#016: How I'm Editing a 45,000 Word Manuscript with AI
Yes, you can actually have Claude read your entire book manuscript and provide feedback. It's unreal.
In last week’s essay, I wrote about how I finished a manuscript for Courage in the Current. This is an upcoming allegorical fantasy novel which I intend to publish this year.
But something has been weighing on me; I want to get feedback before I publish it, yet it’s totally painful to ask for help from people these days. There are a few reasons for this;
Reading an entire manuscript is more than a quick favor and people are busy. I mean, busier than I’ve ever seen. The increasing costs of living are creating an economy where everyone has lost any margin. This makes me pause before asking anyone to spend 5-10 hours to give my manuscript a read and provide thoughtful feedback.
Fiverr and other services are shady. I’m personally 0 for 3 on using Fiverr. Each project I requested was a bust, either due to the provider not actually delivering what they said they would, lying about their pricing, or simply using AI to get things done that I could have. I’m done with Fiverr.
Editing consultants aren’t adding much value. I had a conversation with a local consultant about book services, and I kept asking myself, “So what is it that you actually do again?” All of the services he listed sounded to me like he was using AI and then feeding me back an AI-generated report.
I will say, a good friend of mine who is also an author is reviewing and providing feedback. I am very grateful for that, and I don’t want to make it seem like, “people are useless.” That’s not true. There are good people in my life and one is currently reviewing the manuscript.
But still, I feel bad asking for favors. That’s when it dawned on me. I use AI tools for six+ hours a day for work tasks, so the light bulb went off. I decided to put Claude to the task, which can take over your browser now, and can read documents, and add comments into Google Docs. Perfect!
Here’s a video I recorded to capture my experience and share how you can do it as well.
While Claude went to task, it couldn’t figure out how to add comments. After some prompting and reorienting, it figured out how to get comments in Google Docs working. Now my manuscript is receiving expert guidance from an LLM that knows language at its core. Problem solved!
The only issue I’ve run into so far is that Claude’s usage limits are maddening. Simply awful. Even as a paid users, I can only squeeze 5-10 prompts in Sonnet, and 3 prompts out of Opus. It’s working well with Haiku 4.5, but it’s not as effective as Sonnet for this job. So I have to wait several hours between coding intervals.
Also, Claude can get stuck and the Chrome extension can be finicky. So it’s not perfect, but still, if you think about the process of waiting for and paying human editors, it’s still faster and cheaper. And I’m learning to be more precise in my prompts to avoid Claude burning useless tokens.
So there it is, AI has become my expert editor and I’m happy with it so far. Even better, I don’t need anyone’s editing services and I’ll never have to use a stranger on Fiverr again. Yet not matter how good AI gets, I’m still most keen to hear what my friend’s human feedback is.
Disclaimer: This article is 100% human-generated.