Editorial Review

Overview

Run the workflows that involve people outside the agent: briefing and paying sensitivity and authenticity readers, a real-people and defamation-risk pass, permissions for quoted material, an AI-use disclosure statement, editorial rounds with human editors, and collaboration between co-authors. The skill prepares materials, tracks state in frontmatter, and flags risks. It does not give legal advice, it does not contact anyone, and it never records a permission, review, or disclosure the user has not confirmed.

Prerequisites

A story project with story.md in the root and drafted chapters. Git is needed for snapshot tags, story compare --ref, and the collaboration workflow; offer git init if the project has none.

When to Use

• A book portrays a culture, identity, disability, faith, trade, or experience the author does not share
• Fiction features or resembles real, identifiable people or organisations
• The manuscript quotes lyrics, poems, epigraphs, or other writers' prose
• A passage may echo a source, an earlier book, or another writer too closely
• The user needs an AI-use statement for a retailer, agent, or publisher
• Sending the manuscript to a human editor, or taking their edits back
• Two or more people write or maintain the same book or shared world
• NOT for synthesising reader notes into decisions (use feedback-triage; this skill hands notes to it)
• NOT for fact-checking real-world details (use research; this skill adds the review layer on top)
• NOT for the agent's own prose edit (use line-editing) or structural revision (use revision-continuity)
• NOT for query letters, synopses, or retailer copy (use submission)

Workflow

1. Sensitivity and authenticity reads

1. Find what needs a read: characters, settings, and research notes that touch lived experience the author lacks. Mark the research notes that ground them by adding cultural to the note's risk list (add medical, legal, or others as they apply), or open one:

   story add research 'Deaf community in 1980s Glasgow' --accuracy must-be-accurate --method expert-review --risk cultural --used-in chapter-04
   

2. Prepare the brief with references/sensitivity-reader-brief.md: which chapters, which characters, specific questions, the author's research so far, deadline, and fee. Sensitivity reading is paid professional work; help the user budget and find readers, never suggest asking community members to work for free.

3. Build what the reader receives: story build . --format docx for readers who comment in Word, or story build . --format html for paragraph-anchored notes. A reader-panel round's sensitivity persona can point at passages to put in the brief, but it is not a sensitivity read: never record it in reviewed-by or treat it as clearing a portrayal.

4. Record the returned notes as a feedback round (feedback/round-{N}/) and synthesise them through the feedback-triage skill. When the reader's notes are incorporated, add them to the research note's reviewed-by (name or role, with their consent to be named).

5. story validate . warns when a note with any risk is used in a final or complete chapter and has no reviewed-by.

2. Real-people and defamation pass

For fiction that uses real people, real organisations, or recognisable portraits, follow references/real-people-and-permissions.md: list every real or recognisable person, classify each portrayal, and flag the risky ones in a research note by adding defamation (or legal) to its risk list. Say plainly that this is a flagging exercise, not legal advice, and recommend a publishing lawyer's review before publication whenever a living person or a real organisation is shown doing something discreditable.

3. Permissions for quoted material

1. Find every quotation of someone else's work: epigraphs, lyrics, poems, extracts, and in-text quotes. Each epigraph or quoted page usually lives in matter/.
2. Record state in the matter file's frontmatter: permission (not-needed, pending, granted, public-domain), rights-holder, and credit (the exact credit line the rights-holder requires).
3. Apply the cautions in references/real-people-and-permissions.md: song lyrics almost always need permission, fair use is a narrow and uncertain defence, and public-domain status depends on country and date. Never set granted or public-domain without the user's confirmation and, for granted, the rights-holder's name.
4. story validate . warns when a matter page is pending and the story is complete, and when granted has no rights-holder. Whatever the status, story export and the builds leave a pending page out (the review copy too) and warn permission-pending-left-out, unless --include-pending is given.

4. Overlap with other text

When the user worries that a passage echoes a source, an earlier book, or another writer too closely, compare the chapters with that text:

story similarity . --against ../sources
story similarity . --against ../book-one --min-words 12

--against takes a file, a folder, or a git ref. Each run of shared words is a warning with both locations and the words.

Report the result honestly:

• Say what was compared and what was not. The check only sees the text passed to --against. It says nothing about other books, the web, or sources nobody gave it, so never tell the user a manuscript is "original", "clean", or "plagiarism-free" on its strength.
• Shared text is not plagiarism. Stock phrases, a quotation the author meant, and the author's own recurring lines all share words. List each passage with its locations and let the user decide what it is. Never call a passage copied.
• A passage quoted on purpose from another writer belongs in the permissions pass (section 3), not in a rewrite.
• A passage that should not be there is rewritten by the author, or with the line-editing skill at the author's direction. Never paraphrase it quietly to make the match disappear.
• Where a matching passage came from AI-assisted drafting, raise it when drafting or revisiting ai-disclosure (section 5): the statement describes how AI was used, and the similarity result neither proves nor disproves AI use.

5. AI-use disclosure

1. Ask the user how AI tools were used on this book: brainstorming, outlining, drafting prose, editing, research, cover or art, or translation, and roughly how much of the published text was generated rather than written or rewritten by the author.
2. Draft a short plain statement for ai-disclosure in story.md, for example: Outlining and line-level editing suggestions used an AI assistant; all prose was written and revised by the author. Use only what the user confirms; never minimise or inflate it.
3. Tell the user that disclosure expectations differ and change: some retailers ask at publication whether content is AI-generated or AI-assisted, many agents and publishers ask in submission guidelines or contracts, and some magazines do not accept AI-generated work. Ask the user to check the current terms of each retailer, agent, publisher, or market they submit to; do not quote policy text from memory.
4. story build . --format metadata includes the statement on the retailer metadata sheet.

6. Editorial rounds with a human editor

Follow references/editor-rounds.md:

1. Snapshot and tag the draft sent (sent-to-editor-1). From the book's folder (the one with story.md), check that .gitignore lists dist/, show the user git status --untracked-files=all -- ., and ask about any private file it lists (a .env, keys, scans). With the user's approval, commit the book's folder only and tag it: git add -A -- . && git commit -m "…" -- . && git tag sent-to-editor-1. When the status lists nothing, run only the tag; if the user declines the commit, or it fails, never tag over the uncommitted tree. Then build the file the editor wants: story build . --format docx (Word with Track Changes) or story build . --format shunn for manuscript format.
2. When edits come back, the author accepts or rejects them in Word; the agent transfers the accepted text into the chapter markdown, chapter by chapter, never by a bulk script. Queries that change events go to revision-continuity; editorial letters go through feedback-triage.
3. Show how deep the round went: story compare . --ref sent-to-editor-1.

7. Review copies for non-technical readers

For editors, sensitivity readers, or agents who never open a terminal, story build . --format html produces one file with a table of contents and a clickable paragraph label on every paragraph (ch03-p12), so comments can cite exact places in email, a doc, or an issue. To publish the copy on GitHub Pages with an issue form for notes, follow the GitHub review copy setup in step 1 of the feedback-triage workflow, which has the details. Even without that skill, warn first that a public Pages site makes the manuscript public unless the repository and Pages are private, confirm the visibility the user wants, and ask before creating any file in .github/. Collect the notes that come back into a feedback round and triage them with feedback-triage. Resolve labels from an older build with story compare . --ref <round-tag> --anchor '<label>' before acting on them; see references/editor-rounds.md.

8. Collaboration and backups

Follow references/collaboration.md for co-authored books and shared worlds: list every author under authors in story.md, one branch per author or per chapter, pull requests to main, a CODEOWNERS file for shared-world canon, and a remote pushed after every session as the backup. Real-time collaborative editing (two people typing in one file at once) is out of scope for the markdown model; recommend taking turns per file through branches instead.

Conventions

• Never record a review, permission, credit, or disclosure the user has not confirmed. Unknown values stay pending or unset.
• Flag risk; do not give legal advice. Recommend a qualified lawyer for defamation, privacy, or permission questions on a book going to publication.
• Reviewers are named in reviewed-by only with their consent; otherwise record their role (sensitivity reader, Deaf culture).
• Sensitivity notes are input to the author, not verdicts. The author decides, and feedback-triage records declined notes with a reason.
• Never send, email, upload, push, or publish anything without the user's instruction. The user contacts readers, editors, and rights-holders.
• Never commit, tag, push, or change branches without the user's approval.

CLI Maintenance

Use the Story CLI when it is available. If story is not installed, use the bundled fallback node ../story-maintenance/scripts/story.js with the same arguments. Use node <checkout>/bin/story.js instead only when the user names a Story Skills repository checkout or you are working in one. Write the script as an absolute path (resolve the fallback relative to this skill folder) and run it from the folder you would run story from, so . and other relative paths keep their meaning. Use Node, not Bun or a package script: Bun would load that folder's bunfig.toml (which can run code) and .env, and a package script runs from the checkout's root. If no CLI is available, keep the frontmatter fields current by hand, and leave the research/_index.md and matter/_index.md tables to the next story reindex .: never edit their rows.

After adding or editing research notes, matter pages, story.md metadata, or chapters:

story reindex .
story wordcount . --write
story check .

Reference Files

• references/sensitivity-reader-brief.md - When to hire a sensitivity or authenticity reader, finding and paying them, a brief template, and incorporating notes
• references/real-people-and-permissions.md - Real-people and defamation-risk pass, permissions for epigraphs, lyrics, and quotations, and the matter-file permission fields
• references/editor-rounds.md - Sending a manuscript to a human editor, snapshot tags, taking DOCX edits back into markdown, and HTML review copies with paragraph anchors
• references/collaboration.md - Multi-author projects, git branching per author, CODEOWNERS for shared worlds, and backups

Shared Conventions

Every story skill follows the shared conventions in ../story-maintenance/references/conventions.md, resolved relative to this skill folder. Read it before creating, renaming, or linking story files. If that file is missing because this skill was installed without story-maintenance, the essentials are: kebab-case ids and filenames, YAML frontmatter on every story-project file, _index.md registry tables that story reindex rebuilds (never edit them by hand), bidirectional links between entities, characters for who is on the page and mentions for who is only referred to, status: deceased plus died-in: chapter-{NN} for deaths, and no project-local generator or build scripts (run only the installed or bundled Story CLI).