Sotrane Publishers’ Position on Using AI to Write a Book

An author sends two versions of the same chapter to a publisher. In the first, a retired teacher remembers the question a pupil asked on her first day in class and admits she had no good answer. In the second, after an AI rewrite, she “embraced the transformative power of education”. The spelling is cleaner. The moment that made the chapter worth reading has gone.

We do not think the answer is to tell that teacher never to touch an AI tool. It may help her organise recordings, spot a repeated paragraph or ask what a first-time reader cannot yet understand. But it cannot have lived her first day, decide what she learned from it, or take responsibility for presenting it truthfully. That is where Sotrane Publishers stands: we are interested in useful tools, and we expect a book to remain the work of a person who knows what it says and can answer for it.

Help is welcome when it helps the writer think

Authors have always used help. A friend reads an early draft. A librarian helps locate a source. An editor asks why a scene starts too late. Spellcheck catches an error that a tired writer has read past five times. No serious publisher imagines that a good book must be produced alone.

AI can serve some of those supporting jobs. A writer with a folder of interviews might use a tool to group their own questions by theme before planning chapters. Someone preparing a training handbook might ask it to identify terms that have not been explained for a beginner. A novelist may ask for a list of inconsistencies to check in the timeline, then return to the manuscript and decide whether each is an actual problem. An author writing in English as an additional language may use suggestions to make a sentence clearer without surrendering the meaning or the natural rhythms of their voice.

The task matters. “Show me where a reader might be confused” invites a writer to investigate. “Write a moving memoir in my voice” invites a machine to fill an absence with plausible experience. The distinction is practical: after using the tool, does the author understand the chapter better and have more control over it, or less?

A lecturer in Lusaka writing for students could ask for questions a new reader might have after a chapter about study habits. If one question reveals that she has assumed every student has reliable internet access, the tool has helped her notice a gap. She must still decide how the chapter should address students with different resources. No prompt can substitute for listening to the people the book is for.

The reader is owed an accountable author

A book can be beautifully arranged and still be empty of accountable knowledge. If a health educator, a financial trainer or a historian prints an inaccurate statement, the reader cannot question the software that produced it. They will question the name on the cover and the publisher associated with the book.

For that reason, we would not treat a fluent AI answer as a checked source. A date, quotation, study, procedure or figure belongs in a manuscript only after the author has verified it against reliable material. A convincing reference that cannot be found is not evidence. A tool may help someone list what needs checking; it cannot certify a claim just by repeating it confidently. The US National Institute of Standards and Technology describes the problem of confident false output as “confabulation” in its generative AI risk profile.

Imagine an entrepreneur writing a book for small shop owners. She asks for help making a chapter about stock records easier to read. The new version adds a statistic about how many Zambian businesses fail because of poor record-keeping. Unless she can locate and assess a credible source for that exact claim, it has no place in the book. She may still explain, from her own experience or a clearly marked illustrative case, how missing records can hide losses. A real, narrower explanation is better than an impressive invented number.

Accountability also means being able to answer an editor's ordinary questions. Why is this example here? What happened before it? Where did this claim come from? Why does the character speak this way? If the author cannot explain the material because a tool supplied most of it, the manuscript needs further work, however polished the surface appears.

A Zambian book should not lose its home in a rewrite

There is nothing provincial about a book that sounds like its writer and respects its setting. An author may write for Zambian readers, readers elsewhere in Africa, or a wider audience. Clarity for those readers is a worthwhile goal. Flattening every voice into the same anonymous international English is not.

Suppose a novel set in Luanshya includes a grandmother who avoids a direct answer when a child asks about a family dispute. A tool might rewrite the exchange as an orderly explanation of the family's feelings. The sentences become easier to parse, but the child no longer has to infer anything, and the grandmother no longer sounds like herself. The author can edit for clarity while preserving the relationship and the uncertainty that drive the scene.

Local language calls for particular care. A model may offer a translation that looks authoritative to someone who cannot check it. Spellings, registers and meaning can differ by context; a term used in a familiar conversation may sit awkwardly in a formal narrator's voice. Ask someone competent in the language and situation. If you cannot verify a phrase, do not publish it because it gives a page a convenient “African” flavour.

This does not mean protecting every awkward sentence in the name of authenticity. Readers deserve clear, well-edited writing. It means asking what a change preserves and what it removes. Our article on manuscripts that sound like AI offers ways to find the moments when smooth prose has replaced a writer's observations.

Access matters; shortcuts still have a cost

We know that writers do not all have the same money, time, training or access to professional support. It would be easy to dismiss AI use from a position where every author could afford months of editorial help. That would ignore why a first-time writer might try a free or inexpensive tool to get unstuck.

A parent developing a children's story may use it to generate questions about the age of the intended reader, or to make a checklist before reading a draft aloud. A university student trying to turn a dissertation into a public-facing book may ask which technical terms need introducing earlier. These can be sensible steps. They do not mean the tool has evaluated whether a child enjoys the story, whether a claim is supported, or whether the revised chapter still makes sense to a general reader.

An author with a limited budget can make good decisions about where to spend it. Work through the draft yourself; seek a critical reader who knows the subject; ask for a sample edit or an appraisal if you can. If the central problem is structure, another pass through a grammar tool may produce tidy pages without fixing the book. If the book is sound and near print, a proof has a different purpose. Our guide to AI-assisted editing gives a practical way to test suggestions on a small passage before changing a whole manuscript.

There is no shame in needing help. The mistake is to claim a chapter has been professionally edited or fact-checked when all that happened was an automated rewrite.

Be open about meaningful assistance

Someone who uses AI to generate a few questions for their own planning has used it differently from someone who asks for whole chapters and submits them with minimal revision. Treating those activities as identical is unhelpful. Pretending the second one never happened is unhelpful too.

Our position is that authors should be candid with a publisher about substantial AI-generated text or images included in a manuscript or cover proposal, and about tool use that affects sources, translation or another person's material. The point is to allow an honest discussion about quality, permissions and what still needs checking. The particular obligations in a publishing agreement or on a distribution platform must be reviewed in their current terms; this article does not invent a universal percentage of permitted AI writing.

There is also a responsibility on the publishing side. An author may entrust a publisher or editor with an unpublished memoir, interview transcripts or confidential case studies. Sending that material to an external AI service is a separate decision from reading it for editorial work. The people who own or are described in that material deserve serious consideration, and the author should know what is being proposed. UNESCO's guidance on generative AI stresses the protection of privacy and human agency in its education and research context; those are useful principles for an unpublished manuscript too.

A writer can often ask a useful question without uploading an entire book. Remove identifying information where possible, choose a short sample, and check the tool's current data settings and terms. For sensitive interviews or family histories, even an unnamed passage may identify someone through its details. Sometimes the right choice is to keep the material out of the tool entirely.

We would rather read the author's thinking than a perfect imitation of it

A first draft may repeat itself. A first-time author may need help finding a chapter's centre. Those are ordinary problems that can be worked on. A manuscript made of polished statements the author cannot explain is harder to trust, because the difficulty has been hidden rather than resolved.

A book about youth unemployment does not improve merely because a tool supplies impressive language about innovation. It improves when the author knows which young people the book addresses, what evidence supports each claim, and which practical decisions a reader can make after closing it. A family memoir earns attention through observed detail, careful memory and honest limits. A novel earns it through characters whose choices have consequences. The tools can assist the work around those things. They cannot supply a real life or a point of view on command.

If you are using AI while preparing a book, keep your original drafts. Review changes against them. Verify every introduced fact. Read passages aloud, especially dialogue and local-language material. Tell your editor where substantial generated material appears, and be willing to rewrite it if it does not belong. Our earlier article on using AI to write a book shows how small supporting tasks can be useful without giving the whole book away.

Sotrane's position is straightforward: use a tool where it genuinely helps, but let the author's knowledge, judgment and responsibility remain visible on every page. We will judge a manuscript by what it gives the reader and whether its maker can stand behind it, not by a fashionable claim that it was written “with AI” or “without AI”.

Where would you draw the line between useful writing assistance and letting a tool become the author?