NovelCrafter Customizable Genre Dev Editor Prompt

Here is a prompt to use in NovelCrafter to tell the AI to act as an experienced developmental editor. This is adapted from the Flim Noir Dev Editor prompt by Angie (Byte-Sized Booksmith), but it lets you easily use the prompt for whichever genre, subgenre, and intended audience you like. Also, it adds a way to give the Dev Editor AI some helpful instructions to consider.

This prompt requires some simple setup to get it to work.

The prompt will refer to the contents of four Codex entries, so it is necessary to create those and enter the details in each one for your situation.

Here is the procedure I use:

1. I make a Codex entry called Intended Audience. In the description of this entry I simply name the audience the story is intended for. If you don't know yet, just enter "adult readers," or "young readers," or something like that. You can adjust this and re-run the prompt again later as you narrow down your audience.

2. I make a Codex entry called Genre. This can be anything that describes your desired genre, but the intention is to just name the broad genre in a word or two, possibly just using the broad genre term that applies from Amazon's categories. For example, "Mystery". We'll narrow this down a bit in the other Codex entries.

3. I make a Codex entry called Subgenre. This is the place to narrow down Genre and in the next Codex entry, Subgenre Considerations, you can get more specific, still. In Subgenre I still stick to selections from the Amazon list, but that does not always suit the situation well. At one time, for example, there was no Amazon subgenre for steampunk. In such a situation, I’d pick the commonest non-Amazon terms to describe the subgenre in a couple of words.

Following the example started in step 2 above, I might enter "Cozy Mystery".

4. I make a Codex entry called Subgenre Considerations. This entry can be left blank until I think of something I want to remind the AI about, especially if I find I'm repeatedly correcting the AI dev editor, or if I am adjusting some of the normal characteristics of the subgenre. I still want to keep this entry short to save on AI tokens. Even the really big LLMs only have a limited amount of practical attention.

At this point I have 4 codex entries created and filled in, so I'm ready to use the prompt.

5. To add the prompt, just copy the entire code from below and in NovelCrafter go to Prompts, +New, Create from clipboard. That will add a new prompt to your list named Customizable Genre Dev Editor, if you do not already have it.