Your book is ready when it can compete — not when it is perfect. Four thresholds, all of which have to be met.
Readiness thresholds
All four"Perfect is the enemy of published. The market will teach you more about writing than another six months of self-editing."
The 2026 AI Stance
AI is now a standard tool in the publishing workflow — powerful enough to be genuinely helpful, and sophisticated enough to be genuinely dangerous to your book's voice.
Where AI adds value
- Research organisation and fact-checking — with every fact verified yourself
- Grammar and consistency checking across a long manuscript
- Brainstorming and structural interrogation of an outline
- Marketing copy, metadata and description drafts
Where AI destroys value
- Avoid: Writing your actual prose — AI text has a detectable flatness readers register even when they cannot name it
- Avoid: Creating your voice or style, which is the only thing that is yours
- Avoid: Replacing your creative decision-making, one small delegation at a time
Platform Disclosure — Where Things Stand
Disclosure is no longer an Amazon quirk. Every major route to market now asks, and the ones that do not ask yet are downstream of a distributor that does.
Who asks, and what happens
Checked September 2026- Amazon KDP — a mandatory declaration at upload, covering text, images and translation. Enforcement moved from pulling individual titles to suspending accounts, so a wrong answer is no longer a per-book problem
- IngramSpark — an AI content attestation at upload, passed on so retail and library partners can apply their own policies
- Draft2Digital — disclosure required, and passed through to every storefront it distributes to
- Apple Books, Kobo Writing Life and Barnes & Noble Press — policies in force or in development, and each inherits whatever you declared upstream
- Library distributors — OverDrive, hoopla and several consortia now require AI involvement to be declared before a title enters a collection
Use AI as a research and editing tool. Do not use it as a writing partner — and whatever you decide, answer the disclosure question honestly at every platform you upload to.
Related
Publishing Database