How to Edit a Book with AI — Complete Guide

The editor works on a chapter-by-chapter basis, so your manuscript needs to be split into discrete chunks before you begin. There are two ways to get your text in:

• Paste directly — Copy from your word processor and paste into the chapter editor. Best for editing a single chapter at a time.
• Import a project — If you wrote the book in Entangled Text, the chapters are already there. Open the project and navigate to the editor.

Formatting that matters

The AI reads plain text and Markdown. Before pasting, strip out headers, footers, page numbers, and any layout-specific formatting. Keep paragraph breaks, italics (using asterisks), and scene breaks (three asterisks on a line). The cleaner the input, the fewer artifacts show up in the output.

This is where most people go wrong. The editing instruction is the single input that determines whether the AI produces something useful or something you immediately discard. Vague instructions get vague results. Specific, targeted instructions get surgical edits.

What bad instructions look like

These tell the AI nothing about your intent. "Better" according to whom? "Wrong" by what standard? The AI will guess — and it will guess generically.

What good instructions look like

Effective editing instructions name the problem, describe the desired outcome, and stay focused on one dimension of the prose at a time.

Different models have different editing strengths. The one you pick should match the kind of editing you're doing.

• Claude (Anthropic) — The strongest choice for voice-sensitive editing. Claude is careful with authorial tone, rarely flattens distinctive prose, and follows nuanced instructions well. Use it for dialogue polish, tone shifts, and any edit where preserving your voice matters most.
• GPT-5.6 Terra / Sol (OpenAI) — Excellent at structural edits: tightening pacing, reorganizing paragraphs, cutting filler. GPT tends to be more aggressive with deletions, which is useful when a chapter is overwritten. Also strong at continuity checks.
• Gemini (Google) — Handles very long chapters well thanks to its large context window. Good for full-chapter consistency passes where you need the AI to hold the entire text in memory at once.
• DeepSeek — Reliable for line-level polish: grammar, sentence rhythm, filter-word removal. Cost-effective for multiple editing passes on a full manuscript.

After the AI processes your instruction, you don't get a mystery rewrite — you get a word-level diff that shows exactly what changed. This is where the editor becomes powerful: you can see every insertion, deletion, and substitution before you commit to anything.

How to read the diff

• Green highlighted text — Additions. Words or phrases the AI inserted that weren't in your original.
• Red highlighted text (strikethrough) — Deletions. Words or phrases from your original that the AI removed.
• Unchanged text — Everything the AI left alone. This is usually the majority of the chapter if your instruction was focused.

Read through the diff like a track-changes document. Pay attention to places where the AI deleted something you liked — that's a signal to reject that specific chunk. Also watch for additions that shift meaning in ways you didn't intend.

The diff view breaks the AI's changes into individual chunks — usually a sentence or a short paragraph. For each chunk you have three options:

• Accept — Apply this change. The AI's version replaces your original for this chunk.
• Reject — Keep your original text. The AI's suggestion is discarded for this chunk.
• Re-edit — Neither version is right. Adjust the instruction and run a new pass on just this section.

When to accept

Accept when the AI's version is clearly better: tighter pacing, more natural dialogue, a stronger image replacing a weak one. If you hesitate, read both versions aloud. The one that sounds right when spoken is usually the right choice.

When to reject

Reject when the AI has flattened something distinctive — a quirky sentence you liked, a deliberate rhythm, an unusual word choice that carries meaning. Also reject when the AI over-corrects: shortening a passage that needed its length for emotional weight, or smoothing out a character voice that was intentionally rough.

The accept-all shortcut

If you've reviewed the full diff and every change looks good, use the accept-all button to apply everything at once. This is common with focused instructions — if you asked the AI to do one specific thing and it did it well across the board, there's no need to approve each chunk individually.

Once your chapters are edited and you're happy with the text, you have several paths forward:

• Save as project — The edited text stays in Entangled Text. You can come back for additional passes, share the project, or publish it on the platform.
• Download as TXT — A plain-text export of the full manuscript. Useful as a backup or for pasting into other tools.
• Export to EPUB — A formatted ebook file ready for Amazon KDP, Apple Books, Kobo, or any distributor. Includes chapter breaks, a table of contents, and your metadata.
• Export to DOCX — A Word document formatted for editors, agents, or print-formatting tools like Vellum and Atticus.

Your work is yours. Exports use open formats (TXT, EPUB, DOCX) with no lock-in. Free-plan downloads include a short Entangled Text foreword and closing note with our URL; Pro removes it from exported files.

Use multiple focused passes

The best editing workflow isn't one pass that tries to fix everything — it's three or four passes that each focus on one thing. Run a dialogue pass first. Then a pacing pass. Then a line-level polish pass. Each pass builds on the last, and the cumulative result is far better than any single all-purpose edit.

Keep instructions under control

If your editing instruction is longer than a paragraph, it's probably trying to do too much. Split it into two separate passes. The AI handles one clear objective better than five competing ones.

Use the scan pass for consistency

Before you do any substantive editing, run a lightweight scan pass: ask the AI to flag inconsistencies, continuity errors, or repeated phrases without rewriting anything. This gives you a map of what actually needs fixing before you start making changes.

Trust your ear over the AI's confidence

The AI will always produce a result. It will never say "actually, this paragraph is fine — leave it alone." That means some changes are improvements and some are lateral moves disguised as improvements. If your original version reads well when spoken aloud, keep it. The AI's edit isn't better just because it's different.