Is ProWritingAid Worth It for Nonfiction Authors? A Book Coach’s Review (2026)

The short answer: yes, if you’re writing a book. As of October 2026, ProWritingAid Premium costs $30 a month, $120 a year, or $399 for a lifetime license, and Premium Pro costs $36 a month, $144 a year, or $699 lifetime. It catches the stuff that’s hard to see in your own writing (passive voice, the same word five times on one page, sentences that drag on, and typos), which is the stuff you don’t want to pay an editor to fix. I’ve run every book I’ve written through it.

Updated October 2026: Is ProWritingAid worth it? Well, turns out I STILL use and love ProWritingAid. The biggest problem I had (no Word add-in for Mac) is fixed now, and they’ve added chapter and whole-manuscript feedback that I walk you through below, so if you know you wanna try ProWritingAid, you can get up to 20% off with my ProWritingAid referral code here. I will get a small bonus and you’ll get a ProWritingAid discount! Win-win!

I’ve used ProWritingAid since about 2017, on every book I’ve written. I loved it so much when I tried it that I got the lifetime license (Premium) and haven’t regretted it. I’ll keep using it, too, unless they start saying the US men’s soccer team is better than the US women’s team or something. I did find a few “cons” along the way, and I’ve kept them in this post, along with what’s changed since.

ProWritingAid is a grammar checker, style editor, and writing mentor in one package. The free plan only checks 500 words at a time, though, so for a whole book you’ll want a paid plan.

How Much Does ProWritingAid Cost in 2026?

Premium is $120 a year and Premium Pro is $144 a year, and both also come as monthly and lifetime plans. Prices change, so I check these every month. These are ProWritingAid’s prices as of October 2026, straight from their pricing page:

• Premium gives you unlimited reports on documents of any length, unlimited Rephrases, 1 Chapter Critique a day, and 25+ reports.
• Premium Pro adds 30 Chapter Critiques a day, live workshops, and daily cowriting sprints.
• Whole-book reports (Manuscript Analysis, Virtual Beta Reader, Plot Analysis, Character Analysis, and Marketability Analysis) use Story Credits. One credit covers one run on a book up to 300,000 words, and a credit costs $50 at full price, $35 with Premium, or $25 with Premium Pro.
• Plagiarism checks cost extra on every plan.
• Yearly and lifetime plans can be refunded if you ask within 3 days of buying. Monthly plans and Story Credits can’t be refunded.

I have a Lifetime Premium license, and it was worth every penny for me. If you aren’t hiring an editor, though, I’d go with Premium Pro, because one Chapter Critique a day goes fast when you’re revising a whole book. Either way, you can get up to 20% off with my affiliate link.

Is ProWritingAid Better Than Grammarly for Editing a Book?

For a book, yes, ProWritingAid is just better. Grammarly is great for quick fixes in an email. ProWritingAid looks at how your whole manuscript reads, and it explains why each change helps, so you get better at catching those problems yourself.

(And Word’s built-in spellcheck isn’t in the running. Clippy’s been gone since 2007, and he wasn’t catching passive voice anyway. Rest in peace, buddy. We old Millennials remember you fondly from all our school projects.)

Prices from prowritingaid.com/pricing and grammarly.com/plans, checked October 3, 2026:

Which ProWritingAid Reports Should You Run on Your Book?

Run three on every chapter: Summary, Chapter Critique, and Readability. I teach this same editing pass inside Publish & Prosper, my publishing program, and it’s the order I use on my own books. If you aren’t hiring an editor, add Sticky Sentences, Style, Transitions, and Clichés. Then do one last spelling, punctuation, and grammar pass in Word or Google Docs.

Here’s what each one does for a nonfiction book:

• Summary gives you scores for the whole document, so you can see which problems show up most before you start fixing anything.
• Chapter Critique reads one chapter and tells you what’s working and where it drags.
• Readability flags the paragraphs that are hardest to read, which matters most in the chapters where you explain your method. (That’s where all of us slow down the least, because we know the material so well.)
• Sticky Sentences finds sentences packed with filler words, so you can cut them down.
• Style, Transitions, and Clichés catch passive voice, choppy jumps between ideas, and phrases readers have seen a hundred times.

One more check matters for nonfiction: Consistency. It catches it when you’ve called your framework three different names across six chapters, which happens more than you’d think. (Ask me how I know.)

ProWritingAid also has tools that will write for you, like Sparks and Rephrase. I skip those on book chapters. Your readers are picking up your book because they want you, so I use the feedback tools (the reports and Chapter Critique) and make every change myself.

Does ProWritingAid Work on a Mac and in Google Docs?

Yes to both. ProWritingAid has add-ons for Word (including Word for Mac now) and Google Docs, so you can edit right where you’re writing. It also works with Scrivener projects.

They’ve even got browser extensions, so you can use it on WordPress or wherever else you might be writing online.

Just a heads up though – the Google Docs integration can be a bit finicky with really long documents. My fix for that is below.

Here’s a list of platforms and tools that ProWritingAid integrates with (that I know of)

Who Should Use ProWritingAid (and Who Doesn’t Need It)?

ProWritingAid is great for:

• Authors (fiction or non-fiction) who want to polish their work
• Bloggers and content creators aiming for more engaging posts
• Coaches and consultants who write a lot of emails and client materials

It’s more than you need if you:

• Just need quick, basic edits
• Don’t have time to learn new software
• Only write short emails and social posts

It can slow down on very long documents, and all those reports can feel like a lot the first time you open them. Start with the three reports above and add the others once those feel easy. You’re not being graded on how many reports you run.

Every one of my clients has used ProWritingAid, and they all say it makes editing so much easier. They also say it can feel a little overwhelming at first, which is why, when I work with someone, I give them the exact reports to run and when to run them. Not every book needs every report.

That’s one of the great things about having a book coach in your corner who’s already done your developmental edit with you. They know your sticky points, so they can steer you toward the low-hanging fruit and the problems that show up all through your book. Then, when you hand your book to a line and copy editor, that editor gets to spend their time on your ideas, because your typos are already gone. It turns editing into a pretty easy task (as easy as editing ever is, anyway).

What Went Wrong When I Edited a 75,000-Word Novel

After we whipped up a 73,000 word novel (we didn’t actually whip anything; it whipped us… for months) we did a huge developmental edit on all three books. I talk about what it’s like writing with a co-writer in this post. After the developmental edits, we jumped right into line edits. This is where things got frustrating.

We both have lifetime subscriptions to ProWritingAid. All 3 books were written in Google Docs, and we wanted to edit using the ProWritingAid add-on for Docs.

When you’ve got a big document, Google Docs starts to slow down. Our doc was 75,000 words. When you start adding a lot of suggested edits and other comments, Google Docs gives up on life. We tried running a report with PWA in Google Docs and we nearly lost our entire book from the resulting crash.

Lesson learned: We saved 4 extra copies.

Solution: If you’re writing your book in Google Docs, write it in 10-15k chunks, with each chunk in a new document. You can save all these chunks in one folder in Google Drive. Once you get to edits, the ProWritingAid Google Docs add-on will work fine with each segment. Once your book is fully edited, you can combine it into one document. Plan this before you start, because copying text from one Google Doc to another loses your comments.

Save this post for later ✅

Update: the Mac problem is fixed! ProWritingAid now has a Word add-in for Mac. In Word, go to Insert, then Add-ins, then Get Add-ins, search for ProWritingAid, and click Add. It shows up as a ProWritingAid button on your Home tab.

If you’d rather not work in Word, you can use ProWritingAid’s desktop app instead. It’s a separate application downloadable from the ProWritingAid site. You can copy/paste your book into the ProWritingAid desktop app and run PWA reports, as well as edit your book, from within the PWA app.

It’s a great app, and I would have used it, but it does strip formatting and comments, including prior Track Changes. Also, when you confirm the edits in the PWA desktop app, it inserts them without Track Changes, even if you have Track Changes turned on. Because I was working with a co-writer, I needed to have Track Changes so that she could accept or reject all changes I made.

Solution: The ProWritingAid desktop app is a great solution for authors writing alone, but may be trickier for those who co-write or work with an editor in Track Changes.

ProWritingAid also has a Chrome extension. I keep this enabled only for Gmail. Be aware if you enable it anywhere you can write in rich text, it can add some funky hard coded CSS to your text input. For example, it always gave me trouble when I had it enabled on WordPress. It’s great for making sure your emails are free of silly their vs. there typos before sending them off, though!

I still use ProWritingAid on every book, because with a little planning, I could have avoided all of it.

Over time, your writing truly will benefit from the ProWritingAid reports. I’ve noticed that I make silly mistakes way less, and my voice is so much stronger now.

It helps you catch things you might otherwise miss because you’re too in the weeds with your book to see the issues. When you read something as much as we writers read our own work, all the errors start to disappear. Our brains know what’s supposed to be there and supply it for us, even if it’s not really there. That’s how we end up with silly they’re vs their mistakes!

Your readers catch them, though. In a survey of 355 avid readers by author Gigi Griffis, 45% said they had given up on a book because of typos or bad writing.

Does ProWritingAid Replace a Human Editor?

No. You want both. Even if you get a professional editor to edit your book, you want it to be as clean as possible before you hand it over to them. This will save you money and save the editor time fixing little things, so they can focus on deeper edits that will make your book stronger overall.

If you’ve ever read your own chapter ten times and still missed the same typo, your editor knows that feeling, too. Editors are human, too. In proofreading studies by Dr. Ray Panko at the University of Hawaii, professional proofreaders caught an average of 66% of word errors (like a wrong word or swapped letters) and 81% of nonword errors (like numbers, spacing, and punctuation). So even with a pro, up to 1 in 3 word errors can slip through, which is why you want both.

I asked Lewis from The Novel Smithy what he thought about writers running their manuscripts through ProWritingAid before sending them to him for developmental edits, and here’s what he said:

Whenever I take on a new client and review their manuscript for the first time, I always cross my fingers that they’ve completed at least some editing of their draft. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case, which means I spend a lot of my time sifting through unclear sentences and typos rather than getting to analyze their story itself. ProWritingAid can help you catch run on sentences, passive voice, grammar, you name it—all of which will make your editor’s job easier and the feedback you get better. It’s really a win-win for both of you.

Lewis Jorstad, The Novel Smithy

I worked with Lewis on developmental edits of my first book and was really impressed with his process. Check him out at TheNovelSmithy.com. He runs a writing blog and offers editing services, too.

So, use ProWritingAid to clean your manuscript up as much as possible before sending it off to an editor. It doesn’t hurt to do one last run with PWA before publishing to Amazon, too.

If you want to give ProWritingAid a try and get up to 20% off, use my code: ProWritingAid Discount – Up to 20% Off. (This is an affiliate link, by the way. If you choose to purchase a subscription to PWA with my link, I may get a small commission.)

Is ProWritingAid Worth It?

Ultimately, for me, it’s a big YES. And they seem to be working on improving things all the time, too. Since I first wrote this, they’ve added a Word add-in for Mac, Chapter Critique, and whole-manuscript reports, and they redesigned the whole app in July 2026. So they’re clearly still listening to writers.

If you want to try it, start with the free plan on one chapter, then upgrade when you’re ready to edit the whole book. You can get up to 20% off with my affiliate link.

Your nonfiction book bestie

Hi, I’m Holly.

I’m Holly Ostrout, a nonfiction book and publishing coach. I’ve worked on books since 2014 and coached nonfiction authors since 2018. I help entrepreneurs (mostly women) write one Damn Good Book™ that brings in clients, lands speaking gigs, and makes their business simpler, smarter, and more visible.

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