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The checks an editor actually makes
Editorial judgement looks like intuition and mostly is not. It is a set of specific, repeatable checks applied in order. These are those checks, written out by genre and by element, as scorecards you can actually run on your own chapter.
A separate free preview: A free outside view of your own pages
A separate editorial preview of one extract; it does not read the whole book or do the specialist job this page describes. Send up to 5,000 words. You get back what the draft appears to be doing to somebody who wasn't there when you wrote it, the strongest thing in it named, the exact place a reader starts to drift, and three revision priorities in order.
A separate editorial preview of one extract; it does not read the whole book or do the specialist job this page describes. An AI-assisted read of your own pages. Not a human edit, not a line edit, and not a scored report.
Why the checks are worth seeing
Editorial feedback often arrives as a judgement — the opening isn't working — and an author cannot act on a judgement. They can act on the reader doesn't know what the character wants until page nine, and there is no question on page one that they need answered.
So each rubric breaks an element into its component checks. Each check has a question, what passing looks like, what failing looks like, and what to do about it.
Run one on your own chapter and you will usually find two or three failures you already half-knew about. That is the point: they are made specific enough to fix.
Genre changes the checks, not just the tone
An opening chapter in a thriller and an opening chapter in a memoir are doing different jobs, and the checks differ accordingly.
A thriller opening is checked for whether a threat is present and legible within two pages. A memoir opening is checked for whether the reader knows why this story is being told now. A business-book opening is checked for whether the reader's problem appears before the author's credentials.
Applying the wrong rubric produces confident, wrong advice — which is a fair description of a great deal of writing advice on the internet.
What the scores mean
Each rubric ends with bands rather than a single number, because a percentage on a chapter would be false precision.
The bands say what a score means in practice: whether this chapter is ready for readers, ready for an editor, or needs another pass first. A chapter scoring in the lowest band is not bad; it is early.
And the checks are not weighted equally in real life. A stable point of view matters more than a varied sentence length. The rubric says which are load-bearing.
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Each guide says plainly when a person does the job better than AI. Guides on legal topics are general information, not legal advice.
Running a rubric on one chapter by hand is useful and takes half an hour. Running it across ninety thousand words is the job Detailed Editorial Feedback does — the same checks, applied to the whole manuscript at once, reported as a diagnosis of where and why. It costs 900 credits for a 60,000-word book, inside the 1,000 welcome credits every account starts with.
Ask the Editor answers the single specific question while you work — is this opening doing its job? — and the Editing Suite is where the fixing happens, in order, on the same manuscript.
What a human developmental editor adds on top: market judgement. Whether this kind of opening is being acquired this year, and what an agent's reader will do with page one. The checks are transferable; that judgement is not, and it is worth buying if the book is going to agents.
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Ask the Editor a question
Email me my free review linkQuestions people ask
- Are these the checks real editors use?
- They are the checks that can be written down. Editorial judgement also includes market knowledge and taste, which cannot be — and we say so rather than pretending the list is complete.
- Which rubric should I start with?
- The opening chapter for your genre. It is where the most readers are lost and where the highest proportion of fixable problems sit.
- What if my chapter fails most of the checks?
- Then it is early, which is what first drafts are. Fix the load-bearing failures first — the rubric marks which those are — and ignore the rest for now.
- Do these apply to non-fiction?
- The non-fiction rubrics do. Fiction rubrics applied to a business book will give you confident, wrong advice, which is why they are separated by genre.
- Can I use these on someone else's manuscript?
- Yes, and they make critique-group feedback dramatically more useful — a scored rubric is specific where 'I liked it' is not.