The Continuity Audit
Every place your series disagrees with itself, found before a reader finds it.
For a writer who already has a series. Four books published, a fifth in draft, and a growing suspicion that something in the early volumes no longer agrees with where the story has gone.
We read the whole series and report every place it contradicts itself: the rule established in Book One that Book Three breaks without acknowledging it, the character whose eyes changed colour, the timeline that requires someone to be nineteen and twenty-six in the same year. Nothing is altered. You get the findings and decide.
What we look for
Rules that were quietly broken
Every rule your world runs on, logged with the book and chapter that established it, then checked against every later use. When Book Four does something Book One said was impossible, you find out here rather than from a reader who has been waiting three years to point it out.
People who changed without meaning to
Eye colour, height, handedness, siblings, hometowns, ages against the timeline, and the small physical facts that get invented twice. Also the larger drift: a character whose competence, vocabulary or moral floor moved between volumes without a scene doing the moving.
The timeline
Every dated or datable event placed on one line, running from the earliest thing anybody remembers to the end of the current draft. Seasons, ages, pregnancies, journeys, wars and how long they took. Most series break here first, because nobody is doing the arithmetic while writing.
Who knows what, and when they learned it
A character cannot act on information nobody has told them. Tracked across books, this is the error that survives longest, because the author knows the secret and forgets that the character on the page does not.
Plants that never paid off
Everything foreshadowed and never harvested, everything that arrived unforeshadowed, and everything the series has promised the reader but not yet delivered. Not all of these are errors, but you should be choosing which ones to leave open.
Names, places and the spelling of both
The invented noun that has three spellings across five books. The tavern that changed streets. The minor character who has two surnames. Individually trivial and collectively the thing that makes a series feel unmanaged.
What a finding looks like
From a five-book series · 4 of 61 findingsBook One establishes that the binding cannot be undone by the person who cast it. In Book Four, Aletta undoes her own. Nothing in between grants the exception. Either she is not the caster, or Book Four needs a reason — and the reason has to be planted earlier than the scene that uses it.
Book Two dates the siege to the spring after Corin's nineteenth birthday. Book Three has him twenty-six at the same siege, and his sister, six years younger, already married with a child. One of the two ages has to give; we would keep nineteen, since three later scenes depend on his inexperience.
Marek refers to the wreck at Halloway. He was not present, and the only two people who know have not seen him since. The scene works if he heard it secondhand; it needs one line saying so.
The order is Vaskaryn (Bk 1, 3), Vaskarin (Bk 2, 4) and Vaskaryne (Bk 5, twice). Thirty-one occurrences, all located. Pick one and it is a search and replace.
What you get
The findings report
Every contradiction located to the book, chapter and paragraph, explained, and rated CRITICAL, MAJOR or MINOR so you can triage rather than read a flat list. Each one carries a recommendation, including which of two conflicting facts we would keep and why.
The continuity ledger
The durable half. Every rule, character fact, date and established detail in one document, each with the book and chapter that set it. You keep it and write against it, which is what stops the next four books doing this again.
An honest call on what cannot be fixed
Sometimes a published detail has to be quietly retired, and the right move is deciding how — a line of dialogue in the next book, or simply never mentioning it again. We will say when that is the answer rather than proposing a repair that draws attention to the wound.
What it costs
Three things decide the price: how long each book is, how many books there are, and how complicated the series actually is. They are applied in that order, and every figure is below so you can work out your own before you speak to us.
One — the scan
Each book in the series is priced on its own length, not on an average. A trilogy of a novella, a novel and an epic is charged as exactly that.
| Length of the book | Scan, per book |
|---|---|
| 1,000 – 5,000 words | $90 |
| 5,000 – 10,000 | $150 |
| 10,000 – 25,000 | $250 |
| 25,000 – 60,000 | $400 |
| 60,000 – 100,000 | $625 |
| 100,000 – 150,000 | $850 |
| 150,000 – 200,000 | $1,075 |
Over 200,000 words: $1,075, plus $150 for every further 10,000. A 250,000-word volume is $1,825.
Two — the cross-reference
Scanning a book finds what contradicts itself inside that book. The series work is comparing each volume against every one before it, and Book Six has five predecessors to answer to rather than one. That is charged as a percentage of the scan total.
Two books
+15%
Three or four
+25%
Five to seven
+35%
Eight or more
Quoted
Three — complexity
Two series of identical length can be an entirely different amount of work. A cast of six in one town is not a cast of three hundred across four continents with competing calendars.
Standard
×1A cast you can hold in your head, one or two principal locations, and rules that would fit on a page. Most romance, most cozy mystery, most single-protagonist horror.
Dense
×1.25Multiple viewpoints, a large secondary cast, and a magic system, political structure or investigative procedure with real internal logic that has to stay consistent.
Epic
×1.5Hundreds of named characters, parallel timelines, several continents, and lineage or prophecy that has to track across decades. Wheel of Time and A Song of Ice and Fire sit here.
We set the tier after reading, and we tell you which one and why before any money changes hands. It is not a box you tick — everybody believes their series is the third one, and a multiplier that the customer chooses is not a multiplier.
Three worked examples
A novella trilogy
Three books, 40,000 words each, standard complexity
- Scans: $400 × 3
- Cross-reference, three books: +25%
- Standard: ×1
$1,500
Four novels
Four books, 90,000 words each, dense
- Scans: $625 × 4
- Cross-reference, four books: +25%
- Dense: ×1.25
$3,900
A six-book epic
A novel, a long novel, three epics and a 250,000-word sixth
- Scans: $625 + $850 + ($1,075 × 3) + $1,825 = $6,525
- Cross-reference, six books: +35% = $2,285
- Epic: ×1.5
$13,200
After the first audit
Once a series has been audited the ledger exists, so the next book does not need the whole history read again. Book Seven is charged as a single scan at its own length, plus 15%, and comes back with the ledger updated. This is considerably cheaper than letting four more books accumulate and auditing again from the beginning.
Start with The Read
Send us the series and The Read is $99. You get back which complexity tier it falls in and why, an exact quote, and an honest word on whether the problem is as bad as you fear. The $99 credits against the audit, and against anything else you buy from us.
Send us the series and we will tell you how bad it is.