Step-by-step guides for every tool — from creating your first project to publishing your finished book.
Click + New Project from your dashboard. This opens the Story Wizard — a short guided interview that builds the foundation of your book based on what you already know (or don't know yet).
Each wizard is optimized for a different type of writing project. Here's the quick guide:
The left sidebar is your main navigation. Icons represent each major section:
The right sidebar (when open) shows the AI Intelligence Panel for your project type.
Auctore supports importing from multiple formats. From the dashboard, click Import Manuscript, or from inside a project go to Settings → Import.
Supported formats: DOCX, PDF, TXT/Markdown, EPUB, RTF, and Scrivener (zip your .scriv folder first).
After import, Auctore auto-detects chapter breaks and runs AI enrichment in the background to extract character profiles, world bible entries, and story structure.
Yes. Auctore autosaves your work continuously as you type — every few seconds. You'll see a "Saved" indicator in the editor toolbar.
If you lose connectivity, your content is saved locally and synced when you reconnect. Auctore also keeps a crash-recovery draft in your browser's local storage as a secondary backup.
There are three ways to add chapters:
The Binder supports folders — right-click a chapter in the binder and select Convert to Folder, then drag chapters inside it. Folders work like Parts in Scrivener.
You can also drag-and-drop chapters to reorder them at any time. Sort order is saved automatically.
The Binder (left sidebar) shows chapters while you're in the editor — it's your quick-access navigation, optimized for fast chapter switching while writing.
The Chapters tab (left nav icon) is a full chapter management view — you can see metadata (POV, setting, status, word count), edit scene details, add notes, and get a bird's-eye view of your whole manuscript structure.
The AI Co-Writer (press Tab or right-click → AI Complete) generates the next sentence or paragraph based on everything you've written — your style, characters, and current scene.
It reads your current chapter content and writing style before generating. The more you write, the better it matches your voice.
Block Buster is Auctore's writer's-block rescue tool. It analyzes your current chapter and generates several possible "next moves" — action beats, dialogue options, scene pivots, or internal monologue moments.
Use it when you're stuck at the end of a scene or unsure where the story goes next. Block Buster reads your full chapter context before suggesting anything, so suggestions always feel connected to your story.
Find it in the right-click context menu while editing, or from the AI Tools panel.
Dialogue Coach analyzes the dialogue in your selected chapter (or highlighted text) for:
Open it from the AI Tools panel or the right sidebar.
Auctore's Grammar Checker is AI-powered and understands fiction context — it won't flag intentional sentence fragments, stylistic comma splices, or dialect spelling. It focuses on:
Select text for a focused check, or run it on the whole chapter. Find it in the Grammar & Style panel (right sidebar).
The Line Editor is a sentence-level rewriting assistant. Select any passage, then choose an editing mode:
Right-click selected text to access these options, or open the Echo Chat panel and use the action buttons.
Focus Mode hides the sidebars and toolbar, leaving only the text on screen — ideal for deep writing sessions without distractions. Press F11 or click the Focus Mode icon in the editor toolbar to toggle it.
In Focus Mode you can still autosave, use keyboard shortcuts, and access the AI Co-Writer — just without the visual clutter.
Typewriter Mode keeps your cursor centered on the screen as you type — like a real typewriter. Your current line stays in the middle of the screen, preventing you from constantly looking at the bottom of the page. Enable it from the View menu in the editor toolbar.
Yes. Track Changes mode shows additions and deletions in color, like Word's tracked changes. Toggle it from the editor toolbar. You can accept or reject individual changes.
Version History (accessible from the chapter menu) keeps an automatic log of saved versions so you can compare or restore earlier drafts.
Snapshots let you manually save named checkpoints — useful at major draft milestones.
The World Bible is a structured database of your story's world — locations, rules, history, cultures, technology, magic systems, etc. It's organized into categories so you can quickly reference any element while writing.
It gets populated in two ways:
Go to the Places section from the left nav. Here you can:
Locations you create here will be suggested by the AI when it mentions those settings in generated content.
The Timeline is a visual chronological view of your story events. Add events and they appear on a horizontal timeline you can zoom and scroll.
Each event can be tagged to a chapter, character, or location. You can flag events as in-story time (what happens in the narrative) vs. backstory (what happened before the book begins).
The Relationship Web is an interactive diagram showing how your characters are connected. Each character is a node; relationships are labeled edges between them.
It's built automatically from your character profiles and can be edited manually. Use it to spot plot holes — if two characters should have a tense history but aren't connected, you'll see it instantly.
Moodboards are visual reference boards — like a Pinterest board for your book. Add images (upload or paste URLs), color swatches, and text notes to capture the visual tone of your story.
You can create separate moodboards for characters, locations, the book's overall aesthetic, or anything else. They're great for maintaining consistent visual language when describing settings and characters.
The Research Board keeps your research inside Auctore — no more tab-switching. Add notes, paste web links, upload reference files, and organize everything by topic.
Research items can be linked to specific chapters or characters so you can quickly find relevant reference material while writing a scene.
Go to the Characters tab and click + New Character. You can fill in details manually, or use AI Complete to have Auctore fill in personality, backstory, voice, and arc based on what you've already written about them in your chapters.
Each character profile includes: name, role, physical description, personality, backstory, motivation, voice notes, relationships, and a portrait image.
The Character Generator creates fully-formed character concepts based on prompts you provide. Specify role (hero, villain, mentor), genre, and any specific traits — Auctore generates a complete character profile including name options, appearance, backstory hook, and voice notes.
Use it to jumpstart characters you haven't fully defined yet, or to generate supporting cast quickly.
Open a character's profile and click Generate Portrait. Auctore uses your physical description to generate a portrait image using AI image generation.
If the first result isn't right, click Regenerate to get a new version. You can also upload your own portrait image by clicking the portrait placeholder and selecting a file.
Character Intelligence reads your chapters and builds deep insights about how your characters behave in the story — separate from what you've manually filled in their profiles.
It surfaces:
When you import a manuscript, Auctore automatically extracts character names and builds preliminary profiles via AI enrichment. These appear in your Characters tab after enrichment completes.
You can also run Re-extract Characters from Settings → AI Enrichment to re-scan your chapters for characters at any time.
If the AI extraction created duplicate character entries (e.g., "James" and "James Fletcher" as separate characters), use Merge Duplicates from the Characters tab menu.
Select the two characters to merge, choose which profile data to keep for each field, and confirm. The merged character keeps all relationship links and chapter references.
Go to the Export tab. Choose your output format:
You can customize font, margins, page size, headers/footers, and chapter separators before exporting. For agent submissions, use the Standard Manuscript Format preset.
Format Book is a full book layout tool — think of it as a simplified InDesign inside Auctore. It formats your manuscript with professional typography, chapter headings, drop caps, running headers, and a table of contents.
Choose a book trim size (US Trade, Royal, Digest, etc.) and Auctore calculates page count and adjusts layout automatically. Export as print-ready PDF.
The Query Letter tool reads your manuscript synopsis, character profiles, and genre to generate a draft query letter in standard agent-submission format.
It produces:
Yes. The Cover Designer (Export tab → Cover Designer) lets you generate or upload a cover image and add title/author text with typography controls. Export as PNG or PDF at print-ready resolution.
For AI-generated covers, describe the visual concept and Auctore generates options you can iterate on.
Read-to-Me uses ElevenLabs text-to-speech to read your chapters aloud. Listening to your prose is one of the best ways to catch awkward sentences, pacing issues, and unnatural dialogue.
Select a voice, adjust speed, and click Play from the Manuscript toolbar. You can choose any chapter or start from the current cursor position.
Go to Collaborate from the left nav (or project Settings). Enter the collaborator's email and choose their role:
They'll receive an email invitation with a link to join the project.
The Beta Reader mode gives selected readers access to your manuscript in a clean reading interface — no editor clutter. They can:
Beta readers don't need an Auctore account — they access via a special invite link. Their comments appear in your Collaboration panel.
Yes. Right-click any chapter in the Chapters tab and select Share Chapter. This creates a public link to a read-only version of that chapter.
Useful for sharing work-in-progress with writing group members, contest submissions, or early readers without giving full project access.
Writing Groups let you create or join a group with other Auctore writers. Members can share chapter excerpts within the group, leave feedback, and track progress together.
Groups have a shared feed where members post writing updates. It's designed to replicate the accountability and community of an in-person writing group, asynchronously.
The Series Builder lets you connect multiple Auctore projects as books in the same series. Once linked, you get:
Access Series Builder from the left nav.
Yes. When using Series Builder, characters can be marked as Series Characters — their profiles are shared across all books in the series.
World bible entries can similarly be marked as series-wide, so your locations, lore, and rules are automatically available in every book without re-entering them.
When you create a new project and identify it as part of an existing series in the wizard, Auctore pre-populates the new project with:
This gives you a head start on Book 2, 3, etc. without starting from scratch.
Intelligence Panels are deep-analysis sidebars tailored to each writing type. Each panel knows the conventions, craft elements, and AI-assisted insights specific to that genre or format.
The correct panel activates automatically based on your project type (set during the wizard). You can also switch panels manually.
The Fiction Intelligence Panel provides:
The Screenplay Intelligence Panel is tailored for scriptwriters and includes:
The Memoir Intelligence Panel focuses on the unique craft of personal narrative:
The Non-Fiction Intelligence Panel includes:
The Intelligence Panel auto-activates based on your project's type (set in the wizard). To manually open a different panel, click the brain/magic icon in the right sidebar ribbon and select the panel you want.
You can open any panel regardless of project type — useful if you're writing cross-genre work and want insights from multiple frameworks.
The Pacing Heatmap (in the Fiction Intelligence Panel or as a standalone tool from the AI Tools menu) visualizes the energy and tension of each chapter on a color-coded grid.
Red = high tension/action; blue = slow/reflective; green = turning point. It reads your chapter content and scores it — no setup required.
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Everything described here is inside Auctore — no plugins, no integrations, no separate apps.