Can We Trust Book Publishing to Tell the Truth?
Books are published. Questions arise. Publishers must do better.
I didn’t think I had a newsletter in me this week, but I’ve been thinking about the publishing stories I’ve read and decided to share my thoughts. After the main event, there is information about the webinars I’m running in May and June.
I want to set the record straight: there is no fact-checking in book publishing. Publishers do not have fact-checking departments. Also, most publishers aren’t using AI-detection software (yet). It’s important to get these facts out of the way before I dive into the rest of this newsletter.
When a book is acquired, it is assumed that the author is being truthful about having written it, that AI was not used to write it, and that the facts are, well, factual. Unfortunately, the center is not holding for some publishers in these areas, and the industry must address them sooner rather than later.
Let’s begin with Amy Griffin’s book, The Tell. It was an Oprah Book Club pick. It received A-List blurbs. It was a bestseller. The author and her spouse are wealthy and well-connected. And, some of the story might not belong to Ms. Griffin. The New York Times did a deep dive into the book’s “facts,” if one can call memories retrieved during an MDMA therapy session as such. There lies the problem: Ms. Griffin’s “memory” of being sexually assaulted by a middle school teacher in Amarillo, TX, between the ages of 12 and 16, and an unreliable narrator—the author herself, and her ghostwriter, Sam Lansky, who contributed to Britney Spears’s memoir, The Woman in Me.
While no one can really know what went on during Ms. Griffin and Mr. Lansky’s collaboration, we do know that Penguin Random House didn’t fact-check the book because fact-checking does not exist in book publishing. The first New York Times article about the book raised a lot of questions, including whether Ms. Griffin’s MDMA “memory” belonged to someone else. As it turns out, it just might. A former classmate of Ms. Griffin filed a lawsuit in March. From The New York Times:
Amy Griffin, a best-selling memoirist, was sued on Wednesday by a former classmate who contends that Ms. Griffin’s story of being sexually abused — as she described in her book, “The Tell” — was based on assaults the classmate herself suffered at their Texas middle school in the 1980s.
The classmate, identified in court papers as Jane Doe, filed the lawsuit in California, accusing Ms. Griffin of invasion of privacy, negligence and infliction of emotional distress, among other claims. The suit also names Sam Lansky, a ghostwriter who worked on “The Tell,” as well as Penguin Random House and The Dial Press, which published the book, as defendants.
Penguin Random House had no comment. Neither did Dial Press nor Mr. Lansky. Shocking. Not. The Tell is still available to buy, and Ms. Griffin has been awfully quiet, so I guess we’ll see how that lawsuit goes.
Now let’s hop over to Hachette, which pulled the horror novel Shy Girl after a very dubious series of events in which the author was accused of using AI to write the book. There was a 2-hour YouTube video picking apart the writing (that is really not a hobby I ever want, by the way), Reddit threads, and someone in publishing who decided to run a somewhat pirated copy of the book through AI-detection software and brought the story to The New York Times. Are you still with me?
Now would be a good time to tell you about an incident in my MBA program three years ago. The plagiarism detection software rated a paper I wrote as 85% plagiarized. My professor emailed me, and I panicked, because I knew the work was mine. It turns out that because the professor had us copy and paste prompts from a document he provided, the software assumed I plagiarized. This is not so different from LLMs being trained on works by authors, the authors running their work through detection software, and receiving a high percentage indicating that their work was written by AI.
None of us really knows what occurred when the author Mia Ballard wrote (or didn’t write) Shy Girl. What I do know is that Hachette pulled the book in the blink of an eye without 100% confirmation that AI was used. I have put my own writing into AI-detection software only to have it tell me that my work was likely 90% written by AI. What are we doing here? What in the world happened internally at Hachette that this book wasn’t scrutinized more? Sure, it was self-published and received rave reviews on Goodreads, along with some that called it out as written by AI, but—hear me out—what if it was just badly written? I am not defending Ms. Ballard because I don’t know the truth, but I do know that ruining someone’s career and affecting their mental health is serious, so those accusations better come with receipts. They didn’t. I, along with others, wonder what, if anything, happened during the editorial process. I’m sorry, but AI-detection software that says a book is 84% written by AI is not the same as 100% certainty. Instead, a publisher abandoned an author because she was of no use to them.
Yesterday, The Atlantic published a story about the newly minted bestseller Upward Bound by Woody Brown, a 28-year-old, mostly non-verbal autistic man. The piece is tricky because it delves into “Rapid Prompting,” a training method for communication for autistic people who are nonverbal. It is similar to the Spelling to Communicate approach and uses a letter board. The idea is for the person using it to spell out what they’d like to say. I encourage you to read the full story in The Atlantic above, as it provides important context.
What The Atlantic points out is that Woody Brown’s Today Show appearance showed that he didn’t actually spell real words. It is because of this, and the assessment of a few experts, that the author of the article was skeptical that Mr. Brown wrote the book himself. The piece implies that Mr. Brown’s mother, Mary Brown, may have ghostwritten the book. Here is what the editor of the book at Hogarth (an imprint of Penguin Random House) had to say:
Hogarth would not say whether it had attempted to confirm Upward Bound’s authenticity, either before or after publication. The novel’s editor, David Ebershoff, told me via email that the book is “Woody’s” and that “it illuminates lives too often left out of society and literature. It does what some of my favorite books do—locates beauty and humanity in a place, and among a group of people, so many have underestimated and overlooked.”
It’s not that I don’t believe Mr. Brown wrote the book. It’s that there’s a chance the publisher is being disingenuous, and that erodes readers’ trust, which, as you can see from the three examples I’ve written about, is an ongoing problem.
There is no doubt in my mind that AI will become an even bigger issue with submissions to agents and publishers. Proposals and manuscripts generated by AI will certainly slip through the cracks. The industry is ill-prepared for this, and it will affect sales.
A problem of equal importance is the lack of fact-checking and the inability to sense whether a story is authentic. Publishing is a business, and capitalism is alive and well. Good stories make money for publishers. So do salacious ones. If the author is well-connected, that is even better. However, when the conversation about books is consumed with talk of AI, false accusations, and stories that may or may not be true, both readers and writers lose out. Those discussions suck the oxygen out of the room and make it impossible to talk about the great, new books that no one has heard about yet. Isn’t that why we’re all here?
END NOTES
A quick one! I’ve watched the first 3 episodes of Margo’s Got Money Troubles on Apple, and it is delightful. VERY true to the book.
WEBINARS:
SATURDAY, MAY 9, 12 noon-2 pm EASTERN, VIA ZOOM
COST: $75
A RECORDING OF THE WEBINAR WILL BE AVAILABLE May 10.
Your Book’s Launch Timeline: What Happens Between Contract and On-Sale A 2-Hour Deep Dive for Authors
You signed the contract. Now what?
The road from deal to bookstore shelf is longer—and more complicated—than most authors expect. Deadlines stack up, departments hand off, and decisions get made that affect your book’s success before most readers even know it exists. If you don’t understand the pipeline, you can’t work it.
In this 2-hour session, we demystify the pre-publication process from the inside out: who does what, when, and why it matters to you as the author. You’ll leave with a clear picture of every stage from acquisitions through on-sale, a realistic sense of where your leverage is (and isn’t), and a personalized milestone map you can actually use.
You’ll walk away with:
A clear breakdown of the pre-pub pipeline and every key player involved
An understanding of what your publisher is doing—and what they need from you
Your own mapped launch timeline with milestones and deadlines
This session is for: debut and mid-career authors navigating a traditional publishing deal who want to stop feeling behind and start feeling prepared.
2 Hours | Live + Q&A
REGISTER HERE: Google Form for Book Launch Webinar
SATURDAY, June 6, 12 noon-2 pm EASTERN, VIA ZOOM
COST: $75
A RECORDING OF THE WEBINAR WILL BE AVAILABLE on June 7.
Positioning Your Book to Sell A 2-Hour Deep Dive for Authors
You know your book. But can you sell it in a sentence?
Positioning is the difference between a book that finds its readers and one that gets lost in the catalog. Your hook, your elevator pitch, your audience targeting—these aren’t marketing afterthoughts. They’re the foundation everything else is built on, and most authors never get direct help developing them.
This session changes that. In two focused hours, we’ll work through the fundamentals of book positioning and then put them into practice—live. Bring your pitch. We’ll workshop it in the room.
You’ll walk away with:
A sharp, tested hook and elevator pitch for your book
Clarity on your target audience and how to speak directly to them
Positioning language you can use across your bio, website, and outreach
This session is for: authors at any stage who struggle to articulate what their book is, who it’s for, and why someone should read it right now.
2 Hours | Live Workshopping + Q&A
REGISTER HERE: Google Form for Positioning Your Book
THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW BEFORE YOU REGISTER:
If you complete the Google form, you are registered. Please make sure you can attend the webinar before registering.
The fee for each webinar is $75. You will receive an invoice after you register, and it will state how to pay. Payment is due upon receipt. Please check your spam folders in case the email with the invoice ends up there.
Come prepared with questions. There will be a 45-minute Q&A.
A recording of each webinar will be emailed to attendees the day after it is live.
I decided to offer these on a Saturday so it is easier for West Coast folks and people overseas.
There’s a real philosophical discussion we all need to have. Right now, as a society and profession we’re whistling past it. Where do we draw the line? On the one side we have the fully AI-generated novel. On the other we have the traditional human-crafted novel. In the middle there are a lot of gradations, though. The human-crafted novel is edited by human editors; they go through drafts with a bunch of feedback. Are we going to accept an AI providing editorial feedback? That's not exactly AI writing but it is AI involvement. And then on the other end of it we've got AI drafting and then human involvement, going towards this muddy middle where it’s just hybrid. Most of us are acting as though this is a light switch that's on or off but it's a far more complicated scenario than I think we are prepared to really deal with.
"...the book’s “facts,” if one can call memories retrieved during an MDMA therapy session as such." 😂
Excellent article. Thank you. The trust issue, I feel, has forever been a part of publishing and storytelling, and is now amplified by AI and social media. It used to be scandals (or later finding out, long after some author had died) of appropriating someone else's story or a culture. And outright plagiarism has always been an issue. And passing "memoir" off when it is largely fictionalized. Trust, especially form those presenting the book to the market / audience, is at the root of it. People generally don't like to be lied to. Go figure.