For series authors
Book Two, meet Book One.
Check the new book against the world readers already know.
A reader who has waited two years for the next volume knows your world better than you remember writing it. Scan the new manuscript, add the volumes that came before it, and every word they spell differently is reported: a character renamed by one letter, a place that gained a hyphen, a term book one explained and book three forgot. Both forms, the count from each book, and nothing written to any of your files.
- No plugin. Nothing to install in anything.
- No Microsoft Word required. Any browser, any machine, Mac included.
- Upload the manuscripts you already have. .docx, .epub, .rtf or .txt, up to 20MB.
- Two books or ten The manuscript on screen against every earlier book you add - and each of those against the others.
- Both forms Every disagreement shows the spelling from each book and how often each is used.
- Yours to call A rename and a misspelling look the same to a rule. The decision stays with you.
- Nothing kept No manuscript is stored. The comparison lives in the tab you are working in and goes when you close it.
Five ways a series drifts from itself.
Each of these is a word two of your books use and spell differently. None of them is wrong inside its own book, which is exactly why no amount of re-reading one volume will find it.
Hyphenation
The commonest disagreement in the corpus, and the one a spellchecker will never raise in either book.
Character names
One letter, four years apart. A reader with both books open finds it in an afternoon.
Place names
A city that changed vowel between volumes, usually because it was typed from memory rather than copied.
Capitalisation
A faction that was a proper noun in book one and a common one in book two.
Terms that vanish
Vocabulary the series established and a later book stopped using, which is either a cut thread or a continuity hole.
Four steps, and every book stays yours.
Each volume is uploaded the way the new one is, read, and dropped. Nothing about any of them is stored, which is why each book has to come from you - and the same reason there is no library of your books here to log into.
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Scan the new manuscript.
The book you have just finished. One pass, and every report on it comes from that scan - the series check is one of them.
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Add the book before it.
The manuscript itself, in any format the scanner takes. Included with your pass and using none of your scans: it is read for its names, counts and spellings alone.
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Add the rest of the series, if you want them.
Each further volume uses one scan from your pass, and the control says so before you choose a file. Put them in the order they were written and the screen keeps it.
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Read what they disagree about.
Every book is compared with every other one, not just with the new manuscript: names that drifted, terms written another way, terms a volume dropped, and the style decisions the books settle differently - both forms and the count from each.
One earlier book is included with every pass, the series goes when the tab does, and the mechanics are covered report by report on the feature page. How the series check works → · The series bible it produces →
Managing a backlist or catalogue? That is a different job from checking a series against itself: bulk-check your titles, see which need attention and which problems recur across all of them. Audit everything at once →
What happens to a published series between books.
We found series in a corpus of public-domain novels by measuring which books share a cast, then compared every pair of them word by word. Each of these books was edited and printed.
Across 8,000 pairs of novels that share a cast
The corpus is public-domain fiction. Every figure is published rather than summarised. Our research → · How we measured it →
What series authors ask first.
Do I need an export of the earlier book?
No. You add the earlier book itself - the same .docx, .epub, .rtf or .txt you already have - and it is read for its names, counts and spellings alone. There is no file to save first and nothing about it is kept afterwards.
How many books can I compare at once?
As many as you have. Every book you add is compared with every other one, not only with the new manuscript, so a name spelled one way in book one and another way in book two is found whether or not the new book carries it at all. Adding one earlier book is included with your pass and uses none of your scans; each book after that uses one.
What counts as a disagreement?
A word two of the books use, spelled differently in each: a name, a place, a faction, an invented term, a compound hyphenated in one and joined in the other. Both forms are shown with the count from each book, and nothing is changed in any of your files.
Will it flag things I changed deliberately?
Yes, and it has to. A city renamed between volumes and a city misspelled between volumes look identical to a rule, so the report shows both forms and their counts and leaves the judgement where it belongs. A deliberate change is one you dismiss in a second because you already know about it.
Does it work if the books are not a series?
It works on any books that share vocabulary - a standalone set in the same world, a spin-off, a novella, or a short story collection drawn from the same setting. It has nothing useful to say about books that share nothing.
How common is this, really?
We measured 8,000 pairs of published novels that share a cast. 6.9 per cent of them spell at least one of their own invented words differently from each other, and 44.2 per cent of those disagreements are hyphenation. Every one of those books was edited and printed.
Check the new book against the world readers already know.
Free to preview, and no account to create. One earlier book is included with every pass.