Usually not. Most trade publishing contracts contain an author warranty stating that everything in the book is true and does not infringe anyone's rights — which places the obligation on the author, not the publisher. Magazines fact-check. Book publishers largely rely on the warranty, a legal read where the risk is high, and you.
Do publishers fact-check books?
Who checks what, actually
The middle column is the one that surprises people. Almost every author assumes somebody further down the chain is checking, and in book publishing almost nobody is.
| Who | What they check | What they don't |
|---|---|---|
| Your publisher (trade) | Nothing systematically. They rely on the author warranty in your contract. | Accuracy of any factual claim. It is contractually yours. |
| The publisher's lawyer (legal read) | Defamation, privacy, contempt and rights exposure — and only when risk is flagged. | Whether your figures, dates and quotations are correct. |
| The copy-editor | Obvious internal inconsistencies, and they'll query things that look wrong. | Anything requiring research. It is not in their scope or their fee. |
| A freelance fact-checker | Every checkable claim, against a primary source, with a log. | Judgement calls and interpretation — they check facts, not arguments. |
| You | Everything, in the end. The warranty says so. | Nothing. This is the actual answer. |
A claims audit of your chapter
Send a chapter and we'll email back every checkable claim in it — numbers, dates, quotations, named people — with the ones that carry no source flagged. Free, and it shows you the size of the job.
What the warranty in your contract actually says
Standard trade contracts include an author warranty and indemnity. In plain terms, you promise that the work is your own, that the statements in it are true, and that it does not infringe anyone's rights — and you agree to cover the publisher's losses if that turns out to be wrong.
It is one of the least-read clauses in publishing and one of the most consequential. It is also entirely normal, and not a sign of a bad publisher. But it means the mental model most authors carry — they'll check it — is simply wrong.
If you are self-publishing there is no warranty because there is no publisher. The exposure is identical; it is just more obvious.
What actually needs checking in a non-fiction book
Numbers. Statistics, percentages, financial figures, dates, ages, distances. Numbers travel between sources and mutate on the way, and a figure you read in a newspaper is very often a misreading of a study.
Quotations. Especially famous ones. A remarkable proportion of quotations attributed to Churchill, Einstein and Mark Twain were never said by them, and a misattributed epigraph is the kind of error reviewers enjoy.
Named people and organisations. Job titles, spellings, whether a company still exists and under what name.
Chronology. In memoir particularly — you were nine, or the shop shut in 1974, but not both.
Claims about health, money and law. The highest-risk category by a distance, because being wrong can hurt a reader and can be actionable.
Memory is not a source, and memoir is not exempt
Memoir gets a great deal of latitude on interior experience and almost none on checkable external fact. Readers accept that you remember the argument differently from your sister. They do not accept that the strike was in 1985 when it was 1984.
The practical approach: check anything a reader could look up, and be explicit about anything you cannot. I remember it as a Tuesday; my brother says Thursday is stronger writing than false certainty, and it is safer.
This is also why a chronology document — a simple dated timeline of your own life events — is worth building early in any memoir. It catches contradictions before they reach a reader.
What a fact-checker actually does
They extract every checkable assertion from the manuscript, find a primary source for each, and log the result: verified, unverified, or wrong. Good ones return a document keyed to your page numbers, with the source alongside each claim.
The skill is in knowing what counts as a source. A number in a news article is not a source; the study the article was reporting is. A company's own marketing page is a source for what the company says about itself and nothing else.
Rates run £25–£60 an hour, and a full non-fiction book typically comes in at £600–£2,500 depending on claim density. Books with heavy statistics cost far more than books with light ones.
What Your Book Pro does here
Your Book Pro is a British book-writing platform. You bring a book — an idea, a folder of notes, half a draft, or a finished manuscript written somewhere else — and it gives you the editorial process a publisher would run: a plan, structured feedback, a simulated beta read, a line edit, a proofread, a cover, a blurb and a print-ready file. You can type it, upload it or speak it. The tools sit in one place and work on the same manuscript, so the feedback compounds instead of arriving as twelve disconnected opinions.
Fact Check & Citations does the first and most laborious part of this job: it reads your manuscript and pulls out every checkable claim — numbers, dates, quotations, named people and organisations, causal statements — and tells you which ones carry a source in your text and which are floating unsupported.
That list is what a human fact-checker would spend the first several billable hours producing. Having it in front of you does two things: it shows you the shape of your own risk, and it turns an unbounded task into a finite one.
The honest limit, and it matters: identifying a claim is not the same as verifying it. For a book making health, financial or legal claims, or one with heavy statistical content, a human fact-checker checking against primary sources is a real and necessary purchase. Use this to find out how big that job is before you commission it.
Check your claims
Upload a manuscript written anywhere
Email me the auditQuestions people ask
- Does a copy-editor fact-check?
- No. A good copy-editor raises queries when something looks wrong, and that is a courtesy rather than a scope. Research is not in a copy-editing fee and should not be expected.
- What does a fact-checker cost?
- £25–£60 an hour, so roughly £600–£2,500 for a non-fiction book, driven almost entirely by how many checkable claims per page you have written.
- Do I need to fact-check a novel?
- For anything checkable, yes — a real street, a real date, a real procedure. Readers who know the subject will write to you, and getting the detail right is also what makes a fictional world convincing.
- What if I can't verify something?
- Cut it, or attribute it honestly: 'according to X', 'family tradition holds that', 'I have not been able to confirm'. Uncertainty stated plainly reads as authority. Uncertainty hidden reads as error when it is found.
- Is Wikipedia a source?
- It is a good place to find sources and a poor place to cite. Follow its references down to the primary document and cite that.