Basically, write book get money.
To start off you can only write basic children's books and doing so increases your skills.
As you gain stats in the various skills (I'm thinking like Story-Building/Character-Development/etc), new genres unlock. IE increasing Character-Development and Story-Building can unlock Romance.
To keep it funny and cute, I'd like some sort of adlib aspect so when you "read" it, you'll see pre-generated lines based on input. Example would be you input a character to be Lola Cobblestone, and while reading the book it says something like
Books are scored based on quality, which can be raised relative to your skills that are relevant for the novel (You won't get as much quality for a Character-Development focused skillset in Action as you would Romance). Quality books would also raise a fame stat, which can boost future books.As Lola Cobblestone looked at the starry sky, all they could think about was the man she loved sent off to the great space war... When will he return?
Certain mood events can act as "sources" for your upcoming novel and also boost your quality. Turn that near-death experience into an amazing horror novel!
All of this is for a nice payout once the book is "published". Published books should be announced over the newscasters so there's always something you can check out when not validhunting you're looking for a fun pasttime.
From a non-novelist POV, books should give minor effects. Reading a high quality book should boost ones mood as well as give effects specific to the genre that scales with quality. IE a high quality romance novel can make your hugs give a better moodboost while a bad romance novel will make you such a bad hugger you give people negative moodlets. Another example could be a good horror book can make you so scared you have a heart attack! Or it makes it so you have a hard time falling asleep for the next X minutes...
I think this will let players dress up their characters in a unique aspect where previously you were left to the imagination. "Hey have you read X book yet? It was really great!" or "Hey, you're the famous author X Y!".
Just thought I'd spitball it here so people can build on it until I can be arsed to code it myself.