# The Ladder
Every task in a book project, ranked by voice risk. Print this and keep it where you can see it.

Every task in a book project, fiction or nonfiction, ranked by how much of your voice is in it. Top is safe. Bottom is not.

## Above The Line

RUNG | WHATITIS

1 | Research | Sources, claims, comparison tables, what a policy actually says

2 | Interrogation | Being questioned about your own material until you find out what you think

3 | Structure | Outlining, sequencing, spotting three chapters doing one job

4 | Diagnosis | Reading your draft and telling you what is wrong. It diagnoses, you fix

5 | Transcription and organization | Your talking into clean text. False starts cut, repetitions grouped

RUNG 6 · THE LINE
Everything below this point produces prose that will appear in your book, in words the model chose.

## Below The Line

RUNG | WHATITIS

7 | Line editing your text | Tightening sentences you wrote. Where most drift comes from, because it feels harmless

8 | Drafting sections in your voice | The model writes, styled after you. Copyright weakens. KDP calls it AI generated

9 | Drafting the book | Generating chapters from an outline. Words appear. This is the thing being sold
everywhere

## The Rule

Rungs one through five for the book.
Rungs one through nine for everything around the book.

The exception is large. Rungs seven through nine are completely fine for text that carries no voice: the description, ad copy,
social posts, keyword lists, the index, alt text, metadata, query letters, website copy, the email sequence. Generate all of it.
Amazon's disclosure
ODINBOcoversthe
OKS .OR G /Abook's
I | content, not your marketing.
AN AUTHOR'S GUIDE TO AI-ASSISTED WRITING

That is a great deal of delegation. It is just not delegation of the sentences.

## The Four Practices That Keep It Holding

Never accept a rewrite you did not ask for. Ask for diagnosis. When it rewrites unbidden, discard it and re-ask.

Ask for the criticism before the praise. Reverse the order and the praise contaminates the criticism.

Watch the flatness rate, not the flatness. Compare contractions and commas against your corpus, monthly.

Keep your drafts. Timestamped, in sequence. It is evidence, and one day you may need it.