Copy Editing · Three Ways To Work
Cantos reads your whole manuscript and copyedits it with a professional's ear: grammar, punctuation, spelling, and the consistency slips that hide across three hundred pages. Then you decide how hands-on to be, from let-it-run to approving every comma. Corrections, never rewrites, $99.99 for the whole book, with revisions included.
Start My Copy EditChoose copy editing at checkout, on its own or with your interior. With an interior, your book is built from the corrected manuscript.
Your manuscript is never used to train AI. Ever.
Red-Line hands the book back as a Word file in which every fix is a real tracked change, with its reason. You accept and reject them in your own word processor, exactly as you would with a human editor.
From the team behind BookDesignTemplates.com, trusted by first-time authors since 2011. Real people who have designed books for fifteen years, now working for you.
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Choose Your Comfort Level
The edit itself does not change between them. What changes is how much of it passes under your eye, and every one of the three costs the same.
You trust Cantos to act as your editor. It finds and applies every grammar, spelling and punctuation fix, tells you what it changed and why, and moves you straight on to the layout. The fastest road to a clean book.
Cantos copyedits the whole manuscript, then shows you every suggested fix with its reason in one checklist. You untick anything you do not want before it is applied. Nothing changes without your approval, which is what you want when there is a voice to protect.
Every edit comes back as a real tracked change in a Word file. Review it in Word, LibreOffice, Pages or Google Docs, accept or reject one at a time, then upload the copy you settled. Full control, and a paper trail.
What Gets Read
A quick pass catches typos. The errors that make a self-published book feel self-published are the ones that live between chapters, and the ones that hide in the furniture.
A very long manuscript is edited carefully in sections so nothing is skipped, and you can watch it work. The report is honest: if something was left alone, it says so.
Six Languages
Cantos copyedits English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese and Italian. That is not a list of languages it will attempt: it is the list whose conventions it knows and keeps. A Spanish novel keeps its dialogue dash, its guillemets and its inverted question and exclamation marks instead of having them corrected into English ones. French keeps the space before its own punctuation. German keeps its capitals. Portuguese keeps its travessão, its own dialogue dash, and its accents, Brazilian or European as you wrote them. Italian keeps its caporali, the angled quotation marks it sets dialogue in, and its elisions. If your book is in a language we do not edit, Cantos says so before the check runs, so you never spend anything on rules that do not fit your book.
And if you want the book itself in another language, that is a language edition →
The Price
All three modes run in full, whichever way you choose to work, and when you buy the interior too, it is built from the copyedited manuscript. You get the copyedited Word master, and the tracked-changes red-line if you chose that way of working.
Three books bought together are $199.99, held as credits for whenever the next one is ready. With an interior and a cover, the three together are $229.99; add the Marketing and Book Premiere Kit and the whole package is $249.99.
Revision passes come included with the copy edit, so a second pass after you have thought about it is part of the price.
If it is not what you wanted, ask for a refund within 30 days and you get back everything you paid: every purchase carries a 100% money-back guarantee for 30 days. The full wording lives in the Terms.
Being Straight With You
Nobody here will tell you the second act sags or that chapter four belongs at the front. Structural editing is a human conversation about your book, and it is worth paying a human for. This is the pass that comes after it.
Cantos will not make your prose punchier, warmer or more commercial, and will not quietly modernise your idiom. It fixes what is wrong and leaves what is yours, which is why the fragment you wrote on purpose survives.
A copy edit works on the manuscript, not on the finished pages, and no edit of any kind replaces an author reading their own book once more. That is exactly what a printed proof copy from your printer is for.
One App, The Whole Book
The copy edit runs before the layout on purpose, so the book that gets typeset is the corrected one. Everything below is built from that same manuscript, in the same project.
Why We Built This
Fifteen years ago my team and I started BookDesignTemplates.com because first-time authors kept telling us the same thing: I wrote the book, but I have no idea how to make it look like a real one. More than 70,000 authors have used our designs since, and more than 300,000 books have been published with our work inside them.
In all that time the single most common thing an author apologised to us for was the state of their text. They had read it eleven times. They still knew something was in there, and they were right, because nobody can proofread their own sentences after the fortieth pass.
So we built the pass that catches the rest of it, and we built three ways to work because a debut memoirist and a novelist with a deliberate voice do not want the same relationship with an editor. Your words stay yours. We claim no copyright on your book and we never use your manuscript to train AI.
Tracy Atkins, founder
Before You Start
No. This is a copy edit: grammar, punctuation, spelling and consistency, not a rewrite of your prose. Cantos is built to fix the error and leave the author alone. And in Work Together or Red-Line nothing at all changes without you saying so, edit by edit.
No, and we will not pretend otherwise. Cantos does not restructure your plot, reorder your chapters or critique your argument. It makes a finished manuscript clean, correct and consistent, which is what a copyeditor does and where most self-published books actually lose their readers.
Yes. Choose copy editing at checkout, on its own or with your interior, and all three modes run in full, in the way you pick. If you bought the interior too, it is built from the copyedited manuscript, so the book you download is the corrected one. Revision passes come included.
Your manuscript comes back as a Word document in which every proposed fix is a real tracked change with a short reason. You review it in Word, LibreOffice, Pages or Google Docs, accept or reject one at a time or all at once, then upload the file you settled. It is the workflow a human editor would use with you, and it leaves you a paper trail.
English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese and Italian. A Spanish book is checked against Spanish conventions, so the dialogue dash, the guillemets and the inverted question and exclamation marks are preserved rather than corrected into English ones. A Portuguese book keeps its travessão, its own dialogue dash, and its accents; an Italian one keeps its caporali and its elisions. If your manuscript is in a language we do not edit, Cantos tells you before the check runs instead of guessing.
No. It recognizes the English you write, US, UK, Australian or Canadian, and keeps it: color, realise and whilst stay exactly as you typed them. Spanish gets the same respect, with peninsular, Mexican and Rioplatense conventions each recognized and preserved. Your dialect is the authority.
It is read too, not skipped. A very long manuscript is edited carefully in sections so nothing is missed, and the report is honest with you: if something was deliberately left alone, it says so rather than staying quiet about it.
Yes. It travels over an encrypted connection, it is never sold, licensed or shared, and it is never used to train AI. You can delete a project or your entire account whenever you like, from your own account page.
A careful copy edit of the whole manuscript, your way, with revisions included.
Start My Copy EditCorrections, not rewrites. Never used to train AI.