Made for editors
The editor’s QA instrument.
The last pass over a client’s novel before it goes back to them.
One upload reads the whole file and reports what a person reading in sequence cannot: every invented name, place, faction and term in the book, which of them drift, and where the manuscript disagrees with itself. It also drafts the administrative half of a fiction style sheet from the manuscript’s own decisions. Each finding names the chapter, or how far through the book where the file has no readable chapters, and the exact text to search for.
- Read-only Your file is read, never written to. What you download is a separate report.
- Yours to call Both forms, counted and located. The editorial decision stays with you.
- Rule-based Every finding is a rule applied to the text. No language model reads a word of it.
- Transient The manuscript is transiently processed for one request and never stored.
What one pass returns.
Every finding is a comparison across the whole file, between pages that may be four hundred apart. Each arrives with the forms found in the manuscript, the count for each and the chapters they run between. Nothing to install, and no Microsoft Word required.
Duplicate & alias checker
One name, two spellings, three hundred pages apart
Both spellings are consistent enough that no dictionary objects to either, and the rare one is usually the right one to lose. The pair arrives with its counts and the chapters each form runs between.
How this one works →House style
The style decision the manuscript made, and where it broke it
Possessives of names ending in s, titles with and without a full stop, among against amongst, while against whilst. Neither form is an error, and a book carrying both is what a style sheet exists to prevent.
How this one works →Spelling standard
British or American, and the handful that got away
A spellchecker set to either dialect passes over the words that belong to the other one. This counts both and names the minority spellings, which is the list you would otherwise build by hand.
How this one works →Hyphenation & spacing checker
A compound written hyphenated, joined and spaced
The most common consistency error in speculative fiction and the hardest to read past, because each form looks right on its own page.
How this one works →Typography check
Straight quotes, double hyphens and dialogue that never closes
A quotation mark is not a word, so nothing you have already run has looked at one, and every mark on this list shows in the printed proof. Speech carried over a paragraph break is recognised and left alone.
How this one works →Illustrations, not scan output: nothing is kept from any manuscript, so there is none to print here. Every finding a real scan returns names the chapter to look in, or how far through the book where there are no readable chapters, and the text to search for. There are 42 reports in all, and one upload runs every one of them, with a second file for the draft and series comparisons. The full catalogue →
Fits your existing workflow.
Nothing to install. Four of these five steps are what you already do.
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Client sends DOCX.
Or .epub, .rtf or .txt, up to 20MB. Whatever they already send you.
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You complete your edit normally.
Your process, your style sheet, your judgement. Keep PerfectIt, Grammarly or ProWritingAid running too: they read the prose, this reads the world.
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Run the manuscript through The Novel Kit.
One upload, one pass, every report. A few seconds for a full-length novel.
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Review anything worth checking.
A list of places, each with its chapter, or how far through the book where there are no readable chapters, and the exact text to search for. You decide which are errors and which are the book doing what it meant to.
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Return your manuscript.
The same file you were working in. Nothing was written to it, and nothing was kept.
What survives a professional edit.
We scanned 12,602 published novels, cover to cover, with the same scanner you would run. Every one of them had been edited, proofread and printed.
Across 12,602 published novels
None of this says an edit was careless. It is what a whole-manuscript comparison costs a person to do by reading, which is why almost nobody does it, and why a minute of machine time at the end is worth having. The per-book measurements are published rather than summarised. Our research → · How we measured it →
Two plans that permit somebody else’s manuscript.
The author plans are for manuscripts you wrote or own the rights to. These two add permission to scan clients’ work, and a year’s worth of scans to do it with.
Every report, check and export is on both, and on every author plan too: these differ by volume and licence, not by features. A free scan needs no account and reports headline counts for a whole manuscript, so you can see what a client’s file returns before buying anything. Publishing at higher volume? Tell us what your list looks like and we will quote for it.
What editors ask first.
May I run a client’s manuscript through it?
On an Editor or Editor Pro plan, yes. Those two plans licence you to scan manuscripts you did not write, as part of a professional editing, proofreading or publishing service.
Is the manuscript stored anywhere?
No. The file is transiently processed for the length of one request and never stored. No manuscript text, no filename and no extracted term reaches any database, and there is no retention period because there is no copy to expire.
Does it change my file?
It never writes to your file. What you upload is read; what you download afterwards is a separate report or export. Nothing is edited, corrected or suggested, so there is nothing to accept or reject and nothing to merge back.
Will it read my comments and tracked changes?
Word comments are not read at all: a .docx scan reads the document body, its headers and its footers. Tracked insertions are part of the body text and are read; tracked deletions are not. If you would rather scan a clean copy, accept all changes into a duplicate and upload that.
Does it replace a proofread?
No, and it cannot. It has nothing to say about sense, register, pace, plot or whether a character behaves consistently. It answers one question a person reading in sequence cannot answer well, which is whether the manuscript agrees with itself from end to end.
What file formats does it take?
A .docx, .epub, .rtf or .txt up to 20MB. Reports export as DOCX, HTML, EPUB, PDF, WEB, TXT, CSV or JSON, so a finding list can go to a client in whatever they already open.
How long does a full-length novel take?
A few seconds. Across a 38-book test set the slowest scan ran two and a half seconds, and every report comes from that one pass: filtering, re-sorting or opening another report never costs a second scan.
Further reading: software for fiction editors, confidentiality with clients, preparing a manuscript for a proofreader.
Try it on a manuscript you have already finished.
Free to preview, and no account to create. Run a book you signed off last month and see whether it comes back clean.