We’ve had a lot of questions about History Co-Author these past weeks. What’s in the front end? What’s in the Genre Vault? Are the Vault genres narrative history too, or something else? Do they do anything the front end doesn’t?
Fair questions. And we’ve got no secrets.
So instead of answering one comment at a time, here’s all of it in one place. What’s coming on October 2, what each piece does, where the lines are, and what I’d buy if I were you.
The front end: Narrative History
History Co-Author goes live on Friday, October 2.
The front end is the Narrative History framework, the same one I wrote my own history books on. It takes a real piece of history and turns it into a book that reads like a story. Real people, real stakes, and the reader standing next to the person it’s all about to land on.
You get the framework, the full training course and the Studio plugin. During launch week that’s $17. After launch week it goes to $27 or more.
For $17 you can plan, write and publish narrative history. You don’t need anything else to make it work. We’ve always built them that way and that hasn’t changed.
Everything past the front end has a job. It unlocks something, makes something better, or lets you do something the front end can’t. Which brings us to the big question.
The line the front end won’t cross
To understand the Vault, you need to know one thing about the front end.
It sticks to the record. It’ll put your reader on the ground, in the weather, in the fear. What it won’t do is put a thought in a named person’s head that nobody wrote down, or make up a character with a name and a story of his own. That discipline is what makes it good. A reader can check anything in the book and it holds up.
It’s also why there are shelves it can’t serve. Some history has almost no record. Some has none at all. Some is written from inside a faith, not from a historian’s desk. Some is written for a ten-year-old.
That’s what the Vault is for.
The Genre Vault: six genres, all narrative
Straight answer first. Yes, all six are narrative history. They’re built on the same base as the front end and they run the same way. Same setup conversation, same five planning documents, same one chapter at a time. If you know how one works, you know how all seven work.
What changes is what the writer is allowed to put on the page, and the settings that shape the book.
The six split into two families.
Two stick to the record, like the front end. Historical Biography and Battles and Campaigns. These are specialists. They do the front end’s job for one kind of book, with tools built for that book.
Four go where the record runs thin. Narrative Prehistory and Archaeology, Ancient World, Christian History and Young Readers History. Where the record names people but says little about them, these kits fill them in: thoughts, point of view, whole scenes, speech. Where the record names nobody at all, they create the people the evidence supports. Never against the evidence. Always backed by it. A short Author’s Note up front tells the reader what’s real and what’s reconstructed, so the story never has to stop and apologise.
The front end can’t do that, and it won’t. That’s by design.
Here are the six.
Narrative Prehistory and Archaeology
History starts where writing starts. Everything before that is prehistory, and the only witnesses are stones, bones and rubbish heaps. The front end has nothing to hold on to there.
This kit gives you two books to choose from.
- Shape A, the discovery book. The finders and the finds, a narrator who weighs the evidence, and short scenes of the vanished world opening each chapter.
- Shape B, the reconstruction book. Made people living a season at one real site, with the science arriving inside their days. Nothing goes in their hands that the site didn’t have.
Shape B is the thing I’m most excited about in this whole launch. We tested it on Skara Brae, the Stone Age village in Orkney, and it reads like a novel while standing on the archaeology.
Ancient World
Rome, Greece, Egypt and the rest of the ancient world. The sources name plenty of people and tell you very little about them. Pliny the Elder sailed toward Vesuvius as it erupted. We know he went. We don’t know what he felt. This kit fills him in. The Pompeians nobody wrote down, it makes, from what the ruins show.
It also handles the problem this shelf has everywhere: can you trust the source? Every named person gets a note on how far their witness can be believed. Readers of ancient history notice when you skip that.
Christian History
A lot of you have asked for this one, and it’s the clearest case of something the front end cannot and will not do.
The front end writes like a historian looking in from outside. This kit writes from inside the faith. You name your church in your own words at setup (“Lutheran, the Church of Denmark”, “Southern Baptist”, “Catholic”) and that sets the vocabulary and what counts as the record. Scripture is the first source, read the way your church reads it. The narrator can say God acted. Miracles aren’t hedged.
Think seminary, not university history department.
You choose where the book stands: inside one church, across the churches without taking sides, or for a reader outside the faith, told from inside it. You also decide whether the book ends with what it means for the faith today, weaves that through, or leaves it out.
A Lutheran and a Catholic get two different books from the same idea. That’s how it should be.
Young Readers History
For readers from 8 to 17. These are text books, not picture books: the framework writes words, not illustrations.
You pick the age first, and that one choice sets the sentence length, the vocabulary, the chapter length, how dark it gets and how the book talks to the reader. A nine-year-old and a sixteen-year-old are different jobs, and this kit knows it.
It fills in more than any other kit, because a young reader needs someone to stand behind. Every chapter ends on a hook. The back matter is written for the kid too, so the notes at the back become a small lesson in how we know what we know.
You can also take an adult history book you’ve already written and turn it into a young readers edition. Same research, new shelf.
I think this one’s very cool.
Historical Biography
Record-bound, like the front end. So why a Vault kit?
Because biography has its own ways to fail, and this kit is built around them. Before you fall in love with a subject, it checks whether the life can carry a book at all. Did they leave words of their own, or did someone who watched them closely? No words, no book, and you find that out at setup, not at chapter nine.
It usually builds around one decisive episode instead of cradle to grave. It follows the subject alongside two witnesses and weighs how far each one can be trusted. And you choose how the reader walks into the life and how the skipped years are carried. We tested it on Mary Anning, the fossil hunter of Lyme Regis.
Battles and Campaigns
Also record-bound. Also a specialist.
A good battle book cuts between the tent and the line. The general over his maps, and the soldier in the hole. This kit does both. It follows the ordinary soldier as far as the record goes and lets recorded voices from letters and oral histories speak. It sets how the book keeps time and how close the camera sits, and it treats the ground as a character, because on a battlefield the ground decides things.
We tested it on Trafalgar, told from the Spanish line.
Could you write a battle book on the front end? Yes. This one’s built to write a better one.
The History Editor
There’s a History Editor in the launch too, and it’s not like our previous editors.
Those checked and formatted the writing. This one does that and checks the facts. It goes back to your research and asks whether the book says what the sources say. In history, that’s the difference between a five-star “I felt like I was there” and a one-star “the date’s wrong on page 40”.
It’s bigger and more involved than anything we’ve shipped as an editor before. It’s pretty damn cool.
Covers and A+ content
Two more tools are in the launch.
- The A+ Author Toolkit. If you’ve bought it before, you don’t buy it again. It’s a one-time purchase and every genre we release gets added to it, so the history genres go in too. Already own it? Great, they’re on the way. Don’t own it yet? This is a good moment to get it.
- The new Cover Creator. Same deal. Buy it once, and every genre we release gets added.
Nothing goes away
Our members know this, but for anyone new: nothing disappears after launch week. You can come back for the Vault, the Editor or anything else later, and plenty of you do.
What we’ll never guarantee is that the prices stay as low as they are in launch week. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. The front end definitely doesn’t. It’s $17 during launch week only, then $27 or more.
What I’d get
You asked, so here’s my answer.
The front end at $17 is the easy one.
Then the Vault. Not because the front end needs it. Because the Vault is where the shelves are that the front end can’t touch, and they’re shelves with proven readers and very few narrative series written for Kindle Unlimited.
If I could only write one of the six, it’d be Narrative Prehistory, Shape B. Young Readers is a close second. And for a lot of you, Christian History will be the reason to get the Vault at all, because nothing else we make does it.
The Editor, the Cover Creator and the A+ Toolkit each do a job. Get the ones that fix a problem you actually have. And if you already own the A+ Toolkit, you’re covered.
That’s everything. No secrets.
October 2. Pull up a bench.