Free manuscript audit — check your DOCX before formatting
Drop your DOCX, get a readiness score in seconds
Drop a Word manuscript, our deterministic auditor flags heading-style issues, missing chapter breaks, metadata gaps, and KDP-readiness flags in seconds. Free, no AI cost, no payment, no card. Get a 0–100 score plus every finding with a specific fix.
Built for self-published authors heading for Amazon KDP, Apple Books, Kobo who want to know whether their manuscript will format cleanly before spending money on it. The same engine that powers our £9.99 / £49 Ebook Designer — but the diagnostic stage, free.
- Freeno payment, no card
- 0 AI costdeterministic stack only
- 1–3 sectypical audit time
- PDF reportemailed for keeping
How it works
The flow should be simple enough to use quickly and structured enough to produce a useful publishing decision.
Drop your DOCX
Microsoft Word manuscripts only, up to 50 MB. Your file is parsed in memory and discarded — never stored.
Tell us your email
We email a copy of the report so you can save and share it. No spam. Unsubscribe at any time.
Get a scored report
0–100 readiness score, plus every finding flagged by severity (Critical / Important / Worth checking / Heads-up) with recommended fixes.
Format with confidence
Use the audit to fix issues in Word, then format with our £9.99 Instant Formatter or £49 AI Ebook Designer. Same engine, just transparent now.
FAQ
Frequently asked
What does the manuscript audit actually check?
We run a deterministic stack: DOCX core metadata, content-inferred title/author, Word heading detection (Heading 1, Heading 2, plus non-standard styles like Header1/BookHeading that frequently break ebook formatters), chapter detection (Tier 1 parser + Tier 2 heading-topology heuristics), word count, image count, and KDP-readiness signals like placeholder author names. Every finding includes a specific recommendation you can act on in Word.
Is the audit really free?
Yes — fully free. The audit runs deterministic Node.js code only, no AI/LLM calls. We're giving the audit away because authors who see exactly what's wrong with their manuscript convert better when they later want it formatted. There's no card capture and no upsell during the audit.
Why do you need my email?
We email you a copy of the audit report (HTML in your inbox, plus a plain-text fallback) so you can save it, share it with your editor, or come back later. We also enroll you in our Ebook Nurture email sequence (4 short notes about KDP gotchas over a couple of weeks) — you can unsubscribe with one click any time.
What if my manuscript has problems the audit doesn't detect?
The audit is deterministic — it catches structural and metadata issues with high confidence but won't catch every content issue (e.g. inconsistent voice, formatting drift mid-chapter). Our paid £49 AI Ebook Designer tier runs additional LLM-powered checks (style-map, classifier consistency, visual QA) that the free audit doesn't include.
How fast is it?
1-3 seconds for a typical 50,000-word manuscript on our Vercel runtime. Larger or image-heavy manuscripts can take up to 10 seconds. The bottleneck is the DOCX parsing — the diagnostic itself runs synchronously after.
What happens if my book scores below 50?
A score below 50 means the audit found multiple critical issues (no chapter detection, non-standard heading styles, missing metadata) that would either fail KDP upload OR ship a defective EPUB. The report tells you exactly what to fix in Word. After fixing, you can re-audit (it's free) or proceed to the £49 AI Ebook Designer tier which has additional LLM-based salvage steps for structureless manuscripts.
Next step
Ready to format the book?
Use the audit to fix issues in Word first, then come back to our formatter — £9.99 Instant Formatter or £49 AI Ebook Designer with 1 revision included.