How to Use Novel AI Step by Step (2026 Beginner Walkthrough)

This is the whole workflow, start to finish: account, setup, roadmap, chapters, publishing. It takes about ten minutes to get a first chapter you would actually show someone, and the steps that decide whether the book holds together are all in the first three minutes.

Step 1: Create your account

Sign up on the web or from the App Store or Google Play with email or a social account. No card required. Credits are what writing costs, and you earn them free from day one: the daily check-in, reading time, and rewarded ads stack up to 160 a day. That covers a full novel foundation with cover art plus your first chapter, or four chapters on the cheapest quality tier - enough to see whether the output suits you before deciding anything.

Reading needs no account at all. If you only want to see what the AI produces before signing up, open the library and read a finished novel first.

Step 2: Choose your genre

Open the Create tab. Genre is the only required field, and it does more work than any other: it sets the prose register, the pacing conventions the AI follows, and the art direction of the cover. There are over 70 genres including Fantasy, Xianxia, System and LitRPG, Romance, Sci-Fi, Horror and Dark Fantasy.

Pick the genre a reader would use to find your book, not the one that describes it most precisely. "Xianxia" finds readers; "philosophical cultivation drama" does not.

Step 3: Fill in the setup fields

Everything except Genre is optional, and leaving it all blank does work - the AI will invent a premise. But these fields are the only place you control the story before it exists, and beginners routinely underuse them.

• Title - leave blank for the AI to generate one, or set your own (up to 120 characters).
• Character Name and Ability - "Kai" with "time manipulation that ages him each use" produces a completely different book than a blank field. A cost attached to the power is the single highest-value thing you can write here.
• Character Personality - cold, cheerful, calculating, ruthless. This changes the narrating voice more than it changes the plot.
• World Name and Setting - up to 200 characters. Specific beats grand: "a sinking canal city where the flooded district walks at low tide" outperforms "a vast magical kingdom".
• Power System - up to 200 characters. Describe the rule and the limit, not the ranks. "Memories fuel spells and never come back" gives the AI conflict; "nine cultivation realms" only gives it a ladder.

Those two 200-character ceilings are real limits, not guidance. Write tightly: one mechanic and one cost is worth more than three paragraphs of lore the field will cut.

Step 4: Generate the foundation

Type a one-line description in the prompt bar, or leave it empty, and send. In roughly 30 to 60 seconds and for 20 credits you get a title and description, five tags, an AI cover image, and a five-arc narrative roadmap covering 100 chapters.

You land on a preview screen before anything is written. Read the roadmap here - it is far cheaper to fix the plan now than to regenerate chapters later.

Step 5: Fix the roadmap before writing anything

The roadmap is what the AI consults every time it writes a chapter, which makes it the difference between a book and a hundred disconnected episodes. Each arc holds a title, a chapter range, story beats, power progression and a transition into the next arc. Tap any arc to rename it, move its chapter range, add beats or rewrite the handoff. You can run up to ten arcs.

Two edits pay for themselves on almost every generated roadmap. First, give arc one a concrete ending event rather than a mood - the AI writes toward events. Second, check that the transitions actually escalate; a generated roadmap will sometimes repeat the same stake at higher volume instead of raising it.

Step 6: Choose a chapter quality tier

This is the setting most beginners never open, and it changes both cost and quality more than anything else in the app.

• Sketch - 12 credits, about ten seconds, no planning step. Clean prose, predictable plot. Good for connective chapters.
• Story - 20 credits, about fifteen seconds. The default. The AI plans before writing, which is what keeps chapter 40 consistent with chapter 12.
• Saga - 65 credits. Much deeper planning before a word is written. Better payoffs and foreshadowing, noticeably better structure.

A tier costing five times more does not make the sentences five times prettier - it buys consistency and payoff. The practical mix is Saga for chapter one and your act endings, Story for the body of the book, Sketch for travel and transition chapters.

Step 7: Write your first chapter

Use the prompt bar. Type what should happen - "the hero wakes in a dungeon with no memory" - or leave it empty and the AI follows arc one's beats. A chapter arrives in seconds at 1,200 to 1,500 words with dialogue, action and interiority.

For chapter one specifically, write the prompt yourself. It is the chapter that decides whether a reader continues, and it is the one place where your idea rather than the roadmap's summary should drive the scene.

Step 8: Edit, publish and share

From the Edit screen you can change chapter titles and text, toggle individual chapters between draft and published, and keep generating. When the novel is ready, switch it to public and it appears in the Explore library.

One practical note on discovery: a novel with no chapters published will not be shown anywhere useful, and search results favour books with real content behind them. Publish at least the first few chapters before you share the link.

The two errors every beginner hits

"Both models refused this prompt"

The safety filter blocked the request. It is triggered by the prompt, not by your genre, and it is strict about minors in any scenario involving harm or sex - which catches a lot of otherwise ordinary dark-fantasy and school-setting premises. Rewrite the specific beat, age the characters up explicitly in the setup fields, and it will usually pass. Grim is fine; the filter reacts to who is in the scene, not how dark it is.

The chapter stops early or repeats itself

Almost always a roadmap problem rather than a model problem. If an arc's beats are vague, the AI has nothing to write toward and pads. Open the arc, replace the abstract beat with an event that has an outcome, and regenerate. Moving that chapter up to Saga also helps, because the extra planning is exactly what is missing.

App or web?

Both do the full workflow. The app has audio narration with real AI voices and offline reading; the web version is easier for long editing sessions and for pasting in prepared setup text. Your library, credits and novels are the same account on both, so there is no wrong entry point.