Collaboration
More than one person can work on a project at the same time. Everyone's changes are recorded, attributed, and reversible, so you can hand a manuscript to an editor without losing track of what they did to it.
The Users icon in the left rail opens the panel where all of it lives: who is on the project, what they may do, and whose writing has to be approved. It takes the place of the manuscript while it is open; click the icon again to get back to your writing. It is also in Tools → Users, and for anybody but an administrator, the users tracked button on the review bar under the editor opens it too. A short tour walks through the panel the first time you open it.
Roles
Three questions, asked separately on each person's row.
Admin is the checkbox: can this person control access to the project — invite, remove, change what everybody else may do. It is on its own because it is independent of the rest.
Role is what they may do to the manuscript.
| Role | What it allows |
|---|---|
| Approve | Edit any part of the book, and settle other people's tracked changes |
| Edit | Edit any part of the book, but settle nobody else's changes |
| Read | Read and comment, but not edit |
| Frozen | Read a fixed version of the book — new changes are not shown |
Approve is the one to reach for when you are bringing in help. Somebody on Edit can write anything they like but cannot settle somebody else's tracked change, which is what you want from a copy-editor: their work is answered by whoever commissioned it, not by the next person to open the chapter.
Changes is whether what they write is tracked — see Tracking changes below.
A collaborator does not need a paid plan of their own. Their role on the project is what decides what they can do with it — see Your Account and Plan.
Frozen is the unusual one. It pins a collaborator to the version of the book as it stood, so they can keep reading and referring to it while you carry on editing. It is useful during final proofing, when you do not want a proofreader's page references shifting under them.
Only an administrator can change any of this. To change somebody, pick from the dropdowns in their row or tick Admin — it takes effect immediately.
Administration is only ever removed by unticking the box. Because an administrator can already do everything Edit, Read and Frozen allow, those three are greyed out in their row: picking one would be a demotion the dropdown has no business making.
The last dropdown in a row limits somebody to specific chapters, the same way an invitation link can; everything else in the book is hidden from them. It is greyed out for administrators, who always see the whole project.
Tracking changes
The Changes dropdown on each row says whether the book marks what that person writes:
| Changes | What happens to their writing |
|---|---|
| As written | It goes straight in |
| Track | It is marked as a tracked change — theirs to accept |
| Suggest | It is marked as a tracked change — for somebody else |
Marked edits appear as tracked changes until somebody accepts them — for everybody on the project, not just for whoever set it. There is no private version of this and no second opinion to keep in step: one person works through a round of changes and it is worked through. Going through what your own AI wrote is a separate, private review — see Edits the AI made.
The difference between Track and Suggest is who has the last word over the person's own changes. Track is for an author who wants their changes visible to their co-authors as they go — you can see what they did this week, and they tidy up after themselves. Suggest is the editorial one: neither the green checkmark nor the red cross is theirs to press over their own changes, because withdrawing a proposal is as much a decision about it as accepting one. They can still rewrite or delete the passage like any other editing; what they cannot do is settle it.
Settling other people's changes is the role's business, not this one's. Somebody can be on Approve and on Suggest at once — a co-author who reviews the copy-editor's work while their own still goes past somebody else.
Setting it up for everyone
Track Changes… at the top of the Users panel walks you through it and fills in everybody's rows:
- Whose changes are tracked? Tick the people, or start from Everyone, Everyone but me, Only me or Nobody and adjust. Collaborators who can only read are greyed out, since there is nothing of theirs to mark.
- Who can approve changes? For each person, whether they may approve other people's changes (which puts them on Approve; administrators always can), and — for the people being tracked — whether they approve their own (Track) or leave that to somebody else (Suggest).
- When does the tracking start? Now, from the beginning, or from a date you pick. If some of them are already tracked, you can keep their current start.
The last page lists everything that is about to change, person by person, and warns you if somebody's changes would have nobody else to approve them. Nothing is changed until you press Apply, and you can go Back to any step first. Afterwards, each row can still be adjusted on its own. The wizard opens on how the project is set up now, so it is also a quick way to see that.
Once applied, the rows in the panel say the same thing:
From when
Tracking runs from a date, shown under the dropdown and set to the moment you chose it. That is almost always what you want: a chapter your editor wrote with you last month was not a suggestion, and marking them today should not reopen it.
When you do want it reopened, move the date back — or use Everything they have written, which makes it retroactive over everything of theirs in the project. Nothing is lost either way. Every edit is in the record whatever the date says, so moving it is a change of mind you can change back; and an accept somebody made before the project started marking them still stands.
Inviting by email
Click Invite by Email, enter the address, choose a role, add a message if you like, and send. The invitation arrives by email.
The recipient clicks Accept Invite in that email, after which the project appears in their own projects list.
Someone new to Inkwell who signs up to accept gets a 30-day free trial when they pick a plan, and you get a month of credit once they pay — see Referring other writers.
If they are signed in to Inkwell under a different address from the one you invited — a work address rather than a personal one, say — Inkwell stops to check first, showing both addresses. They can accept as the account they are already in, or sign out and switch to the invited one. Either way the invitation is used up once it is accepted.
Opening a link to the project itself — rather than the one in the invitation — does not grant anything. Until the invitation is accepted they see You don't have access to this project, naming the address they are signed in with, so a link sent to the wrong address diagnoses itself.
Invitations that have been sent but not yet accepted are listed separately, with a Cancel Invite button if you change your mind.
Inviting by link
Invite by Link produces a URL that grants access to whoever opens it. Choose the Role the link should confer, and — this is the useful part — optionally restrict it to specific chapters. Anyone using the link gets access to only those chapters.
That makes it practical to send a subject-matter expert the two chapters they need to check without exposing the rest of the manuscript. The link updates as you change the role or the chapter selection; use the copy button to put it on the clipboard.
Removing a collaborator
Remove in a person's row revokes their access, after a confirmation. Their past edits and comments stay in the document and in the history — removing someone does not unpick their work.
The project disappears from their projects list straight away, and a tab they still have open on it says You don't have access to this project. Their local copy is discarded with it, so an old link or bookmark will not open the manuscript again. Any AI assistant they had connected loses the project too — see Connecting an AI assistant.
Working with other people's edits
Chapters containing edits are marked in the chapter list:
Inside a chapter, each collaborator's changes are highlighted in their own colour. Hover over a change to see who made it and when — "Jane Doe · Sep 14, 3:02 pm". Consecutive edits by the same person show as one change, so if they came back to it later its time is a span from the first edit to the last, such as "Sep 14, 3:02 – 3:40 pm". Times are to the minute, in your own time zone.
To work through them, put the cursor in a change and use the review bar along the bottom of the editor: the green checkmark accepts, the red cross rejects, and the arrows move to the previous or next change. If a collaborator's edits are not marked at all, nobody has set their Changes to Track or Suggest — the bar says No users tracked, and that button opens the Track Changes wizard.
Deleted text stays readable until the deletion is accepted, and you can copy it out: drag across the struck-through words to select some of them, or double-click to select the whole deletion, then copy. Clicking a deletion without dragging puts the cursor there, as before.
Moved passages
Text that is moved rather than rewritten is marked as one move. That is what happens when you drag a selection to somewhere else in the chapter, when you cut it and paste it elsewhere in the same chapter, and when your AI rearranges a chapter for you — its paragraphs, or the items of a list, the rows of a table, or the paragraphs inside a callout or quote. A paragraph your AI moves and rewords a little on the way is a move too, with only the words it changed marked as its edit.
A moved paragraph has a bar down its side in the colour of whoever moved it, and where it used to be there is a single line, Moved down ↓ or Moved up ↑. A phrase moved within a paragraph, or from one paragraph into another, is underlined twice in that colour instead, with a small moved marker in the line it came from. Click the marker to jump to the text.
Accept keeps the text where it is now; Reject puts it back where it was. The words themselves are not marked as new, because they are not: any edits inside the moved text, by anyone, keep their own marking and are accepted or rejected on their own, and comments on it travel with it.
Cutting text in one chapter and pasting it into another is a move too. Above the text where it arrives there is a line, Moved from “…”, naming the chapter it came from, and where it was cut there is a line Moved to “…” → instead of the struck-through text a deletion leaves. Click either line to go to the other chapter. The edits inside the text come with it, still marked as whoever made them, and so do the comments on it, replies and all.
Accept and Reject work from either chapter, and settle the move in both. Reject puts the text back where it was cut, with anything written inside it since; undoing the paste does the same. To act on the move from the chapter it left, put the cursor beside the Moved to line, or use the arrows on the review bar to reach it.
Text moves this way when you paste it in the same window you cut it in, within a day, and it is either whole paragraphs or words from within one paragraph. Otherwise — a cut that ran from the middle of one paragraph into the next, a paste in another window, or a place it was cut from that has since been written in — it arrives as new text, as any paste does, and its comments still go with it.
Copying and pasting is not a move — the original stays where it was.
Edits the AI made
What your AI agent changes is yours to look over before it counts as your writing. Until you have, it is labelled as your AI rather than your own typing and shown in its own colour — so a passage you wrote and a passage your agent rewrote are never confused for one another — and you go through it with the same toolbar.
The Agent starts in Read-only mode by default: it can look at your manuscript but cannot change it, comment on it, or add chapters — asking it to edit just gets you a note saying it can't. Comment mode lets it leave and resolve comments — useful for a review pass where you want its opinion without it touching your prose — but still refuses to edit text or add chapters. Read-write lifts every restriction. Switch modes with the dropdown in the panel's header when you want something different; Inkwell remembers your choice for next time.
Your own agent's edits are shown one reply at a time: the ones under the chip you have open in the agent panel appear whatever the project has decided, and the rest stay out of the way until you open theirs. See Reviewing what it changed.
That review is between you and your AI, and nobody else's business. No role or standing gates it, and accepting there settles nothing for anybody else: it says you have read the change and it is yours now. Reject takes the change back out of the book, for everyone.
To your collaborators your agent is simply you. Its work reaches them as your edits, in your colour, and is marked for them exactly when your own typing would be — whether or not you have looked at it yet. So on Edit or Approve, nobody else is shown it at all. On Track or Suggest, they see it as your tracked change from the moment the agent makes it, and once you have accepted it from your AI it turns into your tracked change for you too, to be settled the way the rest of your writing is: by you on Track, by somebody else on Suggest. The reverse holds as well: a colleague's agent's rewrites arrive here as theirs.
An assistant you have connected from outside Inkwell — Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, or another — leaves its work here in exactly the same form; see The Agent for how to connect one.
Changes with nowhere in the text to point at are listed on the chip instead: Book settings for anything to do with the book's properties, and Book order for chapters added, removed, or reordered — each with its own Accept and Reject. The chip also lists each chapter with changes still pending; click its title to jump to the first one. Accept the rest / Reject the rest settles everything the chip still has.
Comments
Comments are separate from edits: they annotate the text without changing it. Select the passage and press Ctrl-Alt-M, or use the Insert Comment button on the toolbar. To comment on every place a phrase turns up, look for it in Find & Replace and comment on each result from there.
A comment is a conversation, and it appears in the text itself — between the paragraph it is about and the next one, the way a review comment sits under the line it is about. The page breaks for it: the conversation sits on the workspace background rather than on the page, so the manuscript visibly stops where a comment interrupts it and picks up again below. The passage is highlighted and marked with a small numbered bubble, and the thread below carries the same number, so a paragraph with three comments on it never leaves you guessing which is which. Hovering over a thread brightens the passage it belongs to.
A paragraph that a quotation, a list or a display equation interrupts is still one paragraph, so the conversation waits until it has finished: it goes after the text that carries on beyond the quotation, rather than between the paragraph and the quotation.
Writing one
The comment box is a proper editor, and it borrows the one toolbar you already use: put the cursor in a comment and the main toolbar above the page acts on the comment instead of the manuscript. Bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, bulleted and numbered lists, links, Clear Formatting and Undo all work there; everything a comment cannot hold — tables, figures, footnotes, index entries — greys out until you click back into the text. Enter starts a new line, so a comment can lay out two possible fixes on two lines rather than running them together. Ctrl-Enter sends it; Escape closes the box and keeps what you had written for later.
Nothing is recorded until you send, so a comment you think better of leaves no trace.
Replying
Reply adds to the thread. Anybody who can comment can reply to anybody's thread, including a reader whose role is Read — reading a manuscript and saying what is wrong with it is most of what an editor does.
You can edit and delete your own messages; an administrator can remove anybody's.
Deleting the opening message deletes the whole conversation, replies and all — so that is yours to do only while the thread is still untouched. Once somebody else has replied to it or left a mark on it, their words are theirs, and it takes an administrator to clear the thread away. Your own replies stay yours to withdraw either way.
Reacting, and settling a thread
Add a reaction — the smiley with a plus, under the conversation — lets everyone in a thread leave their own mark on it, and choose what it says: 👍, ✅, 👀, 🤔, 🎉 or 👎. That is how an author and an editor can each sign off on the same thread and have the two be told apart. Your own mark is the button for changing it, and choosing the one you already have takes it back.
Your mark is also how you clear a thread out of your way: it stops being one that is waiting on you, and the panel below can hide the threads you have marked — a manuscript ticked ✅ down its length reads as though the round were finished, because for you it is.
A mark is how a thread is settled. There is nothing else to do once everyone who cares has ticked it: the conversation stays on the page, where it is still worth reading, and it is out of everybody's way who has marked it.
Naming somebody
Type @ in a comment and pick a collaborator. Their name appears as a chip in the comment, and the thread is flagged as waiting on them. Only people with access to the project are offered.
Finding the ones that need you
The Comments icon in the left rail opens every comment in the book in one list, newest message first within each chapter, with a badge showing how many are waiting on you. A thread is waiting on you if you are in it — you wrote in it, or it names you — and you have not answered: somebody else had the last word, and you have left no mark on it.
Click any row to jump to the passage, in whichever chapter it is in — which makes working through a round of editorial comments a matter of going down the list.
Two controls across the top narrow what you are shown. The first is how close a thread is to you: Everything, Includes Me — the threads you have written in or been named in — Waiting on me, or Nothing, which takes every comment off the page so you can read the manuscript clean. The second is a row of chips, one per mark plus one for the threads you have not marked; every chip starts switched on, and switching one off hides the threads carrying that mark of yours.
A filter narrows the manuscript, not just the list. A comment the panel is not showing is not highlighted in the text either: no numbered marker in the margin, and no conversation under the paragraph. That is what makes it worth setting one — you can work a filter at a time through a round of editing and read the pages as they will be, rather than through a hedge of other people's remarks. Nothing is lost by hiding it, including a reply you had half written. The panel says how many are hidden and Clear brings them all back, and while anything is hidden the Comments icon in the rail carries a dot to say so.
Filters are remembered in this browser, so the one you set today is still set tomorrow.
The AI's comments
Your AI agent can hold up its end of a conversation too: it leaves comments, replies to yours, and marks a thread with an emoji. Its messages are labelled as your AI rather than your own hand. You can edit or delete them exactly like one of your own, and it can remove or rewrite what it left — but never one of your messages, or a collaborator's, and it cannot delete a thread you have answered any more than you could delete one of its.
Reverting
Everything above is recorded in the project's history, so if a collaboration goes wrong you can roll a chapter — or the whole book — back to any earlier point. See Tools.