title, short description, and your Author Persona
- Set chapters, words per chapter, and the dialogue-vs-description mix
- Write it one chapter at a time: conjured, written, or both
- Add a cover and Generate ePub — that makes the book (Generate ePub stays disabled until a cover exists)
- Open Publish ePub, fill in the panel, tick the NNCM box, and add “How AI Was Used in This Book”
- Click Publish — the book goes live in the Episodica store, entered
- Get it acquired in Episodica, and let the readers vote
One of those readers might be holding your book in December. Start it today — the route is short, and the first step is a conversation.