u/masonga1960

I built a manuscript analysis tool called FirstReader. The main product is a fiction craft analysis (319 principles from published craft books, chapter by chapter), but one of the features I'm most interested in right now is the free AI Perception Analysis.

Quick version: it scans your manuscript for the specific patterns that readers, editors, and reviewers associate with AI-generated writing. Repetitive sentence structures, filler phrases, paragraph shapes that show up constantly in LLM output. It's not a detector. It doesn't claim to know whether AI was used. It identifies the patterns and shows you where they are so you can decide what to do about them. Fully deterministic, no AI in the analysis itself, genre-aware baselines so romance conventions don't get flagged as AI tells in a romance manuscript.

It now works for both fiction and non-fiction. Free at firstreader.app. If you try it, I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.

The ask:

I'm building out the non-fiction analysis pipeline and I need beta manuscripts to test against. Specifically, I need:

- Narrative non-fiction - memoir, biography, true crime, narrative journalism

- Expository non-fiction - analytical, how-to, textbook, reference

I've already validated the pipeline on prescriptive non-fiction (self-help, instructional) and it performed well. But narrative and expository are structurally different enough that I need real manuscripts to make sure the analysis handles them correctly.

What I'm offering: a free full analysis report on your manuscript in exchange for your honest feedback on what the report got right and what it missed. Your manuscript stays private, never used for training, stored securely behind auth.

If you've got a non-fiction manuscript in either of those categories and you're curious what a craft analysis would look like on it, let me know either in a DM or a comment.

Most of us here are looking for beta readers to tell us what's working and what isn't. And betas are great at that. They tell you the middle felt slow, the dialogue went flat in chapter eight, the ending didn't land.

What they usually can't tell you is WHY. Was the slow middle a pacing problem? A scene that didn't turn? A POV shift that broke immersion? That's craft-level diagnosis, and it's not what betas are for. They're readers, not editors.

An alpha read is the step that goes before betas. Scene structure, pacing, show vs. tell, dialogue mechanics, narrative distance - all evaluated while the manuscript is still raw enough to fix without a full rewrite. The kind of analysis a developmental editor would do, except you'd have to wait 8 weeks and spend up to $4,000.

When you fix the craft-layer stuff FIRST, your betas can actually react to your story instead of tripping over structural problems. Their feedback gets more specific, more useful, and you're not spending months trying to decode what "the middle felt slow" actually means.

I ended up building a tool around this concept. It reads your manuscript against 319 published craft principles (McKee, Browne and King, Swain, Gardner) and gives you a chapter-by-chapter report with every finding traced to its source. Called FirstReader, launching soon.

Wrote a longer breakdown of the alpha reader concept here if you're curious: firstreader.app/blog/what-is-an-alpha-reader?src=reddit

Happy to answer questions about how it works or how it compares to just running your manuscript through a chatbot prompt.