How AutoCrit Helps You Plan and Finish Your Book with Bekah Brinkmeier

You don’t need a robot to write your book. You need clear feedback, a smarter revision process, and a way to see what your draft is really doing on the page. We’re joined by Becca Brinkmeier, partnerships and project manager at AutoCrit, plus a full-time author and ghostwriter with dozens of books behind her, to talk about how AI-assisted editing can support real writers without generating content or stealing your voice.

We dig into what AutoCrit is built for: planning, writing, editing, analyzing, and formatting manuscripts for publication. Becca breaks down the Story Analyzer and how it delivers developmental-style feedback on plot threads, foreshadowing, POV, pacing, and worldbuilding. We also talk line editing reports that surface patterns like tense consistency issues and other habits that quietly weaken prose, plus how comparing your style to genre bestsellers can help you meet reader expectations while staying authentically you.

For planners and discovery writers alike, we explore tools like Story Builder and reverse outlining with Backwards Blueprint, including how those features can help nonfiction authors fix structure, cut redundancy, and reorganize chapters without rewriting from scratch. We also cover Market Fuel for market analysis, keywords, and positioning, and why that matters for self-publishing and even for a traditional book proposal.

Privacy comes up for ghostwriters and anyone working with sensitive drafts. Becca shares how the platform approaches secure access and consent, and we end with practical workflow wins like collaboration, offline mode, and high-velocity dictation for getting more words without living at your desk. If this helps, subscribe, share it with a writer friend, and leave a review so more authors can find the conversation.

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Transcript

Meet Becca And Her Writing Life

Joel 0:12

Hi, everybody. Welcome to today's interview. My name is Joel Pitney. I'm the founder of Launch My Book, and I'm here with the pleasure of speaking to Becca Brinkmeier. She's the projects and the partnerships and project manager at AutoCrit, which is a very cool uh writer assist uh platform that we're going to talk all about today. Um, and she's also an author coach and a writing instructor, among other things. Um I met Becca in New Orleans. We we attended a conference called the Writer MBA Conference, um, which I highly recommend to anybody who likes to do writing conferences. It happens every year. And I attended her one of her workshops about the company she works for, Autocrit, and I was super inspired by it. I thought, hey, wow, um, this this actually sounds like something really useful that I would use as a writer, and that the people who um pay attention to our platform who are writing might also be interested in as well. So I wanted to talk today. So welcome, Becca.

Becca 1:07

Thank you so much. Yes, New Orleans was a great time, wasn't it? Such a cool city.

Joel 1:12

Yeah, it really is. I had never been there before in in any significant way. So it was it was cool to check it out, especially in the springtime.

Becca 1:18

Yes, and it's beautiful. It's all a cold place. This is warm and lovely.

Joel 1:24

Totally. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, so I think uh is there anything else you wanted to say about your bio beyond what I mentioned?

Becca 1:31

Or so um, you know, as as you said, I do work with a lot of our authors here at Autocrypt. Um, you'll see my face all over the platform. I am on our socials, I am doing our um some of our teaching here in the academy as well as author coaching. But um what I also do is I write full-time. So I am a full-time author and ghostwriter. I have um some USA Today best tell uh best selling titles. At this point, I'm actually up to 87 works over the last 15 years. That's crazy. Yeah, it's uh I look at it and I'm like, oh my gosh, I can't believe that my creativity just keeps coming up with stuff. But um I don't, uh it's knock on wood, but we're still going strong. There's still stories I want to tell. And this is um, I am literally doing my dream job, like getting to write and create, and you know, being able to find success and be able to support my family like this. Like this is this is what what it is for me. And so being able to help guide other people through AutoCrit's different um services and the coaching piece, it's I am living a happy life over here, getting to help other people find that publishing success. I know that's something that drives you as well.

Joel 2:43

Totally. Then that's why I wanted to talk, you know, because because we're we we're trying to help everybody as much as we can here.

What AutoCrit Does And Does Not

Joel 2:50

Um so uh maybe to dive in, I mean, you know, I I I went to this workshop that you gave. Uh it was all about the autocrit platform. And I'm gonna butcher this, but uh to me, what I was seeing is it's an AI-assisted platform that helps people to be more profit uh more productive, more proficient, more compelling writers. It's an actual the whole platform is designed to help you get better at being a writer and writing things that readers are gonna love and do it in a way that's more efficient for you. Um and so how how do I do? Is that does that sound Yeah?

Becca 3:21

No, that that is great. So what we are is we are a platform where you can plan, write, edit, analyze, and format your books for publication. You are correct that we are an AI assist um platform. So we don't generate any of that content for you, but we do use a closed system with algorithmic and editorial AI to help you find areas where you might need improvement. We have over 30 different line editing reports. We have an extremely um powerful world-class story analyzer, which will help you get some of that developmental and beta reader type feedback on your story. You can go chapter by chapter, you can get the whole thing analyzed, and it's going to tell you everything from did you actually close those plot threads? I know I'm guilty of that because every now and then I'm like, oh, we forgot. And um my beta readers are like, this guy was supposed to be dead. He is not currently dead. Whoopsies. Um, then we also have things like foreshadowing, your D POV. It's going to give you analysis of your world building. You know, no matter what genre you write in, and we do have this for nonfiction as well. I don't want to forget about my nonfiction writers, but no matter what you're writing, you want to make sure that you are giving the best product that you can to your readers. So we have our story analyzer feature, and then we have our backwards blueprint, which is reverse outlining with a click of a button. Um, I don't outline before I write unless forced to. I am a Plancer hardcore. I'm actually captain of Teen Plantzer for our novel 90 writing challenge. And um, being able to reverse outline, it's so great to pull out those tropes, to pull out those themes, to actually get confirmation that I'm hitting the genre conventions of the book that I try to write. If I'm writing a romantic suspense and they're like, this is psychological horror, um, then clearly something has gone wrong. And I need to go in and make sure that that romance plot line, which is supposed to be leading um through that genre, that is the expectation, romantic suspense, you know, has romance goes through it, then I need to make sure that I um amplify that a little bit better. So it's gonna give me all of this feedback. We have a great new marketing tool as well that's going to give you that market analysis piece, promo copy, et cetera. But um, we try to give you all of the data and all of the analysis in one place so that you can make the decisions you need to make for your book. So we don't change it, but we give you suggestions.

Joel 5:46

That's awesome. Yeah. So, okay, so in terms of like, you know, I have no idea

Story Builder Reverse Outlines And Market Fit

Joel 5:52

what this is. I'm like, all right, I go to autocrit, I sign up. Um, so is it best to already have a draft of a manuscript? You plug it in, and then the autocrit tools help you do all the different things you talked about, or can you use it as a getting started tool, or both?

Becca 6:09

Oh, both. Um, so we have a really cool feature called the Story Builder. And the Story Builder, you can actually just put in a couple ideas. Let's say I want to write a cozy mystery, and that's what I know. I want to write a cozy mystery, I want it to be paranormal, and maybe it has a haunted bakery, right? So you can put all of just that information in, and you maybe the only world building you know is I don't know, it's a small town because a lot of cozies are in small towns. I want it to be next to a lake because I love the water, and I want it to be set during autumn. So you put in just that information, like that's not anywhere close to a story. That's just a vague idea. You can put that into our story builder and it will analyze the promise of the premise. It will give you suggestions of how you could develop that out. It will give you suggestions for your world building and for your characters. And then you've got this all fleshed out. It'll even help you build out your beat sheet so that you have a fully fleshed story idea. You click market fuel, and you're gonna be able to get that validation of where does this story that started out with a haunted bakery, cozy mystery, where does that fit into the market? What kind of marketing things am I needing to be thinking about when writing my cozy, when looking at similar titles that could be close to my paranormal bakery? Or what kind of keywords should I be thinking about as I write? And that is such a cool planning tool because um, you know, if you write for commercial gain like myself, um, I love being able to pay my rent with my royalties, but I do need to write books that my uh target audience wants. And being able to have that validation when you're kind of waffling between two ideas, that's fantastic.

Joel 7:52

Absolutely. Okay, that's that's cool. Um so uh let's see here.

Nonfiction Structure Privacy And Dictation

Joel 8:01

Does this work for nonfiction as well? Or are we talking mostly fiction?

Becca 8:04

No, it works for nonfiction as well. So we actually have um so we have really in-depth demos available to anyone who signs up. So market fuel and story analyzer and backwards blueprint are all part of our autocrit pro membership. Um we have one-on-ones, so you can actually meet with uh, we are 100% human support. So you can meet with one of us to help figure out how to use this to the best of your advantage. And we absolutely have support for market fuel for nonfiction. You know, if you wrote a wellness book, for example, like um maybe you want people to understand the power of eating more greens, something we should all probably be doing. And you need you're like, but there's a hundred thousand eat more greens books on Amazon. How do I fit this book into the world? It's going to give you that market overview. It's gonna give you that target audience. You're targeting people that are perhaps on um diet journeys or health journeys or maybe, you know, general wellness, but it's gonna pull some similar title, then it's gonna give you some categories and subcategories where your book could position for success. And it's based on what you've written. So you're not, it's not just pulling this out of thin air, it's it's actually analyzing your entire book and giving you those categories and subcategories and biceps categories if you are going to have this available on all retailers, um, based on what you've written. And I think that's really powerful, especially when we talk about book positioning.

Joel 9:33

That's cool. I mean, it sounds like you could even be doing that in if if you want to if you're trying to get a book deal, if you want to get a traditional book deal, you could also use it to develop your uh marketing plan as part of your proposal, it sounds like with agents that have used that um as a way to pull their similar titles than to be, and because it tells you why it's similar, you're able to make a stronger case.

Becca 9:57

Um, there's the opportunity to use it. Um, even some of our features, like our backwards blueprint, that reverse outline. If you are going to audio, then you're able to give your narrator a full basically dossier on your characters because it's going to pull out all your archetypes, their wants, their needs, their flaws, all of this information so that they better understand your characters before you go to audio. So there's many different ways to use it.

Joel 10:22

That's cool. I so I mean, this is kind of a more of a personal question that I'm I'm curious because I'm I'm thinking about how I might be able to use this. And uh I my company, we work with all genres when it comes to publishing and promotion, but I personally work on a lot of nonfiction um uh as a ghostwriter and also as sort of like a I also help people improve manuscripts uh on the nonfiction side of things. And what I find is that when I'm working with someone's manuscript, um I and I have a few right now I'm working with, uh especially in nonfiction, the structure is where it needs a lot of the work. So someone will have done a draft of a memoir, or they've done a draft of a self-help book, and their structure, there's a lot of redundancies, or it's too boring, right? It's too chronological if it's a memoir, and it's not being interesting and creative. Um and part of what I'm often doing is I'm trying to get I'm trying to take a step back and figure out, well, what is the existing structure of a piece of writing, and then how can I move it around and improve it? So I'm assuming is your backler, you know, your backwards blueprint, is that something I'd be able to do? I could plug in an existing piece of work and the backwards blueprint could identify the existing structure so that I could kind of play with it.

Becca 11:39

Yep. Yeah, it'll it'll generate uh it'll it'll help you fill out a beat sheet specifically for that. We have a nonfiction um ability to do that. So then all of a sudden you can see what order it's in. And then we have dynamic chapters inside of the writer's desk. So I don't write in order because I like to be chaotic apparently. And I um drag and drop my chapters around. So if it turns out that chapter four is actually better as chapter 17, I just go into the navigator and I drop it back down to chapter 17 so that it moves it around. I'm not rewriting everything.

Joel 12:08

Um, that's cool.

Becca 12:09

Yeah, that's pretty handy. But for nonfiction, especially as a ghostwriter, this is this I I have, I know you are as well. You I'm bound by NDAs. I can't have my normal beta team look at any ghostwriting content. I needed a secure way to get that beta reading feedback so that I'm producing the absolute best content I can for my clients. I have clients I've written for for you know almost a decade now. And having this, it's a secure system. My work, no one can access your work. We never train on your work. Um support can't even access your work unless you expressly uh give them, you know, give us consent to even access your file. So having that as a ghostwriter has been absolutely incredible because I'm able to get that uh feedback and I'm able to really tighten up my story, which then saves me time on the revision side of things. So we're streamlining that process, but we're also improving that uh product.

Joel 13:04

So that's very cool. Yeah. Oh, that no, that's really interesting. Yeah, and because with a lot of the AI technology that's available right now, um, the privacy is really important, right? Yes, it is. Uh I just want to go back to one thing that you said about the structuring piece, and it reminds me a little bit of Scrivener in that way. Um that's what I used to use for some different right, and that allowed me to kind of write little chunks and then organize it at a high level. It sounds like that tool is available as well. You can really you can be actively writing in autocrit, um writing drafts and moving drafts and updating everything.

Becca 13:40

Oh, absolutely. And if you have a co-writer, or let's say you have someone that you a critique partner, we have the ability to share your work securely within autocrit. So they would also need an autocrit account, but we could now collaborate to be able to do that. Um, we have offline mode, which is great. Work on your file. I I was on a plane and I was writing in my file. Um, our dictation is the other part. That's what I use a lot of inside of our writer's desk. Um, and I actually will write in autocrit and then I will export it out for my ghost clients because I'm able to use our smart dictation without speaking punctuation. So I'm able to get an extra 60,000 words a month talking on the go. Like I'm muttering into my phone while I'm driving the kids around or I'm going to the different events um with my high school student and things like that, because we're able to um we're able to capture that. And I don't love like sitting, I love the fact that I can work from home, but I don't love sitting at my desk for like 18 hours a day. So that's so cool. Yeah, to do that.

Joel 14:42

Well, if you're if you're out on a walk, you know, and and and this thought appears to you, and if it's nonfiction, it's oh, it's like this new insight, new way to say this thing, or if it's if it's fiction, it's this cool scene or a an interesting quirk to this this character, you can dictate right into your phone and it'll publish it into your platform, and then you can start to use that as a developmental tool to place it.

Becca 15:04

Absolutely. So what I do is I open up autocrate when I take I I do this every day when I take the toddler out on a stroller rock. I'm sure my neighbors have questions about why I'm muttering somewhat spicy romance into my phone while walking around, but you know what? I'm living my life. So I have um the ability, so you open it up on your browser and I I click on the little microphone, which is dictation. It is quite powerful. I have definitely accidentally dictated like the kids' TV show into my manuscript before if I'm like writing in the TV super loud. So keep that in mind. Um, and I will just talk. I have my little headset on connected to my phone, and I will just talk about my story. It will capture that. I don't even look at it, it just captures it. And at the end, I turn my microphone off. And when I get back to my computer, it's all there because it's all linked on the browser uh platform. And I click our paragraph button and it takes that wall of text and it turns it into paragraph format so that you can quickly revise. Um, I find that I'm doing way less revisions uh for my dictated content as I uh previously did for other platforms and other dictation tools. And I also love to move when I write. So if I'm pacing my office thinking about my story, because I tend to write faster if I'm moving, then I'll have my big headphones and I will be at the other end of my office and it will still manage to pick that up and still have the punctuation. So I think that's an underused feature here at AutoCrypt Pro, and everyone who has a pro account has access to it. So I think you should try it. If you're listening to this and you're AutoCrypt Pro and you're like, what is it? Go give it a shot. It's already built into your platform. You can use it as much

Pricing The One Dollar Trial

Becca 16:45

as you want.

Joel 16:45

Are people able to just give AutoCrit a shot? Just like do like a free trial and test it out.

Becca 16:51

So what we have, and I will um actually let me drop the link for you.

Joel 16:54

So we have people who are watching this online, we'll share the links in the comments.

Becca 16:59

Yeah. So we have a really simple subscription model. You we have the free forever account, which means you can write an autocrit and you can use a couple of the report, our line of the reports. Never gonna ask you any money for that. We do though have our autocrit pro. So that is going to be a subscription model. We have $30 a month or $180 for a year. So that brings it down to $15 a month. And we have no limits. So some platforms, if you want to run like something like a story critique, you're gonna have to pay or use tokens per book. We don't, you can run uh you're in, you can run your whole backlist. If you want to run a 400,000-word epic fantasy every single day for the month of May, knock yourself out. You don't have any limits on how many times you can use our Pro Tools. So we actually have a special offer though for your folks, Joel. It's a $1 trial. You can unlock everything inside of AutoCrit for 14 days, and you can book a one-on-one with one of us to um to figure out how to best use it. And you can run, get that story analyzer feedback, get that market fuel feedback, and really play with the tools.

Joel 18:10

That's awesome.

Becca 18:12

We're pretty uh I mean, all of our author services stuff, we're all USA Today best-selling authors, we are all working writers, and we all use the platform. Um, we Catherine was a lifetime member who started working for AutoCrit after she'd already hit the USA Today list using autocrit um for her manuscript. You know, this is this is something that we care about. We are actual writers trying to help other writers write better. That's a lot of use of word write, but I'm gonna stand by it.

Joel 18:43

Well, when you say, when you say that Catherine uh that you're speaking about used autocrit to hit the USA Today bestseller list, what does that mean?

Becca 18:52

Oh, so she actually she used the platform to uh give herself developmental um uh developmental feedback and beta reading feedback and things like that. So she wrote her book within the platform. Again, all of those words are Catherine's, all of my words are mine. This is um this is not going to create new content for you, but it does help you um understand your writing style. It helps you fix things. Uh one of the tools I use a lot is tense consistency. As a ghostwriter who has to write in fiction, I am constantly switching between what everyone's POV and tense that they want. And also I just have a metal block when it comes to tense sometimes. So yeah, running a tense consistency consistency report is going to help me identify what my trends are. What is it that I normally do? And I do mess that up. It's gonna highlight it and then I can go in occasion by occasion of the best-selling authors in my genre. So I'm able to see, oh, my romance um has the same level of let's say adverb usage as Colleen Hoover's romance. That's pretty awesome. I'm able to see that you know my writing style is still mine, but it's comparing to the genre. Or if you wrote a horror, you could compare it to Stephen King.

Joel 20:09

That's awesome.

Becca 20:10

So it's pretty cool. Yeah.

Joel 20:12

Well, you sol you've sold me, Becca. I mean, you sold me in New Orleans on this. Of course, I haven't signed up yet, but I'm going to today. Um one question I I guess one last question I have for you is um we have uh a lot of people I I talk to that I work with, um they are very, very, very, very tech phobic, you know. Um what do you what do you say to someone who, you know, uh is really, really intimidated by any kind of technology beyond Microsoft Word?

Becca 20:47

Well, you can think of it as this is that you don't have to use all of these features. And we're here as a 100% human team. And we have so as part of your pro membership, we have office hours, um, it's actually open to anyone. Office hours every single week. We're on YouTube every single week. We'd run auto print 101. You can watch the replays on YouTube. We have all of these tools because we understand that learning a new platform can feel really overwhelming. So our actual word processing part of the writer stuff should be pretty familiar. It's gonna have a couple extra features, but again, you can start slow. You can actually um and you don't have to write inside of autocrit if you don't want to. If you, let's say you're like, I will write in Word, this is where I write, that's great. You can still export to a docx file. So just save it. Take your docx file. It's very easy to upload it into AutoCrit, as long as it doesn't have really, really advanced formatting, which the average person does not use. Um, you're gonna be able to run that analysis and then you can export that right again as a docx file, and you can carry on your merry ways. So you're able to use this in a lot of different ways. And I would Say um it's worth a shot. It is very intuitive. And we have helped people from every uh age bracket and every walk of life um learn how to use autocrit effectively. And we there are no such there's no such thing as a stupid question. Um we are here to answer those questions and we're here to help you feel comfortable.

Joel 22:21

Awesome. Well, thank you, Becca. I appreciate you taking the time today. Um and I hope that people found this really useful. I certainly did. Um I'm gonna send, I'm gonna share this link. It sounds like we have a special link that gets you the the special deal, the $1 trial. Yep. Um and uh yeah, and we'll we'll uh we'll we'll we'll stay connected. I'm really interested in trying this out.

Becca 22:45

Fantastic. And thank you so much for having me on, Joel. And I hope that we um see each other at the next writing conference, whatever one that will be.

Joel 22:53

Yeah. All right. Awesome. Bye.

Becca 22:56

Bye.