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Writing Guides

Learn how to use Bookshaper effectively and apply proven craft strategies to strengthen your writing.

Reading Your Manuscript ↓Feature Workflows ↓Craft Strategies ↓Documentation →

Reading Your Manuscript

What to look for in your own prose — dialogue balance, sentence variety, filter words, POV — and how to act on what you find.

Show vs. Tell

When to dramatize and when to summarize

Dialogue & Narration Balance

What your dialogue ratio reveals about your manuscript

Tension & Pacing

Reading your manuscript's dramatic shape

POV Consistency

Maintaining point-of-view discipline across your manuscript

Reading Pacing Uniformity

Understanding your manuscript's rhythm and flow

Chapter Balance & Scene Length

What uneven chapters and extreme scene lengths signal

Continuity & Timeline

Catching contradictions before your readers do

Timeline & Chronology

The order events happen, not the order you tell them

Narrative Voice

Consistency is not the goal — intentionality is

Passive Voice

When it weakens your prose and when it serves your story

Filter Words & Adverbs

Removing the invisible barriers between reader and story

Dialogue Tags & Attribution

The invisible mechanics of effective dialogue

Sentence Variety

Why monotonous patterns lose readers and how to fix them

Clichés & Purple Prose

Finding fresh language without overwriting

Feature Workflows

Step-by-step walkthroughs of Bookshaper's features. Learn how to use each tool effectively and build a systematic revision process.

How to Outline in Bookshaper

Build your structure in Outline or Beat Cards; let the AI read it back as Beats

Proofread Mode Deep Dive

Grammar and style analysis for polished prose

Reading Analyze

The two measured groups, the Copy Editor's Read, and where each finding leads

Character Presence & Arcs

Tracking characters across your manuscript

The Story Bible

What the analysis finds in your story world, and where it goes

Marketing Blurb Generator

Creating and refining back-cover copy and taglines

Trope Tags

Deriving discoverability tropes from your manuscript

Cover Studio

Designing front, back, and spine covers with AI-generated or hand-built art

Pull Quotes

Pull-quote image cards in your book's own typography

The Submission Kit

Query letters, synopses, and author bios built from the book you already analyzed

Pitch One-Sheet

A one-page PDF sales sheet built from assets you already have

Reader Magnets

Bonus content that looks like it belongs to the book

Preserved Lines

Author-controlled line breaks that survive every export

Footnotes and Endnotes

Bottom-of-page print footnotes, tap-to-pop ebook notes, native Word footnotes

Text Messages, Callouts, and Written Notes

Genre-staple content blocks that render beautifully in every format

Printing and Saving PDFs

Print any planning view — or save it as a PDF — as a clean document

Print-Ready Check

Catch and fix the page-layout flaws that make a book look self-published

Trim Sizes and Margins

Pick the right book size and let the margin advisory keep your gutter print-safe

Accessible EPUB Export

Ship a born-accessible ebook that clears the EU Accessibility Act bar

Craft Strategies

Holistic approaches to revision that tie together multiple insights and features into actionable strategies for improving your manuscript.

The Revision Workflow

A complete start-to-finish revision process

Genre-Specific Benchmarks

What 'good' looks like across genres

Common Manuscript Problems

The most frequent issues and how to fix them

Ready to finish your book?

Put these guides into practice in Bookshaper.

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Bookshaper uses AI for proofreading, revision, line editing, expansion, dialogue analysis, and select generation features (such as back-cover blurbs and cover concepts). Your manuscripts are stored locally. We do not authorize AI providers to train on your manuscripts, and we configure available no-retention controls on every request; because these features run on third-party AI platforms, this protection relies on each provider honoring its default API terms.

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