The method, plainly

How Casover works with AI.

Casover uses AI to do the reading and the analysis. A person directs it, judges what comes back and decides what reaches you. This page sets out what that means in practice, including the parts it does not give you.

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Manuscript Review

A human editor reads your book. That work can take weeks or months and can cost upwards of a thousand pounds for a novel at professional rates. Or the reading can be done by AI, directed and judged by a person. It costs a fraction of a full human read and applies the same method from first page to last.

Neither is better in every case. They are different trades.

Casover chose AI-assisted review deliberately. We explain the method openly so that you can decide whether it is right for your book before you commission anything.

The reading and the analysis

What the AI does.

Reads the complete manuscript

The whole book, supplied as a Word file or a Google Doc. Not a sample and not the first three chapters. We will not work from a scan, because character recognition guesses at words and its guesses are indistinguishable from your own mistakes.

Locates and quotes every finding

Each one is tagged to a chapter and paragraph and carries ten to twenty-five words quoted from your text. A finding without a location and a quotation does not go in the report.

Checks the book against itself

Continuity, chronology, contradictions, names, places and repetition, across the whole manuscript rather than chapter by chapter. Where two passages contradict each other, both are quoted, so the choice is yours to make.

Reports patterns, not instances

Ten to fifteen recurring habits in sentence construction, punctuation and dialogue, reported as patterns rather than as a list of every instance. This is not a proofread and does not pretend to be one.

Marks its own opinions

A continuity error is an observation. Whether an ending satisfies is a judgement. Every judgement is marked where it appears and then gathered into a list at the end, so you can see which parts of the report are somebody's view rather than a fact about your book.

Said plainly

What we do not do.

Nobody reads your manuscript

Not Steve, not an editor. The reading is done by the AI. Steve reads the reports it produces, carefully and sceptically, but he does not read your book.

Findings are judged, not re-checked

A finding is assessed on whether it is coherent, supported and consistent with everything else in the report. It is not confirmed by going back to the passage.

Views on voice come from the analysis

Whether an ending lands, whether a character convinces, whether a reader would keep going. You get a considered view, and it is often a good one. It is not a human reader's experience of your book, and you should weigh it as what it is.

You know your intent, we do not

What looks like an error may be exactly what you meant. Where a recommendation conflicts with your intention, your intention wins. It is your book.

Proofreading is automated, then reviewed

It handles spelling, grammar, punctuation and consistency well, and it improves month by month. It is less reliable on correctly spelled wrong words, on names, and on mistakes that read as perfectly good sentences.

The judgement, and the name on it

What a person does.

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Sets the brief: genre, readership, the author's own synopsis, and anything the author has said they will not change

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Reads the whole report end to end, and reads it again before it goes to you

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Goes first to the marked judgements, because that is where the report is guessing

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Takes out anything not supported by a located quotation from your text

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Signs it

That person is Steve Castledine. Nothing reaches you that he has not read, questioned and stood behind.

Before print

Every book benefits from one more reader.

Publishers proofread the final typeset pages as a separate stage, and they give that job to someone who has not seen the book before. That is not a comment on the work that came earlier. It is because fresh eyes catch what familiar eyes have stopped seeing, and because print is permanent in a way that a file is not.

We recommend you do the same, whoever did the proofreading. A reader, a fellow author, someone in your own network, or a professional if you would rather. It is the cheapest insurance in publishing, and it is standard practice rather than a precaution.

Yours to make your own

Material we draft for your book.

This is separate work, run on the manuscript alongside the analysis rather than produced by it. Some of what you receive is drafted by AI and is meant to end up in or on the finished book: the back cover synopsis and the publisher's foreword among them. They come to you as drafts, for you to rework in your own voice. That matters twice over. It reads better, because you write like you and nothing else does. And Amazon asks you to declare AI-generated content when you upload a book, so text you have made your own is a different thing from text supplied ready-made. We will always tell you which material was drafted this way.

Why we tell you this

Most of the industry does this. Very little of it says so.

We would rather be judged on a method we have described than found out using one we have not. If, having read this, you would rather have a human being read your manuscript, that is a perfectly reasonable choice. Tell us. We will say so plainly and point you towards people who do that work.

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Manuscript Review

Casover Publishing

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Practical, evidence-led support for complete manuscripts, book launches and already-published books. You keep control of the rights, accounts, files, readership and royalties.

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Casover Publishing is a trading name of Draft2Book LLP, a limited liability partnership registered in England and Wales, partnership number OC455633. Registered office: Unit C5, Welland Business Park, Valley Way, Market Harborough, LE16 7PS, United Kingdom.