Field note 03
You DecideWhat Goes Where
Good tools can genuinely help. They can't write your book.
Here's where we draw that line, and how we hold to it in the work we do for you.
Re: AI
The sentences have to be yours.
That's a copyright and authorship line. It doesn't move, whatever the tool.
We're not nervous about these tools, and we won't pretend they don't exist. Use one to organize research you've already gathered, catch a structural gap in a draft, run a spelling check, or clear the administrative noise around the writing, and you're using it well. None of that touches the actual sentences, so none of it touches the line.
The line is the writing itself: the images, the rhythm, the judgment calls that make the book recognizably yours. Copying a generated paragraph into a manuscript and calling it your own breaks the trust a reader extends to you. Asking a system to imitate another writer's voice, or to smooth your own prose into something more marketable, replaces your writing instead of improving it. Treat anything a tool hands you back, a fact, a quote, a date, a source, as unverified until you've traced it yourself: these systems are fluent and often wrong, and a wrong fact in a finished book is yours, not the tool's. And don't upload a manuscript, someone else's private material, or anything confidential without understanding what the system stores and who else might see it.
If a tool did more than that kind of background work on something published, say so. Name the tool, name the task, name what stayed entirely yours. Readers, agents, and publishers are asking this question more often, and a finished book is the wrong place for the answer to surface on its own.
In this engagement
This is how we work too.
When you send pages for review, Sean reads them. Your bio, book description, media sheet, and website copy are drafted with you, in your voice, not generated and touched up afterward. Anything confidential you share during the engagement, drafts, private material, correspondence, stays off any system that stores or trains on it without your knowledge.
A plain-language disclosure
Say what the tool did. Say what it did not do.
This work was written by [author]. [Tool] was used for [specific supporting task]. No generated prose was incorporated into the manuscript. All creative decisions, source verification, and final language are the author's own.
Adapt this statement to the actual use. If generated material appears in the work, speak with your agent, publisher, or qualified legal adviser and follow the relevant disclosure and registration requirements.
Guidance consulted
This reflects guidance from the Authors Guild, including its Human Authored certification, the Writers' Union of Canada, PEN America, and the European Writers' Council, alongside current Canadian and U.S. copyright guidance. It also reflects the harder line taken by prizes like Giller, the Carol Shields Prize, and QWF. We don't land exactly where all of them do, but the range is worth knowing.
This page offers professional orientation, not legal advice. Copyright, privacy, contract, and disclosure requirements vary by jurisdiction and continue to develop.
Keep close
Delegate the task. Never the responsibility.