Book Illustrate

Interior Illustration Pipeline

Orchestrates the illustration generation process for book chapters.

Prerequisites

• Project must have PRD.md and at least one chapter draft in drafts/
• STYLE.md should exist for art direction (falls back to genre defaults if missing)

Pipeline

Step 1: Generate Illustration Plan

Invoke the illustrator agent:

Read the book's PRD.md, STYLE.md, outline.md, and all chapter drafts in drafts/.
For each chapter, identify 2-4 key visual moments suitable for illustration.
Generate style-consistent illustration prompts with a reusable style seed.
Output the complete plan to publish/illustrations/plan.md and manifest.json.

The agent will:

1. Read STYLE.md for art direction (or infer from genre)
2. Scan each chapter for illustration-worthy scenes
3. Create a style seed prompt for consistency
4. Generate prompts for each scene in multiple tiers
5. Write the plan and manifest

Step 2: Review Plan

Present the illustration plan to the user for review:

• Total illustration count
• Per-chapter distribution
• Style seed summary
• Key scenes selected

Ask the user to approve, modify scene selections, or adjust the style direction.

Step 3: Execute (Optional — requires image generation tools)

If image generation MCP tools are available (claude-image-gen, Replicate, etc.):

• Generate images using the prompts from the plan
• Save to publish/illustrations/ch{NN}-{scene-slug}.jpg
• Optimize file sizes (compress to <500KB for EPUB compatibility)

If no image generation tools are available:

• The plan.md serves as the executable spec
• User can use the prompts in Midjourney, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, or any external tool
• Place generated images in publish/illustrations/ following the naming convention

Step 4: Integration

Insert illustration references into chapter drafts:

![{alt text}](../illustrations/ch{NN}-{slug}.jpg)

Placement rules:

• chapter-header: After the chapter title heading
• full-page: On its own line, between paragraphs at the scene location
• inline: Within the paragraph flow
• spot: As a decorative element at section breaks

Output Structure

publish/illustrations/
├── plan.md                    # Illustration plan with prompts
├── manifest.json              # Machine-readable summary
├── ch01-opening-scene.jpg     # Generated images (if executed)
├── ch01-climax.jpg
├── ch02-meeting.jpg
└── ...

EPUB Compatibility

• All images: JPEG format, RGB, sRGB color space
• Target: <500KB per image for reasonable EPUB file size
• Recommended dimensions: 800x1200px (full-page), 1600x533px (header), 600x600px (inline/spot)
• pandoc automatically embeds images referenced in markdown

Post-Completion

Update the project dashboard status:

node {PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/book-status/scripts/scan-project.js [project-dir] --plugin-root={PLUGIN_ROOT}