Revising your book
Here's a hard truth every writer hits: after sixty thousand words you can't really see your own book anymore. You know it too well. Galley's revision tools are a fresh pair of eyes. Every one of them finds things and hands them to you. None of them rewrites your prose. What you do with what they turn up is entirely yours.
Read-through
Before you fix anything, read it. Read-through pours the whole manuscript into one continuous column, every chapter, end to end, with a faint rule at each seam, so you can read your book the way a reader will, in one sitting, instead of one chapter tab at a time. It's where you feel the pacing sag, hear a chapter open on the same beat as the last, and notice the prose change across a stretch you wrote months apart.
Open it from the Toolkit menu, next to Preview. It's a quiet reading surface: pick a text size and a light, sepia, or dark page, and a slim bar tracks how far through you are. It's read-only by design, this is for reading, not editing, so nothing you do here can change a word by accident.
Out at Lantern Rock the keeper kept the light, humming an old song against the wind, over work that no longer needed the tune.
Whatever the tide left, it left at his door first: a boot, a bottle, once a whole door with its hinges still on.
* * *
On the lowest neap of the year the harbour gave up its floor, and the town walked out onto it to see what the sea had been keeping.
CHAPTER TWO
A Letter Unsent
At Weirwater the lamps were lit by hand, and it was Mara Vale who lit them, in an order no one had written down and everyone kept.
The station had not sent a boat in nine days. She wrote it in the ledger the way she wrote everything, in a small level hand that gave nothing away.
Out at Lantern Rock the keeper kept the light, humming an old song against the wind, over work that no longer needed the tune.
At Weirwater the lamps were lit by hand, and it was Mara Vale who lit them, down at The Quiet Harbour before the neap.1
At Weirwater Station the lamps were not yet lit. Someone had left before the end of their watch.
* * *
The crossing that mattered was set down in the harbour ledger, in a level hand.
Read-through
The whole book
One scroll, front to back, read-only — the way a reader will meet it, not the way you wrote it.
Book-wide find & replace
Open it with Find ⌘F in the top bar, beside ⌘K, or just press ⌘F. Unlike your browser's find, this searches every chapter at once, so renaming a character or fixing a repeated typo is one search box instead of twenty-six.
- Find and replace across the whole book, or step match by match.
- Because a sweeping replace is exactly the thing you might regret, Galley snapshots the whole book first, so undoing it is one trip to version history away.
Overused words
Everyone has crutch words: "just", "really", "suddenly", some verb you reach for without noticing. The overused words tool counts yours, shows how often each turns up per thousand words, and points you to the chapter where it piles up most. It doesn't tell you to cut anything. It makes the habit visible, which is usually enough. Open it from the book's tools menu, next to export.
Your own fillers, counted — not a style rule. “Quiet” peaking in the chapter called The Station at Dusk is probably fine; “just” at 7.4 per thousand probably isn’t.
At Weirwater the lamps were lit by hand, and it was Mara Vale who lit them, down at The Quiet Harbour before the neap.1
At Weirwater Station the lamps were not yet lit. Someone had left before the end of their watch.
* * *
The crossing that mattered was set down in the harbour ledger, in a level hand.
Revision
“just” — 7.4 / 1,000
After sixty thousand words you can't see your own tics. The manuscript counts them for you.
Name consistency
This one saves real embarrassment. Name consistency catches the character whose name you spelled one way ninety times and slipped on once: a lone Sara among forty-one Sarahs, invisible to you and glaring to a reader. It draws on your cast and their aliases, your locations, and your glossary, then flags the near-matches that are almost certainly typos rather than real names.
Consistency sweep
This is the mechanical half of a copyedit, the pass a professional runs first and charges you for. Consistency sweep reads the whole book and flags four kinds of drift:
- British vs American spelling. A colour here and a color there, realise against realize. It tells you which way the book leans and lists the ones that break the pattern.
- Hyphenation. well-being in one chapter, wellbeing in the next.
- Typography. Straight quotes that slipped in from a paste, double spaces, a space before a comma, three dots where an ellipsis belongs, double hyphens standing in for a dash.
- Numbers. Small numbers set as digits where the trade would spell them out, offered as an advisory, since ages and years are fair exceptions.
Crucially, it leaves dialogue alone. A character who says "colour" is characterisation, not a mistake, so a spelling that appears inside quotation marks is noted as such rather than flagged as an error. And like every tool here, it finds and never fixes. It hands you the list, and you decide, with ⌘F to change any one across the book.
Book at a glance
Open the Stats panel from the status bar at the foot. It reads the shape of what you've written, not just the word counts. Every chapter's length is a row of bars, so a chapter that's accidentally twice as long as the rest, or a stub you meant to expand, jumps straight out. Alongside it, per chapter and for the whole book: average sentence length, the share of words that fall inside dialogue, the longest paragraph, and how many scene breaks a chapter carries. Live word counts and reading-time estimates sit with them.
None of it grades you. There's no target to hit and no red for "too long", because a novel isn't a word-count race, it's a shape you revise. The numbers just make the shape visible, the same way a printed proof makes a layout visible: you see the saggy middle and the all-dialogue chapter, and you decide what, if anything, they mean.
Tracking what's finished
As you work through the manuscript, nudge each chapter along its stages with a click:
DraftRevisedFinal
Your dashboard turns those chips into a progress bar, giving you an honest map of how much is truly done versus how much just feels done. See Chapters & structure.
Going back to an earlier draft
Every chapter keeps a history of past versions: a snapshot each day, plus one whenever you snapshot by hand, move a chapter to a new stage, or make a big change like a book-wide replace. If a revision goes sideways, open the Version history panel and:
- Hit Compare on any version to see exactly what changed between it and your current text: added words highlighted, removed ones struck through.
- Restore the one you want. Your current text is snapshotted first, so you can't lose it either way.
Your own snapshots and milestones are kept indefinitely; only the routine daily ones are thinned over time. There's more in The editor.