An adjustable floor isn't a floor, it's a preference

The five lines and their floors

Substance asks how thorough and well-structured the thinking is, and whether it would survive a hostile expert; floor 7. Actionability asks whether a reader could run this on Monday without you in the room; floor 7. Enjoyment asks whether the reader wanted to keep reading for its own sake; floor 6. Clarity asks whether the problem and the action could each be stated in one sentence; floor 7. Lead magnet asks whether the reader left owning a problem they didn't know they had, and knowing who solves it; floor 7.

Enjoyment gates a point lower than the rest on purpose. Prescriptive non-fiction normally sits at 5 or 6 anyway, read for the advice rather than the prose; a 6 means 'I kept going,' which is the honest ceiling for this kind of work, not a weak target. It still gates: a median enjoyment below 6 does not ship.

Anchor the scale on two real books

Nobody scores blind, by feel, against nothing. One documented rubric anchored every reader against two comparison books: a dense, systems-heavy business book scoring substance 10, actionability 6, enjoyment 4, and a more personable small-business author's book scoring substance 3, actionability 6, enjoyment 9. Every reader places the manuscript somewhere between the two, on every line, every round.

Using real, named books rather than a described scale solves a problem a written-out scale can't: 'write a 9 as thorough and well argued' means something slightly different to every reader. A real book on the shelf means the same thing to all of them, because they can picture the actual pages.

Two rules that keep scoring honest

A score with no passage quoted next to it is void, whatever number is written down; a number without a quote is a feeling wearing a rubric's clothes. Clarity only passes if every reader's one-sentence problem statement, written straight after the introduction, agrees on the same problem; six different problem sentences means the asset hasn't said what it's about yet, however high the numeric score reads.

What done looks like

The rubric file is dated before the first blind read. Every one of the five lines has a numeric floor written next to it, anchored against two real, named comparison works. Every score that lands in the final report quotes the exact passage it's scoring.