Marlowe: Analytical AI for fiction – not generative AI
Watch: How Marlowe analyzes your manuscript (under 4 minutes)
Meet Marlowe by Authors A.I.
Marlowe is analytical AI for fiction — it reads your manuscript and gives you expert-level developmental feedback on plot, character, pacing, story beats, narrative drive, and theme. It doesn’t write or rewrite a single word of your book.
What makes it different
Built on a rights-cleared corpus
Marlowe was trained on legally obtained, rights-cleared novels — not scraped text. It doesn’t train on your manuscript either, and you can delete your data at any time.
Built by novelists and data scientists
Marlowe was co-developed by Dr. Matthew Jockers, PhD, co-author of The Bestseller Code, and a team of bestselling authors. It launched in 2020, three years before ChatGPT, with a research-based approach to identifying what makes fiction work.
It’s as simple as 1-2-3
Upload your manuscript
Submit your work in MS Word (.docx) or ePub format. Marlowe analyzes any fiction genre — from romance to sci-fi to literary fiction. Minimum length: 20,000 words.
Marlowe analyzes your story
Marlowe uses analytical AI (not generative) to compare your manuscript against a corpus of thousands of published novels. It evaluates:
- Plot structure and narrative arcs
- Character development and consistency
- Pacing throughout your story
- Dialogue balance and effectiveness
- Theme and emotional resonance
- Genre conventions and how your work compares to bestsellers
- Readability, clichés, repetitive phrases, and technical elements
Get your report in minutes
Marlowe delivers a comprehensive analysis via your interactive Author Dashboard — in minutes, not weeks. Review the insights, then use its feedback to guide your revisions.
Marlowe reports start at $29.95, with Basic and Pro plans available for ongoing feedback across drafts. Compare Plans →
The Marlowe story
We’re authors ourselves — we know what it’s like to wonder if your manuscript is ready, without spending thousands of dollars or waiting weeks for feedback. So a group of 110+ bestselling authors — led by co-founders Matthew Jockers, PhD, Alessandra (A.R.) Torre, and J.D. Lasica — set out to put the power of AI into authors’ hands. Working with leading data scientists, they built Marlowe around Dr. Jockers’ research into what separates bestselling fiction from the rest, using it as the analytical backbone of Marlowe’s feedback engine.
We launched in 2020 — three years before ChatGPT hit the public — because we wanted to build something different: an editorial tool made by novelists and grounded in data. Every decision we make prioritizes your success, your IP protection, and your creative control.
The name is deliberate, too. Marlowe is named for both Christopher Marlowe, the Elizabethan playwright who inspired Shakespeare, and Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler’s hardboiled private eye who plays chess and reads poetry between cases. We like to think our AI has Philip Marlowe’s intellect and investigative instincts, paired with Christopher Marlowe’s pioneering spirit and love of the written word.
“Marlowe is a favorite of mine. In fact, I have been using it a lot lately with my new series. I love the useful advice it gives for me to revise my manuscripts. I don’t know if I would feel good publishing anything I haven’t run through Marlowe first.”
