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Storyboard view

The Storyboard is a bird's-eye grid view of a book — every page (or, for prose books, every chapter) as a small card, in order, with a preview, a story-beat / mood / act-group annotation set, and any Story Bible entity badges. Use it to plan pacing across the whole arc: the 32- or 40-page run of a KDP picture book, the panels of a comic, or the chapters of a novel.

Opening the storyboard

The Storyboard is available for every book type:

  • Picture books and comic books — click the Storyboard button in the page-editor header (next to Metadata + Export PDF). The URL flips to ?view=storyboard, so you can deep-link or use the browser back-button to return to the editor.
  • Prose books — click the Storyboard button in the chapter sidebar to open the chapter-card variant (see Prose books below).

Picture-book and comic-book pages share the same four annotation columns (notes, story_beat, mood_color, act_group); prose books carry the same four on each Chapter. The four inline editors are one shared StoryboardAnnotations component, so the annotation experience is identical across all three surfaces.

Reading a card

Each card shows, top-to-bottom:

  • Thumbnail — the page's image asset (or a placeholder icon for text-only / image-less pages).
  • Position number + title — first non-empty line of the page text (TipTap-aware: handles both plain-string and JSON layouts; truncates at ~60 chars).
  • Layout tag + optional story-beat badge.
  • Beat selector + mood swatches + act-group input + notes textarea — inline annotation editors (see below).

The mood color also paints the card's left border for at-a-glance scanning across the grid.

Click + drag

  • Click a card to return to the editor with that page selected.
  • Drag the grip handle (top-right of each card) to reorder pages. The grip fades in on hover. Reorder uses the existing pages API — same atomic transaction as the page-thumbnails sidebar.
  • Drag does not change act_group. Pages stay in their author-set group regardless of where you drop them visually. Set / change the group via the act-group input on each card.

Annotation editors

All four annotations save on blur / change — no explicit Save button. Errors surface via a toast; your edits stay in the textarea so you can retry.

Notes

A free-text textarea per card. Author memo only — not rendered in the exported book. Common uses: pacing notes, revision flags, "remember to add a transition here", references.

Clearing the textarea writes NULL back so the placeholder reappears for cards with no notes.

Story beat

A dropdown per card with the six standard dramatic-structure beats:

Beat When in the arc
Setup Opening — establish character + world
Inciting The event that disturbs the status quo
Rising Tension builds
Climax The peak — biggest decision / risk / image
Falling Consequences play out
Resolution Wind-down, return to a new normal

The "— no beat —" option clears the beat. The selected beat shows as a colored badge above the dropdown for fast visual scanning of the arc.

Mood color

A row of 10 preset swatches covering the typical picture-book emotional range:

Swatch Mood
#FFC857 Sunny
#FF6B6B Passionate
#4ECDC4 Calm
#C7B8EA Dreamy
#7FB069 Peaceful
#F18A07 Adventurous
#F4A6CD Tender
#6C7A89 Somber
#2E4057 Mysterious
#F4ECD8 Gentle

Click a swatch to set it. Click the currently-selected swatch to toggle it off. The X-button next to the palette is an alternative clear control (only visible when a color is set).

The chosen color paints the card's left border. Custom hex colors are a future filing (STORYBOARD-MOOD-FREE-PICKER-01) — for now the 10 presets cover the common cases without adding a dependency.

Act group

A free-text input per card. Pages with the same act_group value render under a shared group header in the grid; pages without an act_group render in an untitled trailing group.

Empty or whitespace-only values clear the act_group. Enter confirms the value (same as clicking outside the input).

Typical values: Act I / Act II / Act III, or chapter labels like Prologue / Forest / Castle, or any other grouping the author finds useful.

Story Bible entities

If the Story Bible plugin is active, the Storyboard doubles as your appearance-planning surface:

  • Drag an entity from the Story Bible sidebar onto a card to record that the character / setting / item appears on that page.
  • Linked entities show as color-coded badges on the card, in their entity-type color.
  • The entity filter at the top of the Storyboard narrows the grid to the pages where the selected entities appear — handy for checking one character's on-page rhythm, or finding every page two characters share.

These links feed the appearance tracker, Arc View and the continuity checker.

Prose books (chapter cards)

Prose books (novels, non-fiction, anything chapter-based) get a chapter-card variant of the Storyboard, opened from the Storyboard button in the chapter sidebar. Each card represents a chapter and shows:

  • The chapter title and a word count (computed from the chapter's TipTap content).
  • The same four inline annotations as a page card — notes, story beat, mood color and act group — backed by the shared StoryboardAnnotations editors.

Drag a card by its handle to reorder chapters; click a card to return to that chapter in the editor. Use the mood colors and act groups to block out acts and pacing across a whole manuscript at a glance.

Status + labels

Chapter cards also carry a Scrivener-style drafting status and a label:

  • Status — a fixed workflow stage per chapter: To Do, First Draft, Revised, Final (or none). Set it from the status dropdown on the card; it shows as a small colored-dot chip.
  • Labels — a per-book set of named, colored labels you define yourself (e.g. Needs research, POV: Mara). Click Manage labels in the Storyboard header to add a label (name + a color from the preset palette), rename it, recolor it, or delete it (deleting a label clears it from any chapters using it). Assign one label per chapter from the label dropdown on the card; it shows as a colored pill.

Status and label both save instantly and persist per chapter.

What's not in the Storyboard (yet)

Deferred to follow-up sessions, captured in PICTURE-BOOK-STORYBOARD-OPERATIONS-01:

  • Add-page-in-between
  • Duplicate page
  • Split page
  • Merge pages
  • Print storyboard
  • Auto-update act_group when dragging a card across visual groups

These are filed against real user-pull demand. The current v2 covers the annotation + overview + reorder flow that the daily picture-book authoring rhythm needs.