Great Publishers

Great Publishers

Eight publisher/editor/designer personas (Chip Kidd, Tina Brown, Maxwell Perkins, Jann Wenner, Bob Silvers, Diana Vreeland, Bennett Cerf, George Lois) and four operational skills that take what great-authors and great-filmmakers produce and ship it as book sites, trailers, blog posts, and cover briefs. A Claude Code plugin.

Part of the Great Minds constellation — 10 plugins for different craft domains.

New to the constellation? Start with /constellation-start in great-minds — it asks 2-3 questions about your project shape and routes to the right plugin.

Install

/plugin marketplace add sethshoultes/great-minds-constellation
/plugin install great-publishers@great-minds-constellation

Claude Desktop (DXT bundle) — DXT distribution lives in the standalone repo, not the constellation copy:

git clone https://github.com/sethshoultes/great-publishers-plugin
cd great-publishers-plugin/distribution/dxt && npm install && npx @anthropic-ai/dxt pack

What's in v0.1

8 Personas — at the publication threshold

Persona	Strength
chip-kidd-designer	Book covers and visual identity. The most influential book-cover designer of the last 30 years (Knopf). Where the book becomes an object.
tina-brown-editor	Positioning, audience, jacket copy. The Vanity Fair / New Yorker register — the editor who decides which piece gets read and which gets ignored.
maxwell-perkins-editor	Final-pass developmental editing at the publication threshold. Scribner editor for Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wolfe. Distinct from Gottlieb (manuscript-stage editor in great-authors).
jann-wenner-publisher	Long-form serialized publication. Rolling Stone. The magazine as cultural object — multi-issue rollouts, cultural-moment timing.
bob-silvers-editor	Intellectual seriousness, scholarly long-form. NYRB. When the work needs to land at the high register without showmanship.
diana-vreeland-editor	Visual-driven editorial provocation. Vogue, Harper's Bazaar. Image-first stories; the cover as event.
bennett-cerf-publisher	Building a publishing list, brand strategy across releases. Random House. Multi-title strategy.
george-lois-designer	Cover provocation, headline-as-image. Esquire. Satirical, culturally sharp covers that argue.

4 MVP Skills

Skill	What it does
/publishers-channel <persona>	Load a publisher persona into your current conversation. Cover briefs, positioning docs, jacket copy, and other substantive output auto-save to publishers/<artifact-type>/<slug>.md by default. Mirrors /authors-channel.
/publishers-project-init	Scaffold a publishers/ directory at the project root, sibling to manuscript/ and film/. Subdirs: covers/, jacket-copy/, positioning/, trailer/, blog-posts/, social-copy/. Reads .great-authors/project.md for title and genre.
/publishers-build-book-site <project>	Generates an Astro book-site scaffold from manuscript/ chapters. v0.1 ships the contract; the working Astro template lands in templates/astro-book-site/ next pass.
/publishers-build-trailer <project>	Composes the existing render pipeline (great-filmmakers' render_keyframes.py, render_kling.py, render_veo.py) into a single trailer-build skill. Surfaces engine choice and content-policy implications.

Why this plugin

The other constellation plugins produce artifacts but not shippable, public-facing deliverables. Manuscripts. Storyboards. Render manifests. Strategic decisions. None of them was a book site, a video trailer, a launch jacket, a cover. That's the gap great-publishers fills: it consumes what the other plugins produce and ships it.

The plugin is consciously scoped to publication form. Marketing and ad copy live in great-marketers (shipped). Software engineering, product design, and operations are filed for future sibling plugins (great-engineers, great-designers, great-operators) — see projects/great-minds-ai-company-constellation for the roadmap.

Conventions inherited from the constellation

• Orchestrator vs. specialist. Personas are dispatched as sub-agents in clean contexts. The orchestrator never produces the published artifact in-context. See ORCHESTRATING.md. The Gottlieb persona in great-authors covers the orchestrator role; great-publishers does NOT add a parallel persona.
• Default-save. Every generative skill saves output to disk before showing it in chat. Save to publishers/<subdir>/<slug>.md. Document the path in the response. Never strand work in chat.
• Project-bible reading. Every persona reads .great-authors/ at the project root before deciding. The bible is the shared spine across all four plugins.
• Backend awareness. Like great-filmmakers' three-backend output formats, the book-site skill is backend-aware — Astro is the v0.1 default; Hugo and Eleventy are stubs.
• Content-policy awareness. Veo refuses crime-fiction prompts that name bodies or violence. Kling is more permissive. The trailer-build skill must surface this when the genre signals it.

Project structure

.great-authors/                 # the bible — shared with great-authors
manuscript/                     # great-authors writes here
film/                           # great-filmmakers writes here
publishers/                     # great-publishers writes here (v0.1)
├── covers/                     #   cover briefs (and PNGs in v1.0)
├── jacket-copy/                #   blurbs, positioning copy
├── positioning/                #   audience and pitch docs
├── trailer/                    #   trailer scripts and render manifests
├── blog-posts/                 #   chapter extractions reformatted
└── social-copy/                #   launch copy (v1.0)

Roadmap

• v0.1 (this release) — eight personas, four MVP skills, DXT bundle, real test against Murder on the Arizona Strip.
• v0.2 — Astro book-site template lands in templates/astro-book-site/; /publishers-build-book-site becomes fully functional.
• v1.0 — Adds /publishers-design-cover, /publishers-build-blog-post, /publishers-publish-github-pages, /publishers-publish-substack, /publishers-cross-promote, /publishers-orchestrate-launch, /publishers-debate, /publishers-critique, /publishers-edit. ~12 skills total. Matches the breadth of great-authors and great-filmmakers.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.