About Our Process
How the books are made at The Warden's Grimoire Press
An open, careful, anti-hype account of how every story decision is the human author's — and how AI tools are used, openly disclosed, as drafting assistants.
The short version
Every book published by The Warden’s Grimoire Press is the work of a human author who chose the subject, designed the characters and plot, made every editorial decision, supervised every chapter draft, and is solely responsible for the final published text.
The author — PappyDeez — uses AI tools as drafting assistants, the way a working professional might use a research assistant, a transcription tool, or a thesaurus. The use of those tools is openly disclosed, both because honesty with readers is the imprint’s standard practice, and because the imprint’s books are about security and the disciplined, supervised use of technology — and the only honest way to write a book about that is to use the tools the same way the books teach you to use them.
That paragraph is the anchor. The rest of this page is the longer answer.
Why this page exists
Every book the imprint publishes carries a short disclosure note in its back matter (or front matter, for the adult literary mysteries). Those notes are intentionally compact — a parent reading aloud to a four-year-old doesn’t want to wade through a tooling essay, and an adult opening Bill Cosgrove’s The Locked Drawer on a Saturday night wants the novel, not a process journal.
This page is the longer answer for the reader who wants it. Linked from every book in the universe. Updated as the tools and the process evolve. Written in the same voice as the books themselves — calm, careful, anti-hype, and honest about what’s working and what’s hard.
What we’re making
The catalog the process produces:
Twenty-five books across four series, written for every reading level in a family:
- Four Little PIGS — five picture books for ages 4-10, plus All Four Pigs Say Yes (an adult companion that carries the same four-jar habit up to adult-life scale). Grandpa Brick teaches the PIGS money habit: Personal, Investment, Giving, Savings.
- Rosemary & Sage — seven middle-grade fairy-tale fantasy books for ages 8-12, set in the Kingdom of Digilon, where keeping secrets safe is real magic.
- The Lockout Club — seven middle-grade contemporary mystery books for ages 10-14, where Wyatt and his friends in Cypress Grove learn the cost of carelessness with technology the hard way.
- A Bill Cosgrove Mystery — five adult literary mystery books, where Detective Bill Cosgrove works crypto-crime cases alongside an AI agent named Claudia.
Three companion games — small browser games, one for each of the younger series, that let a kid practice the habit the books are teaching. Grandpa Brick’s Village for FLP, The Kingdom of Digilon for Rosemary & Sage, and the Lockout Club narrative puzzle game. The games are the part Patreon makes possible. No grant pays a small press to ship games. Patrons do.
Underneath all four series is the same idea, written four different ways. The picture books call it splitting money across four piggy banks. The fairy tale calls it keeping a secret safe. The middle-grade mystery calls it the cost of carelessness. The adult crime novel calls it the discipline of supervised technology.
That last one — the discipline of supervised technology — is what this page is about.
How the text gets written
The text process is the simplest part to describe and the hardest to do well.
The primary AI tool used in drafting is Claude, by Anthropic. Claude is a large language model. It is faster than a human at certain kinds of writing tasks: drafting a paragraph against a tight outline, restating a complicated concept three different ways so the author can pick the best one, catching a sentence-level inconsistency three chapters back, doing the patient grunt-work of continuity tracking across a series.
Here is what Claude does not do:
- It does not choose what the books are about.
- It does not choose the characters or the plot.
- It does not decide what a paragraph means, or whether a paragraph belongs in the book.
- It does not decide what the publishing imprint stands for.
- It does not have a publishing record or readers waiting for the next book — the author does.
- It is not a co-author in any sense that would warrant a co-authorship credit. It is a tool.
The author’s relationship with Claude is the same one the protagonist of A Bill Cosgrove Mystery has with his AI agent Claudia: prompting carefully, reading the output critically, correcting what was wrong, keeping the human responsible for every editorial choice. Sometimes the tool’s first draft is closer to right than the author would have written alone. Sometimes the tool’s first draft is wrong in ways the author has to notice and reject. The work of writing is the work of figuring out which is which, paragraph by paragraph, over the months it takes to finish a book.
Every word in a finished imprint book is a word the author chose. Many of those words first appeared in a Claude draft. Many of those drafts went through six, eight, ten rounds of revision before they earned a place in the manuscript. The decision about whether each one belonged in the book was, in every case, the author’s.
How the illustrations get made
Image generation is the part of the process where the supervision discipline is most visible — and the most hands-on.
The primary AI tools used for illustrations are Google’s Nano Banana 2 (image generation) and Claude in Cowork mode (image-generation orchestration, reference-image cascading, prompt iteration). For motion sequences in the long-form videos that promote the books, ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 is used for short animated cold-open clips.
The discipline that turns those tools into illustrations that belong in a children’s book — or in a sophisticated adult literary cover — is iteration and reference-image continuity.
A typical illustration’s journey from author’s mental image to printed page:
- The author writes a detailed prompt. Not “a grandfather pig and his grandkids” — but several hundred words specifying the character’s clothing, the pose, the lighting, the camera angle, the palette, the rendering register, and an aggressive avoid block enumerating the failure modes specific to that prompt (no human hands when the character is an anthropomorphic pig; no recognizable real children’s-book artist’s style copied directly; no real-brand product markings; no nudity of any kind; and so on).
- The author attaches reference images so the generator knows what the imprint’s specific world looks like. For Four Little PIGS, that means attaching the actual book cover plus already-locked B-roll images so the character’s design stays consistent across every illustration in the series. For Rosemary & Sage, the reference cascade locks the watercolor-and-ink fairy-tale register, the Kingdom of Digilon castle, the heroine’s red hair, and the goblin-companion design. Each series has its own register, and each register’s continuity is enforced by the reference-image discipline.
- The generator produces a candidate. It is wrong in some way — the character’s anatomy is slightly off, the color palette has drifted, a text artifact has appeared somewhere it shouldn’t, the composition is close but not what was needed.
- The author reviews the candidate carefully. Often at full resolution, often against the canonical book cover and against previously-locked images in the same series, often with a checklist of failure modes specific to the series register. Sometimes the candidate is accepted. More often it is rejected.
- The author refines the prompt with explicit positive specifications for what was wrong, plus enumerated negative specifications in the avoid block. Some prompts that began at 400 words end at 900 words by the time they earn an image that lands.
- Steps 3-5 repeat. Six to ten iterations per page is normal. Some pages have gone through twenty.
- The author selects the final image and, if needed, composites in real titles, the imprint sigil, or hand-painted typography over the AI-generated base.
A worked example. The eight-image Pixar-3D Grandpa Pig B-roll set used to promote Four Little PIGS required, over several days of work:
- A first generation of the primary teaching image that produced a piggy bank with the wrong color-label mapping. Regenerated.
- A second generation where the grandfather pig appeared with human hands rather than pig trotters. Regenerated, with explicit “two cleft toes, no human fingers” positive specifications.
- A third generation where one of the piggy banks was painted “INVEST_ENT” with a visible gap where the M should be. Regenerated, with explicit guidance that the painter is in the act of painting the M.
- A subsequent companion image in which a piglet grandchild’s bare body became visible in frame. Regenerated with explicit “the piglet’s body is entirely off-frame; any visible body must be fully clothed in cottage attire” specifications.
- A round of cross-set continuity testing where all eight images were lined up side by side and checked for character continuity, color-label consistency, lighting register, and rendering style.
That is one B-roll set among four. Each series has its own. Every page of every book goes through a version of this.
The result is what arrives on the printed page. Not the AI’s first guess. The author’s choice.
How the videos and the voice work
The long-form videos that introduce the books — and the social-media Shorts cut from them — use the author’s actual on-camera voice for the anchor moments where he speaks to the camera. The cloned voice (built with ElevenLabs, trained on the author’s own recorded voice) is used for the voice-over segments that play over B-roll, so that script revisions can be re-recorded in minutes instead of re-shot in hours. It is the author’s voice you are hearing in every Warden’s Grimoire video — read aloud by a careful tool that lets him be present for every line of every video without re-shooting every script change.
The Seedance 2.0 cold-open clips that animate the universe-overview moment (four book spines on a shelf; four piggy banks on a cottage mantelpiece) follow the same iteration discipline as the still illustrations: detailed prompts, reference-image cascading from already-locked stills, and regeneration when the output drifts from the canonical look. The cold opens last 14 seconds. The work of making them takes hours.
The supervision discipline
Across all of the tools — text, image, voice, video — one rule:
The human stays responsible.
That is the discipline. It is also the theme of the books themselves. The Lockout Club kids learn the cost of carelessness with technology the hard way. Rosemary & Sage heroines learn to keep secrets safe in a kingdom where revealing them is dangerous. Bill Cosgrove works alongside an AI agent named Claudia in a relationship that is disciplined and supervised — not because Claudia is dangerous, but because the responsibility for the consequences of using her belongs to him.
The author cannot honestly write a series about supervised technology and then make those books in an unsupervised way. So the process is, deliberately:
- Every text decision the author’s.
- Every image’s editorial selection the author’s.
- Every iteration cycle on a prompt the author’s.
- Every cross-image continuity test run by the author.
- Every cover composite assembled by the author.
- Every script the author’s words.
- Every cloned-voice rendering the author’s actual voice as the source.
- Every back-matter disclosure the author’s written acknowledgment.
The tools do the fast work. The author does the responsible work. The books are the result.
What this means for readers
When you open a book from The Warden’s Grimoire Press, you are reading the author’s work, drafted with assistance from carefully supervised tools.
You will sometimes find a sentence the author would not have written alone. That sentence is in the book because the author read it, judged it sound, and kept it. You will sometimes find a piggy bank or a magpie or a brass key that an AI image generator first proposed. That image is in the book because the author iterated until it landed and then chose it.
You will not find anything that the author did not have the chance to consider, refuse, or refine. The work of supervising the tools is the work of writing the book.
What this means for parents and caregivers
If you are buying a children’s book for a young reader, or a young-adolescent mystery for a middle-schooler in your house, here is what the AI-disclosure means in practice for the kid:
- A human being decided what the book is about and what the kid will learn from it.
- A human being chose the characters, designed the world, and made the editorial calls about what belongs in the story.
- A human being is named on the cover, takes responsibility for the content, and stands behind the book.
- A human being designed the illustrations — chose the palette, the composition, the character continuity — even when an AI tool generated the visual draft of each spread.
- A human being supervised every page, and the page in the kid’s hand is the page the human selected.
The book is also a small conversation-starter you can have with the kid about how AI tools work. The Lockout Club books, in particular, are written so that a thoughtful middle-grader and a thoughtful parent can read them together and use them as a starting point for talking about digital safety, careful supervision of technology, and the difference between a tool that helps you do good work and a tool that does the work for you.
The author’s hope is that families who pick up the books also pick up a habit: of asking questions about how the things in their lives are made, and of being honest themselves about how they use their own tools.
The standards we follow
The imprint’s per-book disclosure standards live in an internal document that is the operational source for what appears in the back matter of every book.
Five disclosure variants currently exist:
- Adult literary mystery variant. Approximately 280 words. Used in A Bill Cosgrove Mystery. Front-matter placement, immediately after the copyright page, before the dedication.
- Adolescent variant. Approximately 240 words. Used in Rosemary & Sage and The Lockout Club. Back-matter placement, visible enough that a curious adolescent reader will find it.
- Children’s-illustrated variant. Approximately 220 words. Used in Four Little PIGS picture books. Back-matter placement under a heading For Parents and Caregivers, directed at the adult buyer.
- Children’s-text-only variant. Approximately 180 words. Reserved for future children’s-imprint titles that do not carry AI-generated illustrations.
- Interactive-product variant. Approximately 240 words. Used in the imprint’s companion games. Placed in the game’s About panel, accessible from an imprint Sigil affordance inside the game.
Each variant carries the same anchor paragraph — every story decision is the human author’s; AI tools are drafting assistants, openly disclosed — adapted for the audience. The full text of each variant is the in-book disclosure you’ll find when you open a copy.
What this page is — and isn’t
This page is the imprint’s standing public statement about how its books are made. It is updated when the tools change, when the process changes, or when the imprint’s commitments to its readers warrant a fuller answer.
This page is not an exhaustive technical journal of every AI tool ever used, every prompt ever written, or every iteration ever discarded. The author keeps those records privately. They run to thousands of pages and would not serve any reader to publish in full.
This page is also not a defense. The Warden’s Grimoire Press uses AI tools openly, by choice, and is glad to. The disclosure is not a guilty admission; it is part of the brand’s signal of care. Made with AI — and proud of how.