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🖼️ Publish Books and Articles with Images via AI Assistants or the API | 10.16

Books and long-form articles published through MCP or the API now carry their images inline.

Hey Pickful community,

The most common request from people publishing through an AI assistant (Claude, Codex or any other MCP client) or the REST API: the text goes up automatically, but the images don’t. Books could only be uploaded on the web, and articles carried a cover but not the charts and screenshots inside them. Today we’re fixing both.

💡 One thing first: the packaging, uploading and parameters described below are handled by your AI assistant, which reads the tool instructions and does the steps for you. Just describe what you want, for example: “Publish the manuscript and images in this folder as a book, priced at 10 USDC, and keep it as a draft for now.”


📚 Books: One ZIP, Images and Cover Included

You can now publish a whole book through your AI assistant or the API:

  • Upload a package: ZIP your book.md with an images/ folder; a root cover.png becomes the cover
  • Automatic layout: each # Heading starts a chapter, and every image lands in the chapter where it’s referenced
  • Room to grow: up to 200 images per book, ZIP up to 50MB
  • Review before release: books start as drafts. Check chapters, images and cover with get_book_status, then publish_book, or schedule a release with published_at
  • Price and byline: set an author name and a USDC price; readers pay the author’s wallet directly
  • Easy revisions: pass a new ZIP to update_book and the whole book is re-parsed, chapters and images together

Tools: create_book_upload, create_book, update_book, get_book_status, publish_book.


✍️ Articles: Inline Images

Write in Markdown as usual. Wherever an image belongs, add ![caption](images/chart.png), then hand over the images one of two ways:

Option Best for How
Attach directly One or two images Pass assets (base64 images) to create_post
Upload a package Many images ZIP post.md with images/, upload via create_post_upload, then publish with upload_id. A root cover.png becomes the cover

Up to 40 images per article, ZIP up to 30MB. update_post can add or replace images too, a text-only edit keeps the existing images, and text-and-cover calls work exactly as before.


🛡️ Details That Apply to Both

  • No half-finished posts: if the text references an image you didn’t upload, the call fails and names the missing files
  • Unused images are flagged: images you uploaded but never referenced are listed in the result
  • Safe retries: retry with the same upload_id after a timeout and you get back the book or article already created, not a duplicate

Each image up to 5MB; PNG, JPEG and WebP are supported.


💬 To the Community

Good research runs on charts: one clear figure often says more than three paragraphs. We hope this lets you bring your full work to Pickful, every figure intact. Tell us how it goes.

Live now on Web, iOS, and Android, no app update needed.

Pickful Team
10.16

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