The tool reads five hundred words. These are read by a person.
The assessment tool is honest about what it is: fixed questions, asked in the order an editor asks them, answered by software in about a minute. It is genuinely useful on an opening, and the first part of it is free. What it cannot tell you is that your middle sags, because it has never seen your middle.
There are two ways to have a person read instead.
First Fifty Pages
An editor reads your first fifty pages and writes back properly: what is working, what is going wrong in the prose itself rather than in the outline, and the two or three things worth fixing before you send the book anywhere.
For most writers this is enough. Fifty pages is where the problems that sink a submission actually live — an opening that starts too early, a voice that has not settled yet, a chapter arranging furniture while the reader waits for something to happen. You do not need the whole book read to find those.
Fifty pages is about the first 12,500 words. We go by word count rather than your formatting, so nobody loses pages to a margin setting.
The Reader’s Report
The whole manuscript, read and written up. A reader’s report is what a publisher’s reader writes when deciding whether to acquire a book. This is the same document, written for you instead of about you.
You get the five dimensions you already have numbers for — hook, voice, pacing, structure, publishing path — applied across the entire book rather than the opening, so you can set the two side by side and see whether your first pages are representative or the outlier. Then the structural problems in the order they are worth fixing, and a straight answer on whether this is a book to query agents with.
Up to 100,000 words. Longer books add $200 per further 25,000.
If you have bought a $49 assessment, it comes off either price — whenever you bought it, and it does not expire.
What neither of these is
Neither is a copyedit. Neither will fix your commas, and neither comes back with your manuscript marked up line by line. That is a developmental edit — a different engagement, more work, and a higher price. If that is what you want, say so when you write and we will talk about it directly.
And neither is a promise about agents. Nobody can sell you that, and you should be wary of anyone who tries. What you are buying is a clear-eyed read and a plan, which is the part that responds to work.
Who this is for
It is for the writer who has a finished draft, has revised it more times than they can count, and can no longer tell what is on the page from what is still only in their head. That is the ordinary condition of having lived with a manuscript for a long time, not a failure of judgment, and it is not something another pass through your own draft will fix.
It is also for the writer who has had form rejections with no reasons attached, and would like one honest answer instead of twelve silences.
Common questions
How is this different from the free assessment?
A person reads it. The tool scores 500 words against a fixed rubric in about a minute; an editor reads fifty pages, or the whole book, and writes to you about your particular problem in your particular manuscript. The tool is a good way to find out whether it is worth paying anyone. This is the paying-someone part.
Who is the editor?
A working editor at Tin House Press, reading your manuscript directly. Not software, and not a template with your title dropped into it.
What do you need from me?
The manuscript as a Word document or PDF, and one or two sentences about where you are with it — whether you are about to query, about to self-publish, or genuinely unsure. That last answer changes what is worth telling you.
What if you tell me it does not work?
Then we tell you, and we tell you why, and we tell you what we would do about it. A report that finds nothing wrong is not worth $300. You are not paying for reassurance, and if reassurance is what you want this is the wrong purchase — that is worth saying plainly before you spend the money rather than after.
Do you publish books?
Tin House Press offers editorial, design and publishing support to authors. We do not acquire manuscripts, and buying a read here is not a submission to anyone.
Are you Tin House, the literary magazine?
No. Tin House Press is not affiliated with Tin House (tinhouse.com) or Tin House Workshops, and we do not accept manuscript submissions or queries for publication. People arrive here looking for them regularly, so it is worth saying clearly.
Starting
Write and tell us which one you want, roughly how long the book is, and where you are with it. The buttons above open an email with those questions already in it. We will confirm the price and when we can start before you pay anything.
Not ready for a person yet? Run the free assessment first — it takes about a minute and costs nothing.
