About these guides
The learn catalog collects seventy craft guides for novelists, light novel and web serial authors, from story bibles and continuity to genre terms and prose technique. This page says how those guides are produced, sourced, corrected and translated, so you can judge for yourself what to trust and what to double-check.
How the guides are written
The catalog is written with AI assistance under human direction. Topics are chosen from a researched map of what long-form writers actually struggle with and search for, not picked by a model on its own. Drafts are then AI-written against that plan. Publication decisions are human: no guide is published just because a draft existed.
Sourcing and citations
Every external claim in a guide carries a citation, listed at the foot of the page. During writing, the cited page is fetched and checked against the claim it is meant to support. A claim that cannot be verified against its source is dropped, softened, or labeled as craft consensus rather than sourced fact. That label is a real distinction: craft consensus describes what writers report doing, not what a source documents.
Where writers disagree
Some terms have no settled definition. What “harem” means, or whether “hard SF” names a coherent category at all: writing communities genuinely disagree, and careful writers use the words differently. Where that happens, the guides say so instead of silently picking a side. The glossary follows the same rule: when a term is community-defined or contested, the entry says so.
Corrections are logged
Mistakes happen. When one is found, the fix is recorded in a dated correction log instead of being quietly patched. Two examples:
- Internal reference material once dated Ronald Knox’s detective-fiction decalogue to 1928, while the cited source says it was codified in 1929. The date was corrected everywhere.
- A genre entry’s claim about how slice-of-life tagging is used in web fiction had to be re-sourced when its citation turned out not to mention web fiction at all. The claim now rests on what Royal Road’s tag search actually shows, and the framing around it is marked as craft consensus.
Translations
The guides are translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Burmese, Hindi, Filipino and Thai. These translations are machine-translated in a natural register and have not yet had native-speaker review; that review is planned. Until it happens, read a translation as a rendering of the English page, not as an independently reviewed text.
The newest guides publish in English first and are translated over time. Cited sources stay in English.
Reading times
The reading time shown with each guide is computed from the actual text: the finished page’s word count at a fixed reading speed, not a number typed in by hand. That is the aim of the whole catalog. Where a claim can be checked against its source, it is; where it cannot, the guide tells you which kind of claim it is.