For writers who want to write and hate everything else.
Publishing home for writers
“I’d want to use this on a book.”
What writers say
“I’d want to use this on a book.”
My book had already been through two professional editors, one structural and one proofreading, plus my own AI pass, all to Chicago style. Fred still surfaced suggestions I found genuinely useful. I’d want to use this on a book, even more so if the prose were rougher.
Jason Cohen · founder of WP Engine, writer at Smart Bear, author of Hidden Multipliers“Exactly what an editor is for.”
It’s hard to see your own material as an outside reader, which is exactly what an editor is for. Fred did that for me, catching the central tension right away: whether my book is a memoir with an argument, or a philosophy of selfhood illustrated by memoir.
Bowen Dwelle · memoirist and editor“Fred actually gave critiques.”
It was honestly really helpful. It’s easy to communicate with it, it instantly picked up what I was putting down regarding themes and character motivations, and it was really clear about what the manuscript needed. I’ve used ProWritingAid’s beta reading AI before, and it felt entirely like a yes-man. Fred actually gave critiques, which was super, super helpful.
How it works
A plain book titled Your book title here opens to its first chapter as a draft. Fred, the editor, first gives his read of the whole book and the one thing to fix first, then suggests a light line edit with his reasoning, and once accepted the page updates. Three typeset styles are tried on the same pages: Romantic with a drop cap, Thriller with a large chapter number, and Editorial with left-aligned headings. The book closes, cover designs are dragged onto it, and it ends ready to publish as a print PDF and an ebook.
Hired out, per book
Developmental edit$1,830
Interior formatting$840
Cover design$500 to $1,000
All three$3,170 to $3,670
Reedsy marketplace averagesDo it yourself, on Wordsmith
$50a month
Editing, typesetting, cover design and market fit, for every book you write.
Essays from $10 a month. Start free, cancel any time.
Or we publish it for you
$999per book, paid once
You write. We take the book from final draft to live on the stores.
A person on our team runs the release: ISBNs, store listings and a checked print proof.
What is includedStart free, no card needed.
Our commitment with AI
A letter from the founder
Wordsmith began with a simple question. One day, Yash asked me: “What unreasonable problem do you have right now that we could solve together?”
I had spent the previous four years writing a book. Writing it was naturally difficult, but getting it published felt like an unreasonable problem.
- 01
The book did not fit neatly into an existing category, and I did not want to reshape it into something more conventional simply because it would be easier to place on a shelf. Traditional publishers make a small number of bets, usually on books they already know how to sell. To earn one of those bets, writers are increasingly expected to arrive with the book, the audience, the credentials, and the marketing engine already in place.
- 02
The alternative is to self-publish. But self-publishing often means becoming your own publishing house overnight. You have to find an editor, interpret conflicting feedback, commission a cover, typeset the book, navigate ISBNs and distribution, and somehow persuade people to read it. Each step involves another specialist, another bill, and another unfamiliar decision.
That was the unreasonable problem I mentioned. We came to it from different directions. I understood the writer’s side. Yash saw a system that software could make more intelligent, accessible and humane.
Together, we started Wordsmith. Our mission is to make self-publishing viable for far more people. We are building towards an author-owned publishing house: a place where a serious writer can bring a manuscript and find the editorial judgment, production infrastructure and guidance needed to carry it into the world without surrendering their voice, rights or control. We want more strange books to exist. More sincere books. More difficult books. More books that could never have survived a committee trying to predict what the market already understands. Not every one of those books will become a bestseller. That is not the point. A healthy culture depends on people being able to produce ideas before the world has decided whether it accepts them.
We are still early. We have plenty to learn, and we are building Wordsmith in close conversation with the hundreds of writers who trust us with their work. Every manuscript teaches us something about what technology can do, what it cannot do, and where human judgment must remain at the centre.
If you are writing a book, we would like to earn the right to read it. If you help writers, publish books or build communities around ideas, we would like to learn from you. And if you believe the world is better when more people can turn something private and unfinished into a book another person can hold, we would be glad to have you with us.
Common questions
They're writers, not editors. Under the hood they're prediction engines: ask one to improve your work and it regenerates it, producing the most probable version of your paragraph rather than reading the one you wrote. That's why the voice goes. Fred is built to read and respond, not to replace and regenerate. It works in the margins the way an editor does—inline suggestions, comments, track changes you accept, reject, or argue with, and the judgment underneath: what to flag, what to leave alone, when to stop.
That whole category is correction: rules, grammar, style flags, the sentence in isolation. None of it reads the piece as a piece. Fred works a level up, it takes in the whole thing, has a view on what it's doing, and tells you when it's done, which a rule-checker has no concept of.
Anything where voice and craft carry the piece: fiction, memoir, personal essays, longform. Fred also takes on the structural questions in essays of ideas and nonfiction, what to develop, what to cut, what the argument is actually doing. The more there is to read into, the better the work.
Up to about 15,000 words through the short piece editor (essays, posts, short pieces). Full manuscripts up to about 150,000 words go through the manuscript pipeline, edited in one pass and returned as a marked-up doc.
No. We don't train on your manuscript, and you own everything you upload and publish. It's stored encrypted, in your account, seen only by you and by us when you ask for support. The models we use (Mercury and OpenAI) run under API terms that forbid training on your text. The only thing we learn from is which suggestions writers take or refuse (the way any editor learns the craft), and that signal never includes your words themselves. Want it all gone? Just email [email protected] or [email protected].
That's the one thing Fred is built not to do. It reads your rhythms and word choices and leaves them alone; a line edit shows you a possibility, never a rewrite, and you decide what gets in. You can feed it writing you admire, your own past work, a writer you're chasing, a page of style notes, and it'll hold to that. If it ever sands you down into generic prose, that's a bug, and we want to hear about it.
For now, yes, and on purpose. Editing is the first and hardest part of getting a book out and the part nothing else does well, so it's where we started. But the longer plan is the whole journey from finished draft to published book: editing first, then typesetting, then cover, then getting it onto the shelf and devices. We're building the publishing house as software, one piece at a time, and the edit is the piece that's live today.