Bird’s EyeYour whole book, from above.

What Bird’s Eye shows

Every chapter and scene, found for you, with its word count against your target. Set that target in Bird’s Eye’s settings: Target per chapter.

Open a chapter for its length, reading time and scenes, a bar with how many words it is over or under the target, and an About: line with the words that chapter uses much more than the rest of the book.

Reading time assumes 260 words a minute: the average silent reading speed for fiction in Marc Brysbaert’s 2019 review of reading-speed studies. The whole book gets a line too, with “so far” while the last chapter is still open.

Further down, Characters shows who appears where.

How it finds them

Automatically, or by the heading levels you choose. Atticus books use their own chapters. The details: how chapters and scenes are found.

Your last chapter runs to the end of the manuscript.

The first scan runs by itself when you open the Edit tab, or click Scan now. After that, Bird’s Eye scans again quietly while you write. If a new scan finds no headings where the last one did, it keeps your chapters. In a manuscript of several documents, such as Atticus’s one per chapter, each document is a chapter.

Free or Pro?

The outline and word counts are free. Pro adds pacing, how much of each chapter is dialogue, and a spreadsheet export.

With Pro, an open chapter also shows whether it’s longer or shorter than your average chapter, any scene 40% or more longer than your average scene, its dialogue against narrative, and its adverbs and passive voice per 1,000 words. The export has a row per chapter and scene, and ends with who appears where.

Related

Related checks