Your first 5,000 words, diagnosed — free.
Upload your manuscript and the First-Chapter Autopsy reads your opening the way a developmental editor reads a submission. You get three severity-ranked findings — and every one of them is quoted from your own prose, so you can see the problem instead of just reading about it.
Run my free First-Chapter Autopsy →Free Cadet account · .docx · no card · results in minutes
Three findings, cited from your own pages
Instant, reliable editorial feedback on the pages a reader judges first.
An opening verdict
What your first pages are actually doing to a reader — in plain English, before the findings start.
Three findings, severity-ranked
Critical, major, minor. Each one carries its category, a one-line headline, the diagnosis, and why it matters to a reader.
Evidence quoted from your own prose
Every finding shows the exact passage in your manuscript that proves it. A finding that can't be quoted is dropped, never padded out.
A branded PDF
Your findings on screen the moment the run lands, plus a PDF to keep and mark up.
Three steps, a few minutes
No subscription, no Port-Tokens, no sales call.
Sign up free
A free Cadet account. No subscription, no card, no Port-Tokens needed for this run.
Upload your .docx
The same upload every other Starport tool takes. We read your first 5,000 words — or all of it, if your manuscript is shorter.
Read your findings
Three cited findings and your PDF, in minutes. One free run per account.
We read your first 5,000 words. The full Autopsy reads all of them.
The problems that sink a book at review time usually live in the middle — structure, repetition, sagging stakes, threads that never pay off. Here is what the full Autopsy opens up:
What the full Autopsy covers
- Structure & Beat Analysis — where your story bends, and where it breaks
- Repetition Map — every scene you accidentally wrote twice
- Theme & Premise — what the book is actually about vs. what it says it's about
- Conflict & Stakes Audit — chapter by chapter: what's pulling the reader forward?
- POV Report — every head-hop and distance break, cited
- Trope Delivery — the promises your genre makes, and whether you keep them
- Worldbuilding & Continuity — contradictions, timeline errors, broken details
- Character Arc Review — who changes, who should, who never does
- Prose Craft — filter words, crutch phrases, rhythm, dialogue mechanics
- Genre & Category Fit — where this actually shelves on Amazon
Every finding in the full report is cited from your own pages — instant, reliable editorial feedback on the entire manuscript.
Free Cadet account · one free run · upgrade to the full Autopsy whenever you're ready
What it costsFree
The First-Chapter Autopsy is free — one run per account, no card and no trial clock. It reads the same way the paid tools do: 725,746 hook mentions extracted from real reader reviews and 4,293 reader personas built from that data sit behind every finding. Counted from our own databases on 24 August 2026.
The other free tool here is the Reader-Ready Scorecard — nine craft measurements across the whole manuscript. Everything else is pay-as-you-go: see all tools.
Free tools elsewhere in the estate
Authors Starport is one of four sites Coral Hart Group runs for romance authors. These are free too — no account, no card.
- The 2026 Romance Demand Report — the long-form read on what romance readers are asking for this year and where the shelf is not answering. Free, no signup.
- TropeSmith — Trending — which romance tropes are rising and cooling in reader demand this week.
- TropeSmith — Reader Demand — what readers keep asking for that nobody is writing.
- TropeSmith — Category Checker — every Amazon category a book actually ranks in.
- PlotProse — free writing tools — trope-stack, title, pen-name and character-name generators, the trope library and the reader demand report.