Four artefacts, and what each is for.

The whole-book read: structure, story, character, pacing and theme, written as continuous prose rather than a scorecard. It is long — tens of thousands of characters for a full novel — because it is written to be read by an editor, not skimmed by a dashboard.

Who uses it: the commissioning or developmental editor, as the first full opinion on a manuscript, before any of their own time goes into it.

One per chapter, compressed deliberately: what happens, what changes, what is set up and what is paid off. They are the artefact that makes a book navigable to someone who has not read it yet.

Who uses it: everyone who needs to talk about the book without having read it — rights, sales, marketing copy, a second reader coming in cold. They are also the form the series feature carries into the next book’s read.

The compressed claims the read is built on, each tied to the place in the manuscript it came from. This is the artefact that makes the report arguable: an editor who disagrees can go to the passage rather than to the conclusion.

Who uses it: the editor interrogating the read, and anyone who has to defend or overturn a judgement about the book.

Prose-level and mechanical notes, each flag citing the place it was found. Each pass a title has been through is delivered as its own document, so a house can hand one to a freelancer without handing over the whole project. Passes are started with us for now, not from your workspace.

Nothing, until a person at your house sends it. The notes package leaves as a document from a named editor at the house — not as a message from us, and not automatically.

The author is your relationship. We do not acquire one with them by being in the middle of it.

The editor’s workbench, where notes are agreed and packaged, is in build. The reads it works on are live today.