Regarding AI, Part Five
by Evan Braun
Reclaim Your Voice
When a new manuscript comes across my desk as an editor, I can usually tell within a few pages whether it was largely written by AI. These books can be a bit frustrating to work on because they tend to resist the kind of improvement process we normally bring to bear.
The author may be inexperienced, but the prose is clean, making it difficult to engage on a proofreading basis. There’s not a lot of grammar to tidy up, but every page tends to have the same underlying problems—and they’re hard to address, particularly if the author hasn’t self-declared AI use. After all, as an editor, my role is not to throw accusations around.
That said, my role definitely is to help make a book better. And I can do that best if everyone is on the same page about how the manuscript was constructed.
Today’s post is geared around a solution we’ve developed at Word Alive Press to connect authors with editors who can help them reclaim their voice. If AI tends to smooth away your distinctive voice, then perhaps editing shouldn’t simply polish the prose. Instead we’d like to help you recover what’s been lost.
And so we come to the big unanswered question: if you’ve used AI to help write your book, to one extent or another, what exactly are your options? You may be feeling a bit unsure about where to go from here.
First of all, don’t worry. As always, we at Word Alive Press are here to walk you through the publishing jungle and find the right path for you. We’re certainly not ideologically opposed to AI, just clear-eyed about the implications of its use. Indeed, we want our authors to hold their heads up high and own their use of AI, if that’s the direction they’ve decided to go in.
Instead of shame and deceit, we need to begin our individual author consultations with honesty. So when someone from Word Alive Press asks about AI usage, don’t hesitate to acknowledge that, yes, you’ve used it.
This is important, because going forward we will be maintaining Word Alive Press as a relatively AI-free brand, driven from top to bottom by human creators and designed to showcase and platform unique stories and unique voices—just as it has been since the company was founded more than twenty years ago.
This isn’t a revolutionary change, only a formalization of what we’ve always held to be true.
As previously mentioned, though, some of our partners, including distributors, are considering limits or outright prohibitions against AI use. Therefore, we do need to know about AI use in your book.
For this reason, we’re reviving a previously used publishing imprint, Forever Books, to operate alongside Word Alive Press. Forever Books will be devoted to maximizing the potential of all those projects that come our way whose authors have used AI and are completely happy with how it turned out. Yes, for practical considerations, these books will have some different options on the menu. We’ll help answer your questions and put the finishing touches on your book so we can release it into the world!
If you’ve used AI in your writing process, though, and aren’t interested in pursuing publication at Forever Books, we’re also offering a new editorial service designed to help remediate the effects of AI use and bring you back firmly into the fold of human authorship.
This service is called Voice Restoration. The goal is to ensure that your book ends up sounding like a human wrote it, no matter how much AI you used to create your current draft.
You will work with an editor to identify any clear evidence of AI use and then substantively reconstruct the book in such a way that preserves your original intent, meaning, and creative vision.
We will replace non-distinctive or AI-influenced prose with natural, engaging language that reflects your unique voice. For that matter, we may very well, in the process, help you to identify exactly what your voice sounds like, in case you’ve never completed a book on your own before.
Since every book’s needs are highly individual, we will develop an approach and quote custom-tailored to each client who opts to undergo the Voice Restoration service.
Through our powerful pre-existing services at Word Alive Press, our Forever Books imprint, and our Voice Restoration editorial approach, we are confident that we have a publishing option for any client who comes to us with a project they’re passionate to share with the world. That has always been true, and it will never change. However you found your way to Word Alive Press, we want you to complete your publishing journey with us.
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Did you enjoy this post? Discover more helpful advice from Evan Braun here or read the entire series on AI as posts become available.
About this Contributor:
Evan Braun is a full-time author and editor. He has authored three novels, the first of which, The Book of Creation, was shortlisted in two categories at the 2012 Word Awards. He has released two sequels, The City of Darkness (2013) and The Law of Radiance (2015), completing the series. Braun is an experienced professional editor, and has worked with Word Alive Press authors since 2006. He is also a regular contributor at The Fictorians, a popular writing blog.