Have you ever felt the thrill of using an AI tool like the Easy Peasy Book Machine, only to find the first draft it produces is… a little bland? It follows the instructions, sure, but it lacks the specific DNA of your genre. A cozy fantasy comes out feeling like a generic fantasy, or worse, your mystery novel completely forgets to include any suspects!
It’s a common struggle. We’re told AI can be this incredible co-writer, but the generic output can leave you with more editing work than you bargained for. The truth is, the quality of your AI-generated draft is directly tied to the quality and specificity of your prompt.
That’s why learning to modify a base prompt is a game-changer. By making small, strategic tweaks, you can guide the AI to produce a first draft that understands the unique requirements of your genre, saving you time and giving you a much stronger foundation to build upon.
The Core of a Smart Prompt
Before we start changing things, let’s quickly look at the basic framework of a powerful prompt like the Easy Peasy Book Machine. It’s effective because it’s simple and broken into three key parts:
- Book Information: This is the top section where you define the basics. You tell the AI you want a “cozy fantasy novella,” with chapters of “at least 2000 words,” written in “first-person point of view.” This is the control panel for your project.
- The Process: This is the assembly line. The prompt instructs the AI to follow a specific sequence of steps: create a premise, then characters, then an outline, and finally, draft each chapter using a multi-step plan-draft-edit process.
- Final Instructions: The last part of the prompt gives overarching rules, like “continue the story,” “match the same tone and style,” and “only do one step at a time.” Because AIs often place more weight on the last instructions they read, this part is crucial for keeping it on track.
The magic of this system is that it builds the story block by block. But what happens when your genre needs an extra, specialized block that isn’t in the original instructions?
How to Add a “Mystery Plan” for Your Cozy Mystery
Let’s get practical. Say we want to write a cozy mystery, not a cozy fantasy. The core genre elements are completely different. A fantasy needs magic systems and lore, but a mystery needs a crime, a perpetrator, suspects, and red herrings.
The basic Easy Peasy prompt doesn’t have a step for that. If we just change the genre in the top section from “cozy fantasy” to “cozy mystery,” the AI might guess, but it won’t have a structured plan for the mystery itself.
So, we’re going to add one.
Adding a New Step to the Process
We can insert a new instruction directly into the “Process” part of the prompt. Right after the AI creates the premise and characters, we’ll tell it to create a dedicated plan for the mystery.
Here’s the original process section:
Follow these steps one at a time: 1. Generate a Premise... 2. Generate Characters... 3. Craft a detailed Outline...And here’s our modified version for a cozy mystery:
Follow these steps one at a time: 1. Generate a Premise... 2. Generate Characters... 3. For the mystery plan, craft a mystery that will be introduced in the first chapter and resolved in the last chapter or two, including a perpetrator, suspects, and red herrings label that as mystery. 4. Craft a detailed Outline...It’s that simple. By inserting this one sentence, we’ve added a brand new, essential step to the AI’s workflow. Now, before it even thinks about the chapter outline, it will generate a complete mystery plan. This ensures all those crucial genre elements are established from the very beginning and woven throughout the story, not just tacked on as an afterthought.
This technique isn’t just for mysteries. You could add a “Magic System” step for a fantasy, a “Technology Breakdown” for sci-fi, or a “Relationship Arc” for a romance. You identify the core, non-negotiable element of your genre and build a step for it right into the prompt.
Trick the AI by Bringing Your Own Ingredients
What if you already have an idea for your story? You don’t have to let the AI generate everything from scratch. Another powerful modification is to “trick” the AI into thinking it already came up with your ideas.
Let’s say you have a specific premise for your cozy mystery, “The Cat Who Knew Too Much.” Instead of letting the AI generate a premise in step one, you simply create a document, add your premise, and wrap it in the same formatting tags the AI uses (we call them “Tupperware brackets”).
It would look like this:
[Start: Premise]
The Cat Who Knew Too Much is a cozy mystery set in the fictional town of Maple Glen, Vermont. The main character is Willa Fernwood, an investigative journalist who returns to her hometown after inheriting her aunt's century-old home. When the local librarian turns up dead under suspicious circumstances, Willa finds herself pulled back into the world of investigation, aided by her aunt's unusually intelligent cat, Hemingway.
[End: Premise]When you run the next step (“Generate Characters”), the AI will read your premise, assume it wrote it, and create characters that perfectly match the world you’ve already defined—like Willa Fernwood and Hemingway the cat. You can do this with your own premise, characters, or even a full outline to kickstart a work-in-progress.
This simple method puts you firmly in the driver’s seat, combining your unique creative vision with the AI’s speed and processing power.
Customizing your prompt is the key to unlocking the AI’s true potential as a co-writing partner. Moving beyond generic instructions and adding genre-specific components like a “Mystery Plan” will give you a first draft that is richer, more accurate, and far easier to edit.
This is just scratching the surface of advanced prompt engineering. Imagine creating prompts that automatically check for plot holes, maintain character voice across a 30-chapter novel, or seamlessly pick up a story you started writing months ago.
That’s exactly what we dive deep into in our full course on The Easy Peasy Book Machine at the Future Fiction Academy. We’ll give you the tools, tested prompts, and advanced strategies to make the AI work for you and your specific story. Stop wrestling with generic output and start creating better, genre-aware first drafts today.
If you’re already an Accelerator or Mastermind member, you’re going to want to check out our class 295 Easy Peasy Book Machine. Or purchase our course, Easy Peasy Book Machine: Build It, Bend It, Break It Down. You’ll find these tips and so much more in there!
Ready to become a master of AI-assisted writing? Check out the Future Fiction Academy and join us!
