Revising your book

After sixty thousand words, you know your book too well to see its mistakes. Galley's revision tools find things for you to look at. None of them rewrite your prose, and what you do with what they find is up to you.

Read-through

Read-through shows your whole manuscript as one continuous page, every chapter from start to finish, with a thin line between chapters. You can read it the way a reader will, in one go, instead of one chapter at a time. It's a good way to notice where the pacing drags, when two chapters start the same way, or when your writing changes between parts you wrote months apart.

Open it from the Toolkit menu, next to Preview. You can pick a text size and a light, sepia or dark page, and a bar at the top shows how far through you are. You can't edit in read-through, so you can't change anything by accident.

Read aloud

Hearing your book read back is the oldest self-editing trick there is, because your ear catches the clunky sentence your eye skips. In read-through, press Read aloud and Galley reads from the first paragraph on your screen, marking each word as it goes and scrolling with it. It stops for a beat at every scene break instead of reading the ornament out.

The voice is one your computer already has, so nothing is sent anywhere and the quality depends on your machine. On a Mac the good ones are the Premium and Enhanced voices, which you download in System Settings under Accessibility, Spoken Content. Windows and Chrome have their own. Galley lists the voices that speak your book's language and puts the better ones first.

Book-wide find & replace

Open it with Find ⌘F in the top bar, next to ⌘K, or press ⌘F. Unlike your browser's find, it searches every chapter at once, so you can rename a character or fix a typo everywhere with one search.

• Replace across the whole book at once, or go through the matches one by one.
• Galley takes a snapshot of the whole book first, so if you change your mind, you can undo it from version history.

Overused words

Everyone has words they use too much, like "just", "really", "suddenly", or a verb they don't notice repeating. The overused words tool counts yours, shows how often each one comes up per thousand words, and shows which chapter uses it most. It doesn't tell you to cut anything. Seeing the numbers is usually enough. Open it from the book's tools menu, next to export.

Name consistency

Name consistency finds names you've spelled differently, like one Sara among forty-one Sarahs. You probably won't notice it, but a reader will. It checks your characters and their aliases, your locations and your glossary, and flags names that are close enough to be typos. Names you tag with @ are spelled from the character page, so they don't drift.

Consistency sweep

This does the first, mechanical part of a copyedit, which you'd usually pay a copyeditor for. Consistency sweep reads the whole book and flags four kinds of inconsistency:

• British vs American spelling. colour in one place and color in another, or realise and realize. It tells you which spelling the book mostly uses and lists the ones that don't match.
• Hyphenation. well-being in one chapter and wellbeing in the next.
• Typography. Straight quotes from pasted text, double spaces, a space before a comma, three dots instead of an ellipsis, and double hyphens instead of a dash.
• Numbers. Small numbers written as digits where publishers usually spell them out. This one is only a suggestion, since ages and years are often written as digits.

It ignores dialogue. If a character says "colour" in an American book, that's how they talk, so spellings inside quotation marks are noted but not flagged as mistakes. It doesn't fix anything either. It gives you the list, and you can use ⌘F to change any of them across the book.

Loose threads

Loose threads reads your story bible against your chapters and lists the places where they stop agreeing. Open it from the Toolkit menu. On a draft of Pride and Prejudice it might show:

• Characters who stop appearing. Wickham is in nine chapters and last named in chapter 14 of 40.
• Long absences. Mr Collins isn't named for eleven chapters in the middle.
• Timeline events the chapter doesn't mention. The ball is filed against chapter 3, and chapter 3 never names Mr Darcy.
• Point of view. Who narrates how many chapters, and how far apart they get, once you've set a point of view on your chapters.
• Characters named once, or never. Someone in your story bible who never made it into the prose.

None of these is called a mistake. Wickham may have left for good, and the ball may be told from somewhere else. It puts them on one screen, and every line links to the chapter so you can go and look.

Book at a glance

Open the Stats panel from the status bar at the bottom. It shows the shape of your book as well as the word counts. Each chapter's length is shown as a bar, so you can easily spot a chapter that's twice as long as the others, or a short one you meant to finish. For each chapter and for the whole book, it also shows average sentence length, how much of the text is dialogue, the longest paragraph, and the number of scene breaks. Word counts and reading time are shown there too.

None of it is a score. There are no targets and nothing turns red for being too long. The numbers show you things like a slow middle or a chapter that's all dialogue, and you decide whether they need changing.

Who speaks

Under the book figures, Stats shows how the dialogue is shared out between your characters, for the chapter you're in and for the whole book, and which characters are in this chapter without saying a word.

Working out who said a line is a guess for any software, so Galley keeps to one rule you can check. A paragraph's dialogue goes to the one character it names outside the quotes. "Come in," said Elizabeth is Elizabeth's. A paragraph that names nobody, or names two people, isn't counted, and the panel tells you how much of the book's dialogue that left out.

Tracking what's finished

As you revise, move each chapter to the next stage with a click:

DraftRevisedFinal

Your dashboard turns these into a progress bar, so you can see how much of the book is actually finished. 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 take a snapshot yourself, move a chapter to a new stage, or make a big change like a book-wide replace. If a revision doesn't work out, open the Version history panel and:

• Click Compare on any version to see what changed between it and your current text. Added words are highlighted and removed ones are crossed out.
• Restore the version you want. Galley takes a snapshot of your current text first, so you don't lose that either.

To see the whole book against an old draft, mark a draft milestone from the Toolkit menu when a draft is done. Later, press Compare with now on it. You get the word count then and now, and every chapter marked changed, new, cut or untouched, with how many of its paragraphs are new or rewritten. Click a chapter to open it with its history beside it.

Snapshots you take yourself and milestones are kept forever. Only the daily ones are thinned out over time. There's more in The editor, and a step-by-step in go back to an earlier version.