What Pull Quotes does
Pull Quotes turns short passages from your manuscript into designed image cards for Instagram, BookTok, Substack Notes, and X, in square, portrait, story and wide shapes. Each card sets a pull-quote in your book's own body typeface beneath the ornament glyph from your style template, on a surface in the color of your choosing — then exports it as a correctly-sized PNG ready to drop into a scheduling tool.
The point of difference is fidelity. Generic design tools and AI card makers produce cards that look like cards. Because Pull Quotes reads your project's 41-target style template, the cards it produces look like your book — the same typography and ornament a reader meets on the interior pages. Nobody else can do that, because nobody else has your style template.
Pull Quotes never touches your prose. It reads passages and your style settings to compose images; the manuscript itself is untouched.
How passages are surfaced
Open the Marketing section of the sidebar and click Pull Quotes. Bookshaper automatically surfaces candidate passages from your manuscript so you don't have to scroll back through chapters hunting for quotable lines. Candidates come from several sources, each labelled in the list:
- Your opening line — the first sentence of the manuscript, the marquee first-line quote, ranked at the top of the auto-surfaced pool.
- Chapter openers — the first sentence of each chapter, usually written as a hook. (Generic scene openers are skipped — they tend to be orienting lines that don't stand alone.)
- Scene closers — the last sentence of each scene, where prose tends to land its strongest beat.
- Chapter closers — the closing line of the final scene in a chapter, weighted higher because chapter endings carry extra punch.
- High-tension beats — sentences drawn from scenes your chapter analysis flagged as high-tension, the moments most likely to intrigue a reader.
- Marked passages — any line you flagged yourself in the editor (see the next section). These always rank at the top.
Candidates are filtered to a clean pull-quote length — roughly 6 to 25 words for square and landscape cards, longer for tall portrait formats. Passages outside that window are left out so a card never tries to carry a full paragraph.
Re-rank Quotes
The candidate list is ordered by a built-in heuristic that needs no AI and works entirely offline. If you'd like an editorial second opinion, click Re-rank Quotes: a short, low-cost AI pass reorders the passages by how well they stand alone as quotes — self-contained, with some charge to them, and not leaning on what came before. It only changes the order: the passages you've checked stay checked, and it never rewrites your words or invents new ones.
If you're in BYOK mode without a configured model, or the call fails, the list simply keeps its heuristic order. The re-rank is a convenience, never a requirement.
Marking your own passages
You don't have to wait for a line to be surfaced. While writing or revising, select any passage in the editor, right-click, and choose Mark as Quote Candidate. The line is saved with that scene and appears at the top of the Pull Quotes list, tagged Marked, the next time you open the view.
Marked passages are saved with your project, so they persist across sessions. They bypass the length filter and the spoiler guard — if you chose it deliberately, Bookshaper trusts you.
Designing the card
Click a passage to show it in the preview, then shape the card with the controls on the right. The preview is the card itself, at its exact shape. You can also add a passage of your own: type or paste it and press Enter or Add. It's checked and previewed straight away, and marked Added by you; if its quotation marks don't pair up, the card says so rather than changing your text.
- Template — your book's template by default, or pick any of the 41. The card's body typeface and ornament glyph come straight from it, so switching templates visibly changes the card's personality.
- Size — Square (2000 × 2000), Portrait (1080 × 1350), Story (1080 × 1920), or Wide (1200 × 628), the same sizes as Cover Studio's mockups. The layout reflows for each shape, and Portrait and Story allow longer passages.
- Accent and theme — pick an accent swatch (or a custom color) and a Light or Dark theme. The background is derived from your accent, and the ornament picks up the same color so the card reads as one palette.
- Attribution strip — on by default, adds a “— Book Title” line (and your author name) at the foot of the card. Most platforms surface posts without context, so the attribution usually earns its space; toggle it off for a pure pull-quote look.
- Cover thumbnail — if you've finalized a cover in Cover Studio, you can show it as a small thumbnail above the quote. With no cover yet, the card renders cleanly title-only.
The spoiler guard
Auto-surfacing high-tension beats means the tool will happily find your climax — which is the last thing you want to post as a teaser. The spoiler guard, on by default, excludes passages drawn from the final stretch of the manuscript so you don't shop the ending.
The default hides the last 15% of the book; the Last part of the book slider tightens or loosens that, and unchecking Hide passages from the ending switches the guard off. Passages you marked yourself are never affected — the guard only governs auto-surfaced candidates.
Generating and exporting
Each passage has a checkbox; the top several are checked for you, and Select all / Select none do what they say. Checking a passage adds it to the download; clicking it shows it in the preview. Download Card saves one PNG; Download Cards saves the checked cards as one zip. Files are named from your book title, numbered in order, with the size and dimensions in the name.
The cards are rasterized at full export resolution — the same size they'll be uploaded at — with your fonts embedded so the typography is pixel-accurate, not a system-font approximation.
Want the same passage at several sizes? Download a batch, switch the size, and download again — the file names carry the size and dimensions, so nothing collides.