A line edit you rule on.
Ask for a line edit and Ghostkey reads the chapter closely: filter words, point-of-view slips, repetition, the sentence that doesn't parse. Each note quotes the passage, says what's wrong, and usually offers another wording.
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Marked in the page. The passages under discussion are underlined in your chapter, so you judge each note in context.
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Apply, or don't. Apply takes the new wording, ✕ keeps yours. Nothing in the chapter changes until you say so.
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More than grammar. A slip out of your narrator's head gets a note too, not just a typo.
It edits your book, not a generic one
- Tell it what to watch for.
- Each pass takes a short brief: "watch the tense", "leave her dialect alone".
- A style sheet that learns.
- Your spellings, your house rules, what's deliberate. Every line edit obeys it, and it picks up your book's habits as it goes.
- Your world, spelled right.
- It knows your characters and places from the world bible, so an invented name isn't "corrected" into a real word.
- Your voice stays yours.
- It respects your point of view and leaves deliberate voice alone. And if you apply a note and regret it, undo takes it back.
The edit before the line edit.
A developmental edit reads the book as a whole: what it sets out to be, and what would take it further. Ghostkey first works out whether the book is commercial, upmarket or literary, then reads it for what that kind of book needs. You get an editing letter of three or four pages, and your manuscript with dozens of comments in the margins, each beside the passage it's about.
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Marked in your chapter. Each comment sits beside the passage it's about, so you read it in context.
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Tagged by what it reads for. Genre, pacing, prose, theme: you can see at a glance which part of the letter a note belongs to.
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What works, too. Not every note is a problem. Some tell you what to keep alive until the last chapter.
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Note to note. Turn the pages, or step from one comment to the next through the whole book.
Read for the book you're writing
- It reads for your intent.
- A commercial novel is read for genre expectations, pacing, reader satisfaction and where a reader might wander. Upmarket, for pacing, theme and prose. Literary, for prose, theme and originality. A fantasy gets a worldbuilding read on top.
- What works, as well as what doesn't.
- Every part of the letter says what's already working, so you know what to protect while you revise.
- Comments in the margins.
- Read the book with the editor's notes beside the pages, each tagged with what it's about: pacing, prose, theme. Or download it as a Word file with the notes as real comments, to work through in your own editor or send on.
- Or start with the opening.
- The opening critique reads your first chapter, and the prologue if there is one, the way an editor reads a submission: what the hook promises, the question it leaves the reader with, and how to hook them sooner.
A letter, section by section.
Each part of the letter says what the book does, then checks it against what its readers expect: it fits, it's worth a thought, or it's a flag. Then, what to try.
Nothing in your manuscript changes. The edit says what it sees and where; what to do about it is yours.
Read a real one: the edit Ghostkey wrote for The Way of an Eagle, Ethel M. Dell's 1912 romance. The letter, and the whole novel with the editor's comments in Word.
The whole book, read back to you.
There's a point in a draft where you can't see it any more. You know every chapter too well to tell whether the middle sags, or whether the ending pays off what the opening promised. Ghostkey reads the whole manuscript and reports what it's doing, in its own terms, so you can decide whether that's what you meant.
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Four questions. Does the tension rise, does the ending pay off what the book set up, does the opening hook, does the book keep its hold? Each gets a verdict and the chapters it rests on.
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The pull as a wave. Every chapter rated for how hard it pulls the reader forward, with a line saying why it sits there.
Six ways to read a draft
- Pacing.
- For "it drags and I don't know where": beta readers not finishing, a draft that feels long, a climax that doesn't feel like one.
- Theme.
- The things the story keeps returning to through choices, conflicts and images, what the book says about each, and how they develop chapter by chapter.
- Genre expectations.
- The shelves a bookseller would put it on, then the expectations that matter most for each, marked met, subverted or not addressed, and why.
- Reverse outline.
- Speed-read your own book: a synopsis, an extended outline, or chapter by chapter, written from the draft as it actually stands.
- Continuity.
- The eye colour that changed in chapter nine, the character who knows something nobody told them. Each finding quotes the passages that disagree, and you decide which ones are mistakes.
- Plot holes.
- The places the story skips a step or contradicts itself, in one chapter or across the whole book, found before your readers find them.
Nothing here is a grade.
A subverted expectation is a choice. A long lull is a choice. The reports say what the book does and where; what it should do is yours.
Run one, go write while it reads, and come back to it on any device. Rewrite the middle, run it again, and put the two side by side.
