How It Works
Two workflows, one project. Edit a finished manuscript through four professional stages, or write new chapters with Assist — the AI learns your voice before it suggests a word. Both use the same models trusted by leading publishers.
Where are you in your book?
Pick the scenario that fits, and we'll tell you which workflow applies. Both live in the same project — you don't have to choose permanently.
Still drafting
You're partway through a book and need help writing the next chapter.
Use Assist →
Finished manuscript
Your book is written and you want it polished by an AI editor that reads every chapter.
Run the editing pipeline →
Doing both
You'll write the rest with Assist, then polish the whole book with the editing pipeline.
See how they combine →
Writing New Chapters with Assist
Assist helps you plan and draft the chapters you haven't written yet — but you're the author at every step. Assist proposes, you decide, you edit, you repeat. It reads your existing manuscript, learns your voice, and generates chapter drafts into a staging area — nothing touches your manuscript until you review and accept it. Expect to iterate: regenerate plans if none fit, discard drafts that miss the mark, re-score your own edits, and keep going until a chapter feels right. The four-step loop below is designed to go around more than once.
1. Plan
The Forward Planner reads your Story Brain (characters, open threads, beats) and proposes three distinct directions for the next chapter. You pick the one that matches your vision — or, if none of them do, regenerate with a sharper "direction" note. Options are cheap. Once you pick, the planner breaks your choice into a scene-by-scene beat plan you can tweak before drafting.
2. Draft
The style enforcer writes the chapter from your beat plan, scores each pass against your voice fingerprint, and rewrites up to three times trying to hit an 80% match. You watch live progress ("Iteration 2 — 74% style match") and can safely leave the page — the draft keeps writing in the background. Typical time: 1-3 minutes. If the draft's direction doesn't feel right when you read it, there's no commitment at this stage — discard and run again with a different plan or tighter guidance.
3. Review in Staging
Drafts land in Staging, not your manuscript — this is where the creative back-and-forth actually happens. Read the draft, edit in place to shape the prose, re-score your edits to see how your changes moved the voice match, and iterate until a version feels right. Discard-and-retry is a normal tool here, not a failure mode. Each card shows whether the AI's draft hit the voice target (green "Voice target met") or not (yellow "Best of 3 attempts"), so you know how much shaping it likely needs going in.
4. Accept into manuscript
Accept inserts the draft (with your edits baked in) at the right position in your book and records a provenance entry so AI-assisted passages are excluded from future style-fingerprint extractions. Your fingerprint keeps reflecting your writing, not the AI's. From there, loop back to step 1 for the next chapter — the manuscript grows from your decisions, one chapter at a time.
Full walkthrough: see the Writing with Assist section in the Help Center.
The Editing Pipeline
When your manuscript is done — whether you drafted it with Assist, wrote it in Word, or pasted it in — the editing pipeline takes it through up to four professional editing stages. Each stage targets a different layer of your writing. Run all four, or toggle individual stages on and off.
Running the pipeline
Upload
Drop in your manuscript as .docx, .txt, or .md. Chapters are detected automatically — no special formatting required.
Configure
Choose which editing stages to run. See cost and time estimates upfront. Toggle stages on or off — run the full pipeline or just what you need.
Download
Watch progress in real time. When it's done, download your edited manuscript and per-stage outputs. Re-run anytime.
The four stages
1. Pre-Edit Assessment
A diagnostic pass that reads every chapter and produces a detailed quality report — no rewrites. Flags structural issues, pacing problems, and areas that need attention. Think of it as your editor's first read-through notes.
2. Developmental Edit
The big-picture edit. Rewrites for structure, pacing, character arcs, plot consistency, and narrative tension. Chapters are processed in batches so the AI can hold context across scenes.
3. Line Edit
Sentence-level refinement. Sharpens voice, fixes dialogue rhythm, eliminates AI-tells and cliches, and tightens prose. Uses custom rules to catch the patterns that make AI-assisted writing feel generic.
4. Copy Edit
The final polish. Catches grammar, spelling, punctuation, and consistency errors. Ensures character names, places, and details stay consistent across chapters.
Using Assist and the Pipeline Together
Most authors who use both features do so in that order: Assist first while the book is being written, then the editing pipeline once the manuscript is complete. Here's what that looks like inside one project.
While you're still writing, use Assist
Extract your style fingerprint once, run the Story Brain analysis, and use the Forward Planner + chapter drafter to write new chapters over days, weeks, or months. Each accepted draft is recorded with provenance so your fingerprint stays honest. Re-run the Brain analysis occasionally as the manuscript grows.
When the manuscript is complete, run the editing pipeline
From the same project, switch to the editing side. Run the pipeline on the finished manuscript. The four stages don't know or care which passages were Assist-drafted and which you wrote from scratch — they edit the whole book for structure, pacing, sentence-level prose, and final polish.
Want to mix order? You can.
Nothing forces a strict sequence. You can run a pre-edit assessment on an early draft to diagnose structural issues, go back to Assist to rework specific chapters, then run the full pipeline later. Both workflows share the same manuscript under the hood.
Time & Cost
Estimates are shown before you run. You only pay for the AI API calls — we don't mark them up.
| Manuscript Size | Time (all 4 stages) | Estimated Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Short novel (30K words) | ~8 min | ~$5 |
| Standard novel (50K words) | ~14 min | ~$8 |
| Full novel (80K words) | ~22 min | ~$13 |
| Epic (120K+ words) | ~35 min | ~$19 |
Cost estimates are based on real-world edit data and Anthropic direct pricing (BYOK). Actual costs vary by manuscript complexity and caching. Running fewer stages reduces both time and cost proportionally.
Your Manuscript Is Safe
Your API key, your account
BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) means your manuscript goes directly to your Anthropic or OpenRouter account. We never see your API traffic.
No training on your work
Anthropic's API does not use your data for model training. Your unpublished manuscript stays unpublished.
Encrypted key storage
API keys are encrypted at rest. Session tokens are signed. No plaintext secrets stored.
Delete anytime
Your projects and manuscripts can be deleted from the dashboard. When you delete a project, all files are removed from the server.
Frequently Asked Questions
How is Cherry Edits different from ChatGPT, Claude, or Sudowrite?
What happens to my manuscript — do you store it or train on it?
What's the difference between "Edit" and "Assist" — do I need both?
How does Assist actually learn my voice?
How do you prevent the usual AI-slop problems (head-hopping, POV drift, "not X, not Y, not Z" rhythms)?
What if my book has unusual POV or tense (second person, dual POV, present tense)?
What if the AI produces something I hate?
What does BYOK cost me compared to a managed service?
What if a job crashes or I hit a rate limit?
Can I work on a series, or on a manuscript I haven't finished yet?
No credit card required for BYOK plans.