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PEN NAMES, AND THE TWO WAYS TO GIVE THEM A VOICE

What Settings, Pen Names actually controls, what "voice" means when AI drafts for you, what a pen name with no voice does, and what happens if you never set one at all.

Pen names look like a small settings screen. They're not. A pen name is the one row in WordCrafter.Pro that decides who wrote a book — and, if you choose to give it one, how that author sounds when AI is doing the drafting.

Today's training is about getting that right: what a pen name actually does, the two different ways to build it a voice, and — because this is the question that actually trips people up — exactly what happens when you skip it.

WHAT A PEN NAME IS

Before pen names existed, the only author identity in WordCrafter was a free-text string on a series. One field, no bio, no publisher, no links — and two books by "the same author" could spell the name two different ways with nothing stopping it.

A pen name replaces that with a real row: name, bio, up to twelve genres (which become the actual BISAC subject codes Amazon and Ingram read on export), a promo/ad page, website and social links, and a publisher. You write all of that once, in Settings, Pen Names, and every book or series that picks that pen name gets it automatically. Edit the bio in one place and every export using that pen name updates.

It's a picker, not a text box. Open a book's Metadata modal and the "Author / Pen Name" field is a dropdown of the pen names on your account — never a place to type a name by hand. Choose one and that book's exports — EPUB, DOCX, PDF, wherever the author name gets printed — pull the name, bio, publisher and subject codes from that row.

The inheritance chain

A book doesn't have to have its own pen name. Here's the order WordCrafter actually resolves an author in, top to bottom, first match wins:

1. The book's own pen name, if you set one.

2. The series' pen name, if the book didn't set its own but its series did.

3. A legacy free-text author string, if this book or series predates pen names — kept so nothing you published before this feature existed silently changes.

4. Your account display name.

5. "Anonymous."

That's the whole fallback. A book with no pen name isn't broken — it just climbs this list until it finds a name to print. If you write under one name across an entire series, set the pen name on the series once and every book in it inherits — you never touch it per-book unless one title needs to publish under something different.

THE TWO WAYS TO GIVE A PEN NAME A VOICE

A pen name's bio, links and subjects only affect what gets printed. The voice is a separate, optional layer that affects what gets written — and it's worth understanding both paths, because they produce different things and connect in one specific way.

Path one: Analyse a sample

In Settings, Pen Names, open a pen name and choose Analyse a sample. Paste your own prose — at least 1,500 words, up to about 60,000 characters — and click Analyse voice.

Here's what actually happens: WordCrafter first runs real stylometry on your sample — the same fingerprint engine Prose Doctor uses — measuring sentence length and variation, how much dialogue you write, how often you reach for an em dash or a semicolon, how contraction-heavy you are. Only then does it hand a language model that measured table alongside your prose and ask it to describe the voice: a register label, a style description, one voice-signature paragraph, and eight to ten Do rules and Avoid rules. The model is grounded in real numbers, not just vibes.

This needs one of your own API keys — it's a real AI call, so it goes dark under a No AI mode. It also costs nothing until you cross the 1,500-word floor; under that, the button won't run and tells you exactly how many more words you need.

Path two: Import a guide

The second tab is Import a guide. Paste a finished Prose Voice Guide — a Markdown document with numbered sections, a Do list and an Avoid list — and click Import guide.

The important difference: this makes no AI call at all. The guide you're pasting already is the analysis — someone (possibly you, possibly a tool) already did the describing. WordCrafter just parses the structure and stores it. That means Import keeps working even with zero provider keys configured and even under No AI mode, because pasting a document you already wrote isn't an AI feature.

Import needs a "Voice Signature" paragraph, or at least four numbered sections, or it tells you plainly that what you pasted doesn't look like a voice guide.

Where an imported guide comes from: the Writer's Voice prompt in the Skill Panel

This is the connection worth knowing. The Skill Panel carries a separate Writer's Voice prompt — run by a persona named LUMEN — built specifically to produce the document Path Two expects.

It's a structured, three-phase interview, not a one-shot generation:

Phase 1, Intake. It asks for the name that should appear on the guide, then the project and genre, then asks you to paste 1,500 to 2,000+ words of your own prose — plot movement, dialogue, and internal reflection if you can manage all three.

Phase 2, Extract and audit. It runs a full analysis across all sixteen categories — narrative rhythm, POV distance, formality, lexical tendencies, reader relationship, tone, emotional range, sentence rhythm, paragraphing, structural instincts, reading level, dialogue style, sentence openings, clause structure, punctuation habits, and cadence — entirely as an internal draft you don't see yet. Then LUMEN runs a confidence pass over its own work and flags anything the samples don't clearly support: thin evidence, internal inconsistency, a rule too vague to give an AI cleanly, even suspected AI-generated samples. You resolve each flag — Keep, Drop, or Clarify — before anything gets finalized.

Phase 3, Final output. A clean Markdown file, named after you, with every flag resolved, no hedging, no open questions.

That file is built to be portable — usable in a Claude Project, in BookWeaver, or right here. Paste its contents into a pen name's Import a guide tab, and it becomes that pen name's voice with zero additional AI calls.

The gap is closed. This post originally shipped with an honest caveat here: the Writer's Voice prompt's guide, in its base form, covered thirteen categories against WordCrafter's own sixteen, missing lexical tendencies, reader relationship, and structural instincts on import. That's fixed now — the skill produces all sixteen, numbered and ordered to match WordCrafter's own canonical Prose Voice Guide format exactly, section for section. A guide built via Path Two now imports every category Path One's direct Analyse would give you. If you built a guide before this update, it's still perfectly usable — it just won't carry those three sections; run the skill again on the same samples to pick them up.

After either path: strength and calibration

However a pen name got its voice, two more controls sit under it:

Voice strength — Subtle, Balanced, or Strong. Subtle is "a hint, nothing forced." Strong is "a reader should recognise the same author." This is a dial, not a re-analysis: change it and it writes through immediately, no re-running anything.

Voice check (calibration) — a separate, deeper measurement called Burrows's Delta, built from the actual chapters you've written under this pen name rather than from the sample you fed it. It needs a voice already set — calibration measures how far a draft sits from a voice, which has to exist first — and it needs real chapters on the books published under this pen name. It won't save a weak calibration silently; if the statistics don't clear the bar, it tells you and lets you force-save anyway, flagged as uncalibrated, which the verification path then knows to ignore rather than trust.

WHAT "VOICE" ACTUALLY DOES WHEN AI DRAFTS FOR YOU

Every prose-writing AI call in WordCrafter — drafting, revising, rewriting — resolves the book's voice through the exact same chain as the author name: the book's own pen name, then its series' pen name. Nowhere else.

That last part is deliberate, and it's the detail worth sitting with: voice does not fall back to your account's default pen name. If a book has no pen name of its own and its series has none either, the prompt gets no voice directive at all — not your default pen name's voice, not some blended average. A thriller pen name's clipped, dialogue-forward voice should never quietly bleed into a cosy mystery you simply forgot to label. WordCrafter treats "no pen name assigned" and "no voice" as the same honest answer, and costs that book's prose calls exactly zero extra tokens for a voice directive that isn't there.

When a voice is attached, here's roughly what the model actually receives: an instruction to write in this author's established voice (worded differently at each strength level), the voice signature paragraph, the register, rhythm targets grounded in your real measured numbers where those numbers are still valid, a handful of Do and Avoid rules scaled to strength, and — for an imported guide, at Balanced or Strong — a budgeted slice of the guide's own sections. It closes with an explicit instruction that the style transfers, never the sample's own characters or plot, and that the book's own established voice always wins over the profile where the two conflict.

One more honesty rule worth knowing: if a voice was measured under an older version of the fingerprint engine, or was imported rather than measured, the rhythm and habit numbers are omitted from the prompt rather than asserted as if someone actually counted them under the current definitions. A profile like this still works — it just describes the voice in prose instead of numbers until you re-analyse.

WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU NEVER SET A PEN NAME AT ALL

Nothing breaks. This is worth saying plainly because "unset" is a completely normal, supported state — not a mistake to fix.

The name on your exports climbs the fallback chain above: series pen name, then legacy author text, then your account display name, then "Anonymous."

The bio, links, publisher, and subject codes on that export are simply blank, unless a legacy publisher string happens to be sitting on the book or series metadata already.

The voice is exactly what you'd expect from "no pen name assigned": nothing. AI-drafted prose for that book carries no voice directive, at all, full stop. It writes in whatever voice the prompt, the genre pack, and the model itself land on — same as WordCrafter behaved before pen names existed.

If you're drafting solo under your own name and don't care about a bio or a distinct voice, this is a completely fine place to stay. The moment you want either — a consistent author bio across a series, or AI prose that actually sounds like you instead of like nobody in particular — that's the moment to open Settings, Pen Names and give the book something to point at.

THE ONE-PARAGRAPH VERSION

Settings, Pen Names is where an author identity lives — name, bio, links, publisher, genres — and optionally a voice. A book resolves both through the same chain: its own pen name, then its series', then it falls back to plain text and eventually "Anonymous," with no voice at all in that fallback case. Give a pen name a voice by analysing your own prose directly (needs an API key, gets you the full sixteen-category profile plus real measured numbers) or by importing a finished guide — including one built by the Writer's Voice prompt in the Skill Panel, which runs no AI call on import and gets you thirteen of the sixteen categories. Either way, strength decides how hard it pushes, and calibration is a separate, deeper check built from your actual chapters once there's enough of them to measure. No pen name means no voice — never a silent default — and that's a supported choice, not an error state.

Tuesday Training runs on the weeks there's a feature worth walking through properly. Questions for next week's session go in the usual channel.

The three images below show what the Pen-Names panel in your User settings look like. I couldn't do a continuous scroll for a single image on this machine. the second image you can see where if you choose a genre and a vibe it can suggest a pen name as well

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