Proofreading is the last pass, not the only pass, and it is the one your own eyes cannot do: you read what you meant, not what is there. This checks the whole manuscript at once against your own style sheet, and reports rather than rewrites.
Tool
Proofreading that protects deliberate voice and dialect
What it does, precisely
- Line-by-line check for typos, inconsistency and broken punctuation
- Recognises dialect, idiom and deliberate non-standard usage and leaves it alone
- Queries rather than changes anything that might be intentional
- Records every decision so consistency actually holds
Free opening chapter review — on your own pages
Paste or upload up to 5,000 words. You get back what the opening appears to promise, what is already working, where a reader may hesitate, and the three priorities worth fixing first. Free, private, no card.
This is an AI-assisted snapshot, not a human edit. You decide what belongs in the next draft.
What it does
If you are writing in Scots, or Multicultural London English, or a family idiom nobody else uses, that is not an error to be fixed. It is queried, never corrected silently.
What this looks like in your genre
memoir. The errors that matter most in memoir are dates and names, because readers do the arithmetic. You were nine, and the move was in 1974 — every other date in the book has to agree.
business. Business books carry numbers, and numbers are where the errors are: a percentage that changes between chapters, a figure quoted in two units, a company name that changed and is used both ways. The pass checks those specifically rather than reading for typos.
childrens. A short text gets read aloud hundreds of times by adults and learned by heart by children, which makes a repeated refrain that changes by one word a real error. The pass checks refrains word for word and holds reading-level vocabulary consistent.
fiction. Fiction's proofreading problems are continuity problems: a name that acquires an 'h', a dog that changes breed, eye colour that drifts across 90,000 words. Reading will not catch them because your eye supplies what you meant.
non fiction. Non-fiction proofreading has to cover the apparatus as well as the prose: endnote numbering, citation format, cross-references to chapters that have since moved, and figure numbers that no longer match their captions. That is where the errors cluster, and it is invisible while reading.
However you write
Proofreads any manuscript in the account. This is the tool uploaded drafts reach for first: a finished book written elsewhere, run through a proper proofread before it goes anywhere near a printer.
The mistake: letting a proofreader flatten your voice
Authors who write in dialect are right to be frightened of automated proofreading. The usual result is a manuscript quietly corrected into standard English, with the voice — the entire point — sanded off in the name of accuracy. Scots, Multicultural London English, a family idiom nobody else uses, a character who speaks the way your grandmother did: to a spellchecker these are all errors, and they are all fixed.
The distinction that matters is between a mistake and a decision. A tool that cannot tell the difference should query, not correct.
What Your Book Pro does here
Your Book Pro is a writing studio for people making a real book. You bring the words — typed straight in, dictated if you'd rather talk, or uploaded from whatever you have already written elsewhere — and it does the work that normally costs thousands: structure, editorial feedback, proofreading, a cover, and a publisher-ready export.
One rule shapes all of it. Your words are stored as Exact Text and are never overwritten. Every suggestion arrives attached to a place in your manuscript, and nothing changes until you accept it. Where most AI tools quietly rewrite you into their own register, this one shows you the change and waits. Even the automatic clean-up pass is held to a length check — if it drifts too far from what you actually wrote, the edit is thrown away and you keep your own words. The editorial standards behind the feedback are our own, written for books and specific to your genre, not a general chatbot answering in a good mood.
Proofread queries deliberate voice and dialect rather than correcting it silently, and every change waits for you to accept it. Included in Annual Pro, $149 a year (normally $299).
The final typeset proof still wants human eyes — page numbers, widows, running heads, the things that only exist once the book is laid out.
Where it stops
The final typeset proof still wants human eyes — page numbers, widows, running heads, the things that only exist once the book is laid out. This catches most of the text-level errors first, which usually lowers what that proofread costs.
Where to find it
Proofread runs in the Editing Suite on the Edit tab and writes a saved report as it goes, so it survives closing the panel, navigating away and refreshing. Ask the Editor — the pill in the top right — can quote that saved report back to you while you work.
What this replaces
| What you are buying | Typical range | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Proofreader | £300–£800 for a full book | Usually per 1,000 words; CIEP publish suggested minimums. See /costs/proofread for the full breakdown and sources. |
Run a proofread
Review my opening