tome.

Getting started.

Tome is a writing studio for novelists who want to finish the book — drafted manuscript on Monday, a polished cover on Wednesday, on sale in the Tome store by Friday. This guide gets you from a fresh signup to your first finished chapter.

What you need before you start

  • Nothing to set up for the AI. Tome runs Claude (and the cover models) for you and bills your prepaid credit — most writers spend only a few dollars a month, and you top up whenever you run low.
  • A draft, an outline, or just an idea. Tome works for novelists, essayists, and short-form authors.
  • About ten minutes for the initial setup.

Sign in

Sign in with the magic link from your inbox — no card needed. You land on the dashboard and run a short onboarding, then you're in the studio.

Run through onboarding

The first time you land on the dashboard, Tome walks you through a few short steps:

  1. Your name and writing language. Just so Claude knows who it's writing as.
  2. Your voice profile — a paragraph about how you write, the kinds of books you love, your usual tone. Tome injects this into every AI prompt so suggestions sound like you, not a generic AI.
  3. You're set. Drop into the studio. Add a little credit from Billing when you want to use the AI — you only pay for what you use.

When you finish, the dashboard becomes your home base.

Create your first work

Click New work from the dashboard. Tome asks for a title and a genre and creates an empty manuscript with one chapter. From there, you can either:

  • Import a draft from PDF, DOCX, or Markdown. Tome runs it through LlamaParse to handle footnotes and headers cleanly.
  • Start fresh with a blank editor and write the first chapter from scratch.

The editor is intentionally quiet — no distracting toolbars, no AI buttons cluttering the page. Highlight any text and a small menu offers Rewrite, Expand, Shorten, Continue. Each of those calls Claude with your voice profile attached.

Where to go next

Once you've written a few chapters, the other parts of the studio start to make sense. Read these in whatever order matches what you want to ship next:

  • Billing & credits — how prepaid credit works and what each AI feature costs.
  • The Tome store — set a price and list your finished book for readers to buy and read.