Agentic Book Writing

Writing full-length reference and instructional books with Claude Code, using teams of subagents and a repository as shared memory.

SPEC.md is the source of truth for the pattern. This repository documents it; two others implement it.

What this is for

Producing a print-on-demand paperback — Lulu, KDP Create, or equivalent — that carries educational, instructional or reference material which did not exist in that form before. Manuals, field guides, technical references, documentation of a system nobody has written down.

It is an agentic research pattern. The book is the delivery mechanism; the work is research, structuring and writing. It is deliberately not built for producing books at volume, and §1.1 of the spec explains which parts of the architecture would have to be removed to make it so.

The problem it solves

One agent cannot write a book — not because a manuscript will not fit in a context window, but because quality degrades long before the window fills. A single agent carrying a whole book restates itself, drifts in register, and starts producing text that is locally fluent and globally empty.

So the architecture is context management by delegation: no agent is ever given a task large enough to reach that region. The cost of that is that agents cannot stay consistent by reading each other's work, so consistency is carried by documents instead — a style guide, per-chapter briefs, a continuity ledger.

That trade is the whole pattern. Everything else follows from it.

The teams

flowchart LR
    U([User]) --> D[Definition]
    D --> P[Planning]
    P --> W[Writing]
    R[Research] -.-> W
    W --> RV[Review]
    W --> G[Graphics]
    RV --> PB[Publication]
    G --> PB
    PB --> H[[Print geometry handoff]]

Detail, including who reads what, is in SPEC.md §4 and docs/teams.md.

The three repositories

Repository	What it is
Agentic-Book-Writing (this one)	The spec and the documentation of the pattern
Claude-Book-Writing-Plugin	The Claude Code plugin: agents, skills, commands
Claude-Book-Workspace-Template	The scaffold a book project is instantiated from

Split this way because they run on different clocks. The plugin is replaced wholesale on /plugin update; a book project lives for months and diverges from the template forever; the spec changes more slowly than either.

Related

KDP-Publishing-Plugin — takes a finished manuscript and produces a print-ready KDP paperback: trim geometry, a full-wrap cover built last from the interior's measured extent, and mechanical pre-flight. This pattern hands off to it rather than reimplementing any of it, and the two are designed to meet at dist/manuscript.json.

The division is deliberate and runs both ways: that plugin states it does not write your book, and this one does not typeset it. Typesetting and authorship have different failure modes, and tools that bundle them tend to be good at neither.

Reading order

Document
SPEC.md	The pattern, normative
docs/brief-as-given.md	Where the spec came from, unedited
docs/context-problem.md	Why one agent cannot do this
docs/teams.md	Each team, its inputs and its outputs
docs/documents.md	The foundational documents and who owns what
docs/delegation.md	Read-scoping and the parallelism rules
docs/publication.md	Concatenation, typesetting, the handoff
docs/failure-modes.md	What goes wrong, and which rule prevents it

Status

v1. The pattern has been used by hand to produce printed books; this is the work of making it repeatable. §8 of the spec lists what v1 does not answer — revision passes after first assembly being the largest.

MIT.