Safety Screening reads your manuscript and flags the passages most likely to carry legal exposure — identifiable living people, factual allegations, private information, anything involving a child — so you know which ones to take to a solicitor. It does not tell you whether you will be sued, and it is not a substitute for legal advice. It tells you where to look, early, while a chapter is still cheap to change.
Tool
Legal and duty-of-care exposure, flagged early
What it does, precisely
- Flags passages likely to carry defamation, privacy or duty-of-care exposure
- Identifies where living people are identifiable even when unnamed
- Notes where a claim is stated as fact without support
- Does it early, while changing the chapter is still cheap
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
Flags are advisory and nothing is changed in your text. You decide what to cut, what to anonymise, and what to defend.
What this looks like in your genre
memoir. Memoir carries more exposure than any other category, and the two risks are different: defamation, where truth is a defence, and misuse of private information, where it is not. Health, addiction, sexuality, finances and anything about a child are the categories that catch memoir writers who assumed truth was enough.
business. Business books carry exposure around named companies, former colleagues and employers: statements about business conduct, references to confidential information, and anything covered by a settlement or a non-disclosure agreement. All are checkable and all are routinely discovered late.
non fiction. Non-fiction exposure sits in allegations about living people and organisations, and it is compounded by the author warranty in most publishing contracts, which makes accuracy contractually yours. The screen flags the passages a solicitor should see rather than the whole manuscript.
travel. Travel writing has an exposure most writers do not anticipate: people met briefly on the road who never expected to appear in a book, sometimes in countries where what you write about them has consequences for them rather than for you.
However you write
Screens any manuscript in the account. Most valuable on an uploaded draft that is nearly finished — the point where the exposure is real and the author has stopped being able to see it.
The mistake: finding out at proof stage
Memoir writers routinely discover at proof stage that a chapter cannot be published as written. By then it is structural: the chapter is load-bearing, three others reference it, and removing it means reopening a book you had finished. The legal advice also costs more, because there is more to unpick and less time to do it in.
Living people, private medical information, other people's children, a business dispute you are still angry about, letters and diaries you do not own the rights to — these are all findable early, when the fix is a paragraph rather than a restructure.
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.
Safety Screening flags exposure early and changes nothing in your text — you decide what to cut, what to anonymise and what to defend. Included in Annual Pro, $149 a year (normally $299).
Safety Screening is AI and can make mistakes. Its advice is not comprehensive and does not replace legal advice — always check its answers. You will still need a solicitor; this might make that conversation shorter by telling you which passages to send them.
Where it stops
Safety Screening is AI and can make mistakes. Its advice is not comprehensive and does not replace legal advice. Always check its answers.
This is not legal advice and does not replace a solicitor. It flags what to take to one, so that conversation is shorter and cheaper. Defamation and privacy law is fact-specific and differs between England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and again outside the UK. If you are writing about identifiable living people in a contested way, get proper advice.
What this replaces
| What you are buying | Typical range | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| A first check by a human | £250–£500 an hour; £1,500–£5,000 for a full legal read | You will still need legal advice. What this does is help you identify which passages to take to them — which might make that conversation shorter, more specific and cheaper. Publishing solicitor rates. See /costs/safety-screening for the full breakdown and sources. |
Run a screening
Review my openingQuestions people ask
- Does this mean I don't need a lawyer?
- No, and it would be dangerous to read it that way. If your book identifies living people in a way that could damage them, you need legal advice. This narrows what you send them from ninety thousand words to the passages that matter, which is what makes that advice affordable.
- Can I rely on what it says?
- No. It is AI and can make mistakes, its advice is not comprehensive, and it does not replace legal advice. Always check its answers. Treat it as a first pass that tells you where to look.
- What does a legal read actually cost?
- Roughly £250–£500 an hour, or £1,500–£5,000 for a full read of a manuscript, depending on length and how much of the book carries risk. A solicitor reading fourteen flagged passages bills for far less than one reading the whole book.
- Does changing names protect me?
- Not by itself. The test is whether a person is identifiable to people who know them, so changing the name while keeping the trade, the town and the year identifies them just as clearly. This is general information, not legal advice.
- Is truth a defence?
- To defamation, yes, if you can demonstrate it. To misuse of private information, no — and that is the risk memoir writers most often miss. Take it to a solicitor.
- When should I run it?
- On a near-final draft, before typesetting. Early enough that changing a chapter is still a paragraph rather than a restructure, late enough that the manuscript is the one you mean to publish.