How Reader Pulse reads your book
Reader Pulse is an AI estimate. Robin (what Robin is) reads your chapters and predicts how readers of your genre would respond to each one: where they would stay hooked, and where they might put the book down. No real readers are involved, and no reader data is collected. It is one careful reading of your book, not a measurement of an audience.
This page explains how that reading works. For the step-by-step, see Reader Pulse on the web or Reader Pulse on mobile.
What Robin reads
- Your chapters. Robin reads the text of each chapter. When a book is too long to read in full, Robin reads a short summary of each chapter instead. When that happens, the printable cards (and the report on mobile) say so, because hook and pacing scores are less precise from a summary.
- Your book's details. The title, genre and sub-genres, and the summary and description you gave the book. Robin uses the genre to judge each chapter by what readers of that genre expect: a slow, quiet chapter can be right for literary fiction and a risk in a thriller.
- Your Story Hub, if you use it. Characters, world, places, and glossary. Robin uses them to notice when a chapter contradicts something you defined, and lists that under the chapter's concerns.
Robin reads a few chapters at a time, with a short outline of the whole book alongside, so each chapter is judged as part of the larger arc and not on its own.
While a run is in progress, Robin's notes appear as they read. On the web, the finished report keeps those notes in How Robin read your book, so you can see how Robin reached the scores for this particular run.
What the scores mean
Every chapter gets five scores from 0 to 100:
| Score | The question Robin asks |
|---|---|
| Opening hook | Does the first page grab attention? Is there a question, a tension, or a strong image that keeps a reader going? |
| Closing hook | Does the chapter end with a reason to keep reading: an open question, an emotional punch, or forward momentum? |
| Pacing | Is the mix of action, dialogue, and description right for the genre? Are there slow patches where the prose gets dense or repeats itself? |
| Tension | Are there stakes, conflict, or pressure that fit the genre? Even a quiet chapter should carry some. |
| Emotional resonance | Do readers feel connected to the characters and what happens to them? Does the emotional payoff feel earned? |
Robin uses the same scale for all of them:
- 0 to 30: a serious problem, most readers of the genre would struggle here
- 31 to 60: average, it works but does not pull the reader along
- 61 to 80: good, readers keep going willingly
- 81 to 100: excellent, readers are deeply hooked
Each chapter also gets an engagement score, which is Robin's overall judgement of that chapter, and a drop-off risk (low, medium, or high).
The book's overall engagement is simply the average of the chapter engagement scores, and the strongest and weakest chapters are the highest and lowest of them. Those are calculated, not guessed. The trend and the summary paragraph are written by Robin from the chapter results.
Why results can change between runs
Robin's reading is not fixed. Each run is a fresh reading, so the same chapter can come back with somewhat different scores and different wording, even when you have not changed a word.
So read the report for its patterns rather than its exact numbers: which chapters sit low, which score is weakest across the book, and which concerns come up again and again. A difference of a few points between two runs is not a sign that a chapter got better or worse.
One report per book
Each new full-book analysis replaces the previous report. Reader Pulse does not keep earlier reports yet, so you cannot open an older run next to a newer one inside the app.
If you want to compare before and after a rewrite, save the printable cards as a PDF before you run Reader Pulse again: Print cards then Print / Save as PDF on the web, or Cards then Save as PDF on mobile.
Running Reader Pulse on a single chapter updates only that chapter's results. The rest of the report stays as it was.
Who can see your writing
- Your book and its report stay in your workspace. Reader Pulse only runs for people who can already open the book. Other writers cannot see your chapters or your results.
- Your writing is not used for training. Under the privacy policy, your writing is not used to train AI models, ours or anyone else's, unless you opt in. When an outside service does the reading for Robin, it is set up not to train its models on your data.
A compass, not a verdict
Reader Pulse tells you where one careful reader thinks the pull is strong and where it slackens. You know your story and your readers. Take what helps, and leave what doesn't.
See also: Robin overview | Reader Pulse on the web | Reader Pulse on mobile