Edit a manuscript you were invited to

Someone handed you their manuscript and said: make it better. That’s a lot of trust in one link.

Good news: you can’t break anything. As an editor, you work on a copy of the author’s project, and every change you make is a suggestion they get to accept or reject. Their original stays untouched until they say so.

This walks you through the whole thing, start to finish: opening the invite, suggesting changes, leaving comments, and handing your edits back.

We’ll cover:

Open your invite: the link the author sent you
What you’re editing: your own copy, not their original
Suggest changes: every edit is a tracked suggestion
Leave a comment: flag something without rewriting it
Hand your edits back: mark it ready so the author can merge

Open your invite

The author sends you a link, usually by email. Click it and Dabble opens an invitation window. It names who invited you, the review copy you’ll be editing, and your role: Editor.

Already signed in to Dabble? Click Accept.
Signed in to the wrong account? Click Switch Account, pick the right one, then Accept.
New to Dabble? Sign in or create a free account first. You’ll come right back to the invite.

Dabble connects you to the shared copy and drops you straight in. That’s it. You’re editing.

The review copy invitation window: it names the person who invited you, shows the project cover and the review copy you'll edit, your Editor role, and Decline, Accept, and Switch Account buttons.

The copy also lands under Shared with Me on your dashboard, tagged with your Editor role, so you can reopen it whenever you like.

The Shared with Me section of the dashboard showing the invited project as a tile marked Editor.

What you’re editing

Here’s the part that makes editing someone else’s book safe.

You’re not typing into the author’s live manuscript. You’re in a review copy: an isolated copy of the parts they chose to share with you. That might be the whole book or just a few chapters, whatever they scoped it to.

Everything you do stays in this copy. Your edits reach the author only when they pull them in, and they review each one first. So go ahead and be bold. Nothing you change here overwrites their words.

The top bar names the review copy and shows an Editing status with a Private toggle beside it. Only the documents the author scoped to you show up in the sidebar.

An editor's view of a review copy: the top bar reads "Maya's edit pass" with Editing and Private next to it, and the manuscript sidebar shows only the shared chapter.

Suggest changes

In a review copy, track changes is always on. You don’t flip a switch. You just edit.

Type to add a line. Select and delete to cut one. Change formatting the way you normally would.
Each edit shows up as a suggestion: an insertion, a deletion, or a format change. The author sees every one as a card they can Accept or Reject.
Want to compare your version against the original? Open the view dropdown beside the Track Changes button and switch between Original (Read-Only), Difference, and Suggestions.

Because tracking is always on here, there’s no way to quietly rewrite the author’s text. Every word you touch is on the record.

An editor's review copy: the word "good" replaced with "considerable" as a tracked suggestion, and a suggestion card in the right gutter reading Substituted: good to considerable, attributed to the editor.

For the full tour of views and suggestion cards, see Use track changes.

Sometimes you don’t want to rewrite a line. You want to ask about it, or cheer it on. That’s a comment.

Select the text you’re reacting to.
Click the comment icon in the toolbar (tooltip Add Comment, shortcut Cmd+Opt+C or Ctrl+Alt+C).
Type in the Leave a comment… field and click Save.

Your comment appears in the gutter next to the text, and the author can reply. Full details in Comment and reply.

A comment card in the right gutter next to selected manuscript text, with a reply field and the person who left it.

Hand your edits back

Your review copy is private while you work. The author sees a PRIVATE badge and a Waiting on Editor(s)… status, and they can’t merge your edits yet. That’s on purpose. It keeps your work in progress yours until you say it’s ready.

When your edits are done:

In the top bar, click the status control (it reads Editing).
Choose Ready for Review.

That tells the author your suggestions are ready. They open your copy, accept or reject each change, and merge the good ones into their project. You don’t merge anything yourself. That’s the author’s call.

If you’d rather let the author watch your progress in real time, click the Private toggle beside the status control to turn private mode off.

The review copy's status control open in the top bar, showing the Editing and Ready for Review options, next to the Private toggle.

After you hand it back

The author reviews every suggestion. Accepted changes fold into their project; rejected ones simply drop. Your name stays on the comments and changes you made.
Your work saves automatically and syncs whenever you’re online, so you can close the tab and pick up later.
Once the author merges, your access to the review copy ends and Dabble adds a read-only project to your own list, badged Editor’s Copy. See what collaborators see when their access ends.
If the author added you straight to their project instead of a separate copy, you’ll edit in place with those same tracked suggestions, and there’s nothing to hand back: they see your suggestions as you make them.