Building Edith, an editor for novelists that reads the whole book and never rewrites a word. Made it for my wife.

Kristoffer Petersson  • Peerlist

Edith is an editor for finished novels.Most tools that offer to help with a manuscript read a few chapters and hand back a rewrite. Edith works the other way around. She reads the entire book first, up to 150,000 words, holds all of it in mind, then works through it in stages: the structural read first, the line level last.Every piece of feedback arrives as a note, one at a time. You accept it, reject it, or push back and make her defend it. Then you make the change yourself, in your own words. She never writes a sentence of your book. That is a design decision, not a setting: the finished manuscript contains no machine-written prose.What she does<ul><li>Reads and remembers the whole book. A note on chapter 40 knows what happened in chapter 3.</li><li>Six stages, in the order a human editor would work, from the first structural read down to a final proofread.</li><li>Notes and questions only. Nothing is rewritten, nothing is auto-applied.</li><li>Argue back on any note. Settled decisions carry forward, so you never have the same argument twice.</li><li>Line-stage edits arrive as tracked changes and margin comments in Word, so you work where you already work.</li></ul>Why it existsI built it for my wife, who self-publishes. A full edit from a human editor runs into the thousands, out of reach for most independent authors. The affordable alternatives had two failure modes she kept hitting: they lost the first half of the book by the time they reached the end, or they quietly rewrote her sentences into something that was no longer hers.Try it before signing upThere is a full sample editorial letter on the site, using a demo manuscript, so you can judge the real output before giving anyone an email address.Pre-launch. Waitlist members get their first Editorial Review free, normally $15.