Book editing is one of those high-value skills that takes a lifetime to acquire. But basic proofreading and grammar checkers have been around for awhile. We think AI editing tools are a big opportunity for indie authors, so they can quickly and cheaply fix typos and punctuation mistakes, and focus on delivering the best version of their story.

To that end, we’re working on some editing and proofreading tools of our own.
Below you should see a simple critique chatbot so you can add in your text and get some feedback. It’s basic but we’ll update it with something better soon (more details on that down below!)

 

We’ve set up a pretty powerful tool over on ghostthewriter.com – sign up for some free credits and you’ll be able to put in a chapter for instant feedback; and not the usual generic AI fluff. Real, useful writing critique based on our decades of experience (we’ve just trained the model to make a cheap clone of ourselves. Not quite the same… but pretty close).

Try it out: Rate My Prose

 

We also have a VERY ambitious tool called “WordWraith” – you can paste in a chapter and then use our highly-trained AI editor to fix and improve your content. It’s unique because it’s designed for writing and literature.

• AI Editing and proofreading
• Expand, improve, add descriptive detail, drama, show don’t tell – choose what you need and test out different things.
• Choose a famous author – this won’t copy their style exactly, but combined with the other editing choices will get closer to the ideal writing of your target genre.
• Tools to change POV from third to first or tense from past to present; to iron out those stubborn random passages that need to be redone.
  
  

This is something new we’re working on, I’ll post the link when it’s ready!

Many authors don’t need an AI writing tool to write the book for them; they just want simple editing and proofreading tools that will keep their unique style and voice, without changing too much of their story.

So we’ve developed a tool that just has 3 core levels

🖋 PhantomFix – The Spectral Editor for Writers Who Want Brutal Honesty & Real Improvement

Editing is hard. Finding real feedback is even harder. Critique groups are a mess of egos. Friends won’t tell you the truth. And professional editors? They cost a fortune.

That’s where PhantomFix comes in—your ghostly, AI-powered editor that slices through your manuscript, exposing weaknesses, fixing mistakes, and refining your prose while keeping your voice intact.

Choose your level of editing, and let the wraith whisper through your words.

👻 Three Levels of Editing: How Deep Do You Dare Go?

1. Phantom Polish (Proofreading – Light Editing)

👁 “Just a touch.” A delicate, spectral sweep that cleans up grammar, punctuation, and typos without changing your writing style. Perfect for final drafts before submission.

💀 Fixes:
✔ Punctuation, grammar, and clarity issues
✔ Awkward sentence structure
✔ Minor readability improvements

2. Ethereal Edit (Copy-Editing – Medium Editing)

🖤 “A whisper through the pages.” A deeper refinement that smooths flow, pacing, and word choice while keeping your unique voice intact.

💀 Fixes:
✔ Sentence structure and awkward phrasing
✔ Clarity and coherence issues
✔ Overuse of filler words, passive voice, and redundancy

3. Wraith Revision (Developmental Editing – Heavy Editing)

⚰️ “This is where your manuscript is reborn.” A bold, transformative edit that restructures sentences, tightens flow, and enhances clarity while respecting your vision. This is the deep cut—for writers who want real improvement.

💀 Fixes:
✔ Structural issues and pacing problems
✔ Weak or inconsistent character voice
✔ Overwritten or underdeveloped sections
✔ Sentence rewrites for maximum impact

Classic children’s book author Roald Dahl wrote a short story in 1953 called the The Great Automatic Grammatizator. It was dystopian fiction at its finest, ending with the earnest plea “give us the strength to let our children starve!”

But the truth is, AI writing tools – while scary for creatives – also allow authors to publish better books at a lower cost for entry. We like the name so maybe we’ll use it for our own tool: a 100% free, instant grammar checker and proofreader. It’s not impossible, and that’s the kind of challenge we can get behind.

ChatGPT vs Claude for Book Editing

Can’t you just do this yourself? Sure! Except… it’s very hard to get editing tools like Claude or ChatGPT to just fix the mistakes without rewriting everything or changing too much. AI tools are overly dramatic and tend to summarize or omit key details.

We’ve spend hundreds of hours experimenting with prompts that actually work; and our pricing is low enough that it’ll cost less than $50 to edit your book – way cheaper than Fiverr with better results.

Ideally, we hope the cost for running AI tools like this will drop low enough that we can giveaway free critiques and proofreading tools on this site so you can just visit us to DIY your book editing (even if you’re hiring an editor, you’ll save everybody a lot of time to turn in a very clean manuscript so we can focus on the big picture stuff instead of manually fixing thousands of minor punctuation or grammar mistakes).

ProwritingAid, Quillbot and Grammarly

Personally, I used Grammarly for line-edits and proofreading inside of Microsoft Word. Or at least I used to. I hate the new universal popup; I also hate Copilot’s popup that’s installed on Windows. But this is the future: you will have AI tools built into every writing tool you use, online or offline.

And it makes sense: Grammarly and ProwritingAid are huge but unnecessary business expenses, and better quality revision and edits are now easy for major companies to provide. But you have to go through one by one to check every single change, and make a conscious decision about which commas to leave or remove, so all that can take time.

I’m looking for a dump-and-click, instant proofreading tool that will clean up a manuscript so I can start editing it, without getting distracted by all the mistakes. In my own editing process (for my personal books), I’ve been experimenting with chatgpt4.5 and Claude. First I train it in my own style, give it very specific and long prompts, build a custom project folder with even more instruction… but all that set-up is worth it to get very good, clean results.

As an alternative to those tools, for about the same price, I’ve built tools that have all the prompts built in so they just work.

AI generated vs AI assisted writing

KPD and other writing platforms have mostly said they don’t mind AI content, but it needs to be disclosed, so when you publish, you’d choose which tools you used and how much of your content was AI written. If you used Grammarly or ProwritingAid just to edit mistakes, you may not need to disclose it at all; if you used it for more polishing and revision (or for brainstorming, outlines or character name generators), you may want to pick “AI assisted”.

These are just for Amazon; there is no penalty and it won’t show on your book’s sales page or anything. You don’t need to tell people how much AI you used – it’s still your story. If you’re worried about AI checkers (being “found out” that you used AI) – they don’t really work. But we are thinking of adding some kind of “HUMANIZER” to rewrite your AI content so it passes for human.

This probably isn’t necessary for a book. For blog articles however, depending one your niche and genre, you might want to use more advanced prompts that pass AI checkers – Google has said they don’t mind, and AI is very good at making very useful content… it just lacks a creative voice.

In our testing, we can write amazingly-human sounding articles that pass AI detectors as 100% human. But all that really matters is whether *actual* breathing humans appreciate, engage with or enjoy the writing content you’re offering.

Gramerly Grammer

I was surprised, though I shouldn’t have been, to learn that over 100,000 people a month search for terms like “gramerly” and “grammer” – but of course they do. The people most likely to search for terms like that have heard about grammar but maybe don’t know how to spell it. It’s a stupid word anyway, English sucks.

We have some huge articles on common grammar mistakes (we even developed a book called the “Zombie Guide to English Grammar”!) but the reality is, you may never need to learn spelling and grammar and punctuation anymore, because the robots are smart enough to fix it for you. So go ahead and dump your ideas and worldbuilding and get it cleaned up with AI tools.

Learning to actually write great books is about much more than grammar and proofreading, so storycraft is the actual skillset you want to focus on developing. We have tons of resources for that stuff too!