Questions
Questions publishers ask us.
These four are verbatim the first questions our first publishing house asked. The answers are the honest ones, in the same register as the rest of this site.
The four
Who uses it?
The house's editorial staff. Pricing never counts seats, so who you bring in is your decision, not a billing event. The house workspace — organisation, imprints, staff roles — is in build now; while it is, access is set up with you directly.
What should we test first?
The manuscript itself. Send one full manuscript through the read and judge the editorial report, the chapter summaries and the key points against what your own editors would have produced. That is the core of the product and it is live today.
How does it fit our editorial process?
As a hybrid workflow. The system prepares the read; your editor reviews it, interrogates it, and decides what reaches the author. The system holds no opinion an editor has not approved. The editor’s workbench inside the publisher workspace — where notes are agreed and packaged for the author as a document from a named person — is in build; the read it works on is live.
Can it hold a series?
In build, honestly labelled: every read already produces chapter summaries and key points — the compressed form designed to be carried forward — and a series relationship that carries them into the next book’s read is being built now. We would rather tell you it is coming than imply it is here.
A question we cannot answer yet
How well it reads your list. We have production figures and we have houses we can describe, but the only honest answer to “will it be right about our books” is to put one of your manuscripts through it and compare the result with what your own editors said about the same book.
That is why the ask on every page of this site is one manuscript rather than a meeting.
Put a manuscript through it
The fastest way to judge us is the product’s own: send one manuscript through the read and compare the result with your editors’ view of the same book. Write to us — a person reads every enquiry — and we will also send the technical specification: what the system does, how it is built, and what it does not yet have. A specification that contains only good news is a brochure.
publishers@authorslab.ai