Frequently asked questions

After you finish a fiction book, BookBud gives your whole manuscript a professional two-part edit from the Polish & Editorial Review card on the Write Story tab.

Analyze Manuscript is free and takes seconds — it scans the complete book for repeated phrases, chapters that open in similar ways, overused character gestures, AI-sounding stock phrasing, and pacing notes. It reads your book and reports; it never changes a word of it. On especially long manuscripts, the pacing/dialogue notes may only cover the opening chapters that fit in one free pass — you’ll see a note telling you exactly how much was read. The paid Editorial Review below always covers your entire book.

From there, one pass runs two stages, in this order, and you cannot run them separately. The Polish stage rewrites each chapter to vary sentence rhythm, openings, and word choice so the prose reads naturally — without changing your story. The Editorial Review stage then reads the entire manuscript for the things a style pass can’t catch: timeline and continuity errors, character-knowledge slips, motivation gaps, cause-and-effect problems, and plot points that need clarifying. It runs in the background, and when it finishes you get a continuity report listing each issue, the chapters involved, and a suggested fix.

Because the review is the second half of that single pass, the only way to get the continuity report is to let the Polish rewrite run first. If you want the findings without keeping the rewritten prose, see the next question — Undo Last Polish restores your text and leaves the report in place.

The Polish stage does rewrite your prose, and that is reversible. It is a line edit, not a rewrite of your story — plot, events, clues, character names, point of view, and the meaning of every dialogue exchange are preserved, and each chapter stays within about 15% of its original length. Every chapter’s previous version is saved automatically, so if you prefer your own wording you can click Undo Last Polish and the whole book reverts instantly to exactly the text you had.

The Editorial Review stage never edits your manuscript. It only reports the continuity and logic issues it finds, each with a suggested fix you can apply one at a time from the report, so you stay in full control of every change.

If you have hand-edited your chapters and want the continuity findings without keeping the rewritten prose: the Editorial Review is not a separate button — it only runs as the second half of the Polish pass, so the rewrite happens first either way. Run the pass, read the report, then click Undo Last Polish. Your chapters go back to your own wording and the continuity report stays available under View Editorial Review. You are still charged for the polish that ran, so budget for the full combined estimate shown before you confirm.

Analyzing your manuscript is free, including the editor’s notes on pacing, dialogue, and continuity.

The full pass has two parts, and you’ll see the exact combined estimate before you confirm:

• The Polish stage costs about 1 credit for every 2 characters of manuscript text (half the normal generation rate).
• The Editorial Review stage costs about 1 credit for every 3 characters, because it reads your whole book rather than rewriting it.

You’re only charged for work that actually completes — the polish for the chapters it polishes, and the review only if it finishes successfully.

The Editorial Review reads your entire novel the way a developmental editor would, looking for the story-consistency issues that are easy to miss when a book is written chapter by chapter:

• Timeline — events out of order, impossible durations, contradictory dates or days of the week
• Character knowledge — a character acting on something they couldn’t yet know, or forgetting what they learned
• Motivation — actions with no established reason, or reasons that contradict earlier behavior
• Continuity — physical or factual contradictions in names, objects, injuries, or who was present
• Cause and effect — setups that never pay off, or payoffs with no setup
• Plot clarity — points a careful reader would find confusing or unexplained

Each finding tells you the chapters involved, the specific conflict, and a concrete fix you can choose to make. Because it compares details across the whole book, it catches inconsistencies that only appear when two distant chapters disagree.

For findings where the exact text to change is clear and unambiguous, a Quick Fix button appears in the review — clicking it applies the correction to your chapter in one step. Most continuity and logic issues require a judgment call, so for those you'll see the affected chapters and a suggested fix to guide your own edit in the section editor. The Quick Fix step does not use any credits.

If you turn on Include verified academic citations on your project (it appears whenever you choose a citation-friendly tone such as Formal, Persuasive, Expository, Instructional, Journalistic, Scientific, Philosophical, Rhetorical, Empathetic, or Motivational and Inspirational), BookBud will write your book with real, sourced references — not invented ones.

Here is what happens behind the scenes:

1. Real papers, fetched first. Before BookBud writes each chapter, it searches the OpenAlex open academic database for peer-reviewed work relevant to that chapter's topic and pulls a short list of real papers (with title, authors, year, and DOI).
2. The AI may only cite from that list. Those papers are handed to the AI as the only sources it is allowed to cite. It cannot make anything up — if a claim isn't supported by one of the listed papers, it will write the sentence without a citation.
3. Used sparingly, where it counts. Citations are inserted only when a specific factual claim or research finding is materially strengthened by attribution — never for filler or general background. You should expect a handful of inline references per chapter, not a citation on every sentence.
4. One consolidated Citations chapter at the back. Every reference used anywhere in the book is collected, de-duplicated, and listed in a single chapter at the end of your book — author, year, title, and a clickable DOI link to the actual paper. No more references scattered through every section.
5. Inline links to the back chapter. Each inline reference (rendered as a small superscript like ^[3]) links directly to that source in the back-of-book Citations list, so readers can jump straight to the source.

Why this matters: earlier versions of BookBud generated citations using the AI alone, which sometimes produced plausible-looking references that didn't actually exist. The new flow guarantees every citation in your book points to a real, verifiable paper. The trade-off is that you may get fewer citations than the old system produced — but every one of them is real.

Tips:

• Pick the citations checkbox before you start generating chapters. It applies during writing, not as a post-processing step.
• If the topic is very niche or recent, the OpenAlex pool may be thin — BookBud will simply use fewer citations rather than invent any.
• Citations only appear on tones where they make sense. Choose any of the eligible tones above as one of your three project tones to enable the option.
• The Citations chapter is automatically placed at the very end of your book in EPUB, PDF, and Word exports.