On this episode of the Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast, Dan Holloway examines the fallout from the “Shy Girl” controversy, where allegations of AI-assisted writing led to a withdrawn book deal and raised new questions about author responsibility and editorial use of AI. He also highlights Jane Friedman’s new AI-in-publishing guide, reports on a surge in self-published titles linked to AI tools, and looks at the growing use of Substack as a platform for fiction.
Listen to the Podcast: ‘Shy Girl' Controversy Raises AI Editing Questions
Show Notes
Jane Friedman’s AI and Publishing: FAQ for Writers
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About the Host
Dan Holloway is a novelist, poet, and spoken word artist. He is the MC of the performance arts show The New Libertines, He competed at the National Poetry Slam final at the Royal Albert Hall. His latest collection, The Transparency of Sutures, is available on Kindle.
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Read the Transcript
Dan Holloway: Hello and welcome to Self-Publishing News for the last time before Easter. It's a very interesting set of news this week, all surrounding the big story that has been breaking — the controversy around the novel Shy Girl by Mia Ballard.
I'll begin with something I'm going to be covering in more detail over the weekend, which comes on the back of this controversy and a huge amount of other work. Jane Friedman — industry legend, friend of indies, and all-round good thing — has issued a fantastic set of FAQs for writers on her website. I'll try to remember to send Howard the link. It's called AI in Publishing: FAQ for Writers, and it goes into essentially all the detail you could wish for on where the legal positions around AI are currently known.
It includes the usual disclaimer about not constituting legal advice, very wisely. But there is all sorts of fascinating material there, including whether you can copyright AI-assisted and AI-generated works — to which the answer is a very mixed one. What you can do on covers, translations, the whole shebang on fair use and so on, going into several of the key cases. It looks at whether the rulings in those cases are universal and replicable, or whether they're very specific and what those specificities are. And then a very interesting section on AI licensing, AI clauses in book contracts, and really fascinating material on disclosure of AI and specifically AI detection — which brings us back to Mia Ballard and Shy Girl.
The ‘Shy Girl' Controversy
Shy Girl is an originally self-published title that did very well upon its release in February 2025 — which is, of course, more than a year ago. And yet there are still claims that it is a largely AI-generated or AI-assisted work. So AI has clearly been very capable at producing readable prose for a considerable time, and is clearly only going to get better.
The book did so well as a self-published title — a very familiar story — that it attracted the attention of Hachette, who made an offer and published it in the UK and were about to publish it in the US. But there has been a growing amount of speculation on Reddit and other forums about whether some of the work might have been AI-generated. Such was the discussion that the publishers decided to pull it before its US release and withdrew the title from the UK market after just 1,800 copies had been sold.
That is the start of the cautionary tale. It goes on. As always in these cases, this has had a massive effect on the author. The author claims not to have used AI and is going so far as to sue Hachette, saying she has fulfilled her side of the bargain. And her claim is that if AI-generated material has crept in, it must be because of the editor she used.
This is where it becomes really, really interesting — and where all of us as writers really need to sit up and pay attention. Because we are always encouraged to use editors. But if we are to be held responsible for what our editors do with our work, that places the whole author-editor relationship on an entirely different footing. Even if we are not held legally responsible, but are held responsible in other ways — such as there being consequences for our title if it is determined that AI was used — that still puts the relationship under a spotlight. There are still massive implications if it turns out that our editor has used AI without informing us of doing so. There is a whole level of due diligence required here, and I can see it eroding the trust between editors and authors.
When I reported on this, I noted that it feels very similar to a situation in another area where I wear a different hat — athletics. If you were to replace ‘author' with ‘athlete' and ‘editor' with ‘coach,' this is basically the same issue at the heart of many doping disputes, where athletes claim they never knowingly took anything and that everything they took had been passed by their coaches. Courts have really struggled to find a clear legal position on that, and it's not simple.
But ultimately, if an athlete takes something they shouldn't — whether accidentally or not — they tend to end up with a ban of some kind. And this is very similar: however AI material gets into the work, it is nonetheless the author who ultimately ends up carrying the can. Whether that's in relation to prizes, non-disclosure to a platform that requires it such as Amazon, or indeed in moving from indie publishing into a traditional publishing deal. A really interesting case, with lots of ins and outs.
This is not the first case where AI use has been alleged, and it will certainly not be the last. But it raises all kinds of issues that as indie authors we need to be very clear about. We've already become very aware of the need to make sure we know the provenance of our cover art and whether AI has been involved. But now it appears we also need to be very clear about what our editors are doing. I say this with no implication that the editor in this case has or hasn't done anything wrong — but the fact that the question is raised at all shows how important this due diligence has become.
A Million More: AI and the Self-Publishing Surge
There are some other interesting things on the AI front this week. There has been a big outcry about the fact that more books were officially self-published last year than in 2024 — a million more titles in the US. These are officially self-published titles that can be tracked by BookScan because they have an ISBN. We know there will be many hundreds of thousands more that don't have an ISBN and go straight to Amazon. The general opinion seems to be that the reason for such a spike is AI-generated content.
That matters in part because of things like Kindle Select and Kindle Unlimited, where there are pools from which authors get paid. Mark Williams has done a very interesting dissection of this story, where he essentially says: stop panicking. The pool for KDP Select is growing and growing. But it is nonetheless the case that where there are pools that are divided up, if a lot of AI-generated content is entering the market and taking a slice of that pie, there is a smaller slice left for everyone else. So this is something that needs keeping an eye on.
Substack and Fiction
Another interesting piece I came across last week is around Substack. A lot of people use Substack as their newsletter platform or nonfiction platform of choice. But this article looks at an increasing number of creators using it for fiction — including some very high-profile authors like Ottessa Moshfegh. Interesting to consider, if you're thinking about subscription models, the possibility of using Substack for fiction. It seems to be something more and more people are doing.
I look forward to speaking to you again at the same time next week, when hopefully there will be more to talk about than literary scandal — and something a little more cheerful. But in the meanwhile, do please go and check out Jane Friedman's piece. It is absolutely excellent and approaches the exhaustive level, which is exactly what we need. Thank you very much, and speak to you again same time next week.
