Manuscript Profile Setup

Manuscript Profile Setup

A manuscript's profile is what makes the rest of the suite genre-aware instead of guessing. It records the book's genre, audience, register, comps, craft standard, where the canon/series bible lives, which passes apply, and any marketing constraints. The passes read it automatically — you set it once.

STEP 0 — Locate the project root

Determine where .manuscript/ should live. From the current working directory, walk up the parent folders looking for an existing .manuscript/profile.md.

• Found → this is an edit, not a fresh setup. Load it, show the current values, and ask what to change. Skip to STEP 3.
• Not found → this is a new setup. The project root is normally the folder the author is working in (where the manuscript files are). Confirm the root in one line ("I'll set up the profile at <path>/.manuscript/ — is that the right project folder?") before writing, unless the author already named the folder.

STEP 1 — Interview (only ask what you can't infer)

First, try to infer from anything already available — the manuscript text, a bible document in the folder, the author's message. Then ask only the gaps. Keep it to a short, friendly back-and-forth, not a form dump. The fields:

1. Title / series / book number / author byline.
2. Genre + subgenre (mystery, fantasy, romance, thriller, literary, sci-fi, memoir, nonfiction…).
3. Audience + register (adult / YA / middle-grade; and the tonal target — cozy, dark, comedic, grounded…).
4. 2–3 real, recent comps the book would shelve beside.
5. Craft standard — an author/book whose technique they're aiming at.
6. Canon source — do they have a series bible? A doc path, a skill name, or a few load-bearing facts stated inline? (Fine to have none — say so.)
7. Load-bearing facts — the handful of things a contradiction of would break the book (a secret, a death, a timeline anchor).
8. Which passes apply — default to continuity + prose-immersion + publisher + listing; add fair-play only if it's a mystery/crime/thriller. (If the add-on manuscript-cinematic-scene-audit is installed, also add cinematic.)
9. Marketing constraints — anything that must stay out of blurbs.

Don't stall on blanks. Any field can be empty; the passes degrade gracefully and say what they couldn't judge. Capturing genre, audience, and the load-bearing facts gives 80% of the value.

STEP 2 — Derive sensible defaults

• greatness_set ← map from genre (mystery→mystery, fantasy→fantasy, romance→ romance, thriller→thriller, literary→literary, memoir/nonfiction→memoir-nonfiction, anything else→general).
• passes ← continuity + prose-immersion + publisher + listing by default; add fair-play iff genre ∈ {mystery, crime, thriller, suspense}; add cinematic iff the manuscript-cinematic-scene-audit add-on is installed.
• ledger_path ← .manuscript/canon-ledger.json.

State the derived defaults so the author can override them.

STEP 3 — Write the profile

Write <project root>/.manuscript/profile.md using the schema in profile.template.md (the suite ships it at the repo root; mirror its YAML keys exactly so the passes can parse it). Preserve the author's free-text Notes section. For an edit, change only the requested fields and keep the rest.

Then seed an empty canon ledger if none exists: write <project root>/.manuscript/canon-ledger.json with the empty skeleton the manuscript-canon-ledger skill defines (its STEP "seed an empty ledger"). Do not populate canon here — that's the ledger skill's job.

STEP 4 — Confirm and hand off

Report, in a few lines: where the profile was written, the key choices (genre, audience, passes enabled, canon source), and what to do next — e.g. "Run manuscript-editorial-router on a chapter, or call any single pass directly." If the author originally asked for a critique and only needed setup to proceed, continue straight into that pass now.

Rules

• Never invent canon. If you don't know a fact, leave it blank or ask — do not fill load-bearing facts with guesses.
• One profile per project root. If you find a profile up the tree, edit it; don't create a second one in a subfolder.
• Keep the profile human-readable: real YAML in the frontmatter, plain prose in Notes. The author will open and hand-edit this file.
• This skill writes only .manuscript/profile.md and an empty ledger. It does not read, grade, or rewrite the manuscript.