Why I built Galleys
Galleys is the revision system I built because I had a 388,000-word first draft and no way to pay for the developmental edit it needed.
“I finished a 388,000-word first draft and couldn't afford the five-figure developmental edit that length implies. So I built the triage system a real developmental editor would use — reference docs first, every issue quoted and tiered, fixes in severity order — and used it to cut the draft to 315,000 words over seven passes. Galleys is that workflow, turned into software so you don't have to spend three years learning it the hard way.”
— Founder, Galleys
The draft
Three years of evenings produced The Third Silence, a fan completion of Patrick Rothfuss's Kingkiller Chronicle. It came in at 388,000 words. A professional developmental edit at that length quotes out at $12,000–$20,000, which was never going to happen. So I had to learn to do a structural edit myself, and most self-editing advice collapses at novel scale.
What didn't work
- Read-throughs with notes.By chapter 40 I couldn't hold chapter 3 in my head. Continuity errors survived four full reads.
- Generic revision checklists.“Check your pacing” is not actionable when the actual problem is that chapters 61–74 all end on the same beat.
- Line-editing too early. I polished thousands of words that later got cut entirely. Weeks of work, deleted.
What worked
A triage system borrowed from how developmental editors actually work:
- Build reference documents before judging anything.A character list with what each person knows and when, a timeline, and a list of every open promise to the reader. Tedious and non-negotiable — every continuity error I found traced back to a gap one of these documents exposed.
- Severity tiers.Every issue went into one of three buckets: story-breaking (the reader puts the book down), craft problems (the reader trusts you less), and polish (the reader doesn't notice, you do). You fix them in that order, in separate passes. Fixing a Tier 1 plot hole rewrites scenes; polishing those scenes first is how you waste a month.
- Quote the evidence.“Chapter 12 drags” is useless six weeks later. “Chapter 12: three consecutive scenes end with X deciding to wait” is a fix you can execute.
Seven passes and 139 tracked issues later, the draft was 315,000 words and, per beta readers who had seen both versions, an actually different book. You can read it at thethirdsilence.com.
From a spreadsheet to Galleys
The process ate so much of my life that I ended up building software around it. Galleys runs the same pipeline on your manuscript: it builds the reference documents first, analyzes every chapter across structure, plot, character, prose, continuity, and theme, tiers every issue with the passage quoted and a concrete fix, and sequences the whole thing into a 5-wave revision plan. Genre adaptation and a convention-tolerance setting keep it from flagging deliberate choices as mistakes, and a False Positives Log shows you the calls it decided not to make.
It is not a replacement for a human editor. It is the pass you do before one, so the expensive hours go to a manuscript that already has its structure right. The full methodology is written up on the methodology page.
How the business works
Galleys LLC is independent and self-funded. Reports are sold one at a time ($19 for a short work, $39 for a full manuscript) or by subscription for authors revising several drafts or a series. Your manuscript is encrypted, never used to train AI models, and never read by a person. Every one-time report carries a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Get in touch
Questions about a report, the methodology, or a manuscript that doesn't fit the usual shapes: email [email protected] or use the contact form. I read everything.