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.
Open Tools → Collab to manage who has access.
Roles
Every collaborator has one of four roles:
| Role | What it allows |
|---|---|
| Administrate | Everything, including inviting and removing other collaborators |
| Edit | Edit any part of the book, and comment |
| Read | Read and comment, but not edit |
| Frozen | Read a fixed version of the book — new changes are not shown |
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 roles or invite people. To change someone's role, pick a new one from the dropdown in their row — it takes effect immediately.
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.
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 Collaborator 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.
Working with other people's edits
Which changes you see is controlled from the Review menu; see Review Menu. The usual setting while editing someone else's work is View Other'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.
To work through them, put the cursor in a change and use the review toolbar: the green checkmark accepts, the red cross rejects, and the arrows move to the previous or next change.
The Edits button in a collaborator's row jumps to a view of just that person's changes — handy when two people have been over the same chapter and you want to consider one set at a time.
Edits the AI made
Anything the AI agent changes is tracked the same way, and reviewed with the same toolbar. It is attributed to whoever ran it, labelled as their AI rather than their own typing, and shown in its own colour — so a passage your co-author wrote and a passage their agent rewrote are never confused for one another.
A new Agent conversation 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.
These appear whatever the Review menu is set to, including View No Edits. Nobody asked for them the way they asked for their own typing, so they stay pending until somebody accepts or rejects them.
Changes with nowhere in the text to point at are listed in the agent panel instead, at the top of its list: 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 Revert. Below them, one entry per chapter shows how many edits are pending there; click its title to jump to the first one. An Accept all / Revert all pair above the whole list resolves everything at once.
Comments
Comments are separate from edits: they annotate the text without changing it. Add one with the Insert Comment button on the toolbar.
Each comment can be edited, deleted, and marked resolved or unresolved. Resolved comments stay attached to the document but are hidden unless you turn on Resolved Comments in the Review menu, so a settled discussion stays available without cluttering the page.
Your AI agent can leave comments too, the same way it makes edits: they appear labelled as your AI rather than your own hand, and you can edit, resolve, or delete them exactly like one of your own. It can also remove a comment it left for you, if you ask — but not one of your own, or a collaborator's.
Connecting Claude, ChatGPT, or another AI assistant
Besides the Agent panel built into Inkwell, you can connect an external AI assistant — for example Claude.ai or ChatGPT — so it can read and, if you let it, edit your book from outside the app. Open Tools → Connect Claude/ChatGPT to manage this (also reachable from the Agent panel itself, the first time you open it).
For each book, a checkbox controls whether connected assistants can reach it at all, and — once that's on — a Mode dropdown appears below it, controlling how much they can do: Read-only, Comment, or Read-write, the same three modes as the in-app Agent panel. Different books can be set to different modes; an assistant that can freely edit one book might only be allowed to leave comments on another. Changes take effect immediately for every assistant you've already connected — no need to reconnect.
Copy the Connector URL into your assistant's connector settings (for Claude.ai: Settings → Connectors → Add custom connector; for ChatGPT: Settings → Apps & Connectors → Create), then approve access when Inkwell asks. One connection can reach every book you've toggled on, at whatever mode you've set for each. The Connected assistants list shows everything currently connected, with a button to revoke any of them.
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.