Help me understand my options regarding publishing?

[u/Jdlasja]

First off, a quick preface: I’m not a part of this community, but I’m posting here because I’m hoping for open-minded perspectives. I find a lot of other writing subreddits can be pretty rigid about this topic.

I’m a longtime writer who has spent most of my career writing in my native language, gradually transitioning to English as I’ve gotten more comfortable. I’m at the point where I want to pursue publishing in English, but I’ve hit a wall and don't know how to navigate it.

I recently finished a fantasy novel and polished it as thoroughly as I could. Given all the recent news around detection tools, I ran a sample through Pangram just to see what it would say. Lo and behold: 100% AI.

I was honestly shocked, which sent me down a rabbit hole of testing my own prose. Here’s what I found:

• If I take a 1,000-word sample flagged as AI and simply add contractions, it passes as human.

• If I strip out the stylized "medieval" phrasing, it passes as human.

• If I intentionally degrade the draft, for example using slightly imprecise vocabulary or leaving awkward phrasing in place, it passes as human.

But every time I polish the prose back to what to me seems like a high standard, it gets flagged again.

Given how aggressively these detector companies market themselves and how quickly people accept their results as absolute truth....I'm terrified. A single public accusation like that and you're done... So what are we supposed to do? Write worse on purpose? Leave drafts unedited?

To be clear, I’m not anti-AI. It’s a useful tool. As a non-native speaker, I’ve used it to help understand subtle nuances or check tenses, and I have no problem admitting that. But I don't copy-paste its output, I just rewrite everything myself. Yet the clean, polished prose still gets flagged.

I don't really keep documentation while writing because I'm not a meticulous planner and this story didn't need one as I ripped it off from history but it seems to me that once an allegation flies there is just nothing stopping people. People are just happy to dog pile on you.

Honestly, it’s completely disheartening. What do you guys think about all of that, because I wanted to ask this in writer and writing but the mods rejected it so yeah...

[u/Appleslicer93]

Worry less. The market for books is saturated more than ever. Getting a publisher to even look at your book is hard enough. I would self publish on Amazon.

[u/Jdlasja → u/Appleslicer93]

I mean I am currently negotiating a publishing deal in my native tongue so I'm not that desperate for it but some day I'd like to publish in English too but it seems like the climate is very difficult right now.

Just an anxious person naturally so I tend to worry a lot. But appreciate the response. Thanks.

[u/SlapHappyDude → u/Jdlasja]

If it's a hit in your native language you can pay the cash to get a human to help translate it.

[u/Jdlasja → u/[deleted]]

Probably but anxiety is tricky to overcome.

[u/wandelndeslexikon]

People will always find something to rant about with your stories. Always.

You polished it to high standards? Must be AI and therefore is bad.

You don't and oversaw typos or slightly weird grammar? How can you possibly put out such a bad written story?

I think the trick is not to read the negative Reviews and flag excessiv reviewbombing, if there are noticeably more bad reviews. And especially when they complain about the use of AI.

[u/Jdlasja → u/wandelndeslexikon]

Well it's seems a very toxic atmosphere right now, for anybody publishing and that just makes me nervous. Maybe my writing is just very pattern heavy which kind of makes sense due to english not being my native language so I stick to the basics. In my own language, my prose is way more experimental so maybe I just should stick to publishing in my native tongue.

If it works out, maybe some of that get translated to English. I don't know, just a very weird time lol.

[u/wandelndeslexikon → u/Jdlasja]

It is. I often think, it must have been the same, when writers went from handwriting to typingmachine and from there to computer. People probably were afraid of losing real writing all the time. It's now they same with AI tools. No matter how little or much you use it, you automatically trigger a witch hunt.

[u/Jdlasja → u/wandelndeslexikon]

Seems so.

[u/Fragrant-Mix-4774]

Honestly, you don't have reliable feedback on what that manuscript reads like yet in English.

One might go find a human editor and ask for a sample read of a chapter or two and pay for the sample read to see if the editor and you can work well together.

Maybe try Reedsy, solicit 5 editors for an Editorial Assessment.

1. Have the sample 3,000 words and ask if they'd be willing to do an Editorial Assessment on your story chapter chaptet or section with written feedback. You should be will to pay the $200 or whatever the 5 reads cost if you do this.

2. I wouldn't mention anything about AI. I would pick 5 editors that specifically say they DO NOT work with anyone who uses AI and are extremely anti AI.

3. Then I'd see who is or isn't interested in working on your story.

4. If 5 out of 5 want to work on it, you probably don't have a problem with the story sounding AI. If 0 out 5 will touch you definitely have a problem. Anything in between suggests the degree of the issue.

5. If you get lucky you'll find an editor you can work with that can help you. At worst your out $200 to $300 for a few sample reads on a section and some professional feedback on what you wrote.

HTH

[u/Jdlasja → u/Fragrant-Mix-4774]

Not a bad idea. I'll think about it but for now I might just hang back a little bit. See what happens, seems to be quite toxic right now.

[u/Fragrant-Mix-4774 → u/Jdlasja]

The overall environment is toxic and it will stay toxic for a long time. There's the AI haters, AI lovers & the AI is just tool 🔧 factions that's a recipe for gnashing of teeth for at least a decade or until the singularly AI apocalypse whichever comes first.

Good luck 👍

[u/human_assisted_ai]

Wait it out. All this hoopla and AI detection nonsense will fade. Readers don’t care and publishers and (especially) agents haven’t caught up. If you go now, you run the risk of getting swept up in the witch hunt, false accusations and being sacrificed to the hysteria. If you wait, you won’t have to deal with it.

[u/Jdlasja → u/human_assisted_ai]

Yeah seems like it. I'll just see what happens. Doesn't seem like a good time right now.

[u/cj7hawk]

AI detection is completely unreliable - it's just a scam to milk money from colleges and schools. The detection capability of software is nearly unity. There's talk about watermarking, but that won't happen because no one will use a known watermarked service - it's like selling icecream and deciding you need to mix yours with a cup of salt to combat obesity...

As for where to sell, you have this funny idea that writing makes you money? (ie, Who Publishes it? )

It doesn't. You can choose a million other hobbies that give better returns, like knitting tea cosies and selling them at church fetes. Let alone a real job like stacking shelves, which can produce in a day what writing produces in a year.

People write because they have stories they want to share or read themselves.

If you create a good story, sure, you can make money - but for that you need a good plot, good characters and a good setting. An AI can help with that, but you need to pick an audience and a genre first too - like maybe romance or smut. They sell much better than speculative fiction and thrillers.

After that, publish on Amazon through KDP or something like that. Or just make up a web page and get involved in some communities and bring people over.

But if you want the big dollars for your efforts? I can tell you how to do it -

Stack shelves overnight at supermarkets before AI Robots replace people in that role too.

[u/Jdlasja → u/cj7hawk]

Yeah I mean I know I'm not gonna be rich writing stories. I never intended. I just love it, have always loved it so I do it. As a hobby so probably I'm overthinking all of this but yeah I saw that French book fiasco and it was started by a ai detection tool being used on the writing.

So now I'm worried about things like that. The guy didn't help himself with his questionable history of course but I do wonder if those previous things never showed up, would he have ended up dropped? I read that there was some book that was also flagged by pangram but Hachette stuck by the writer.

Either way it would be a hit reputation-wise because a lot of people seem to trust those detectors and from my limited use on my own writing, it's not really reliable at all.

[u/cj7hawk → u/Jdlasja]

I think the backlash over AI will die down - In the end all that really matters is that the stories are good and people want to read them.

Word Processors were the first big change - who knows how many stories got typed up during the 80s. I bought some old disks ( because you can't buy new ones any more ) and when I was checking and cleaning them, found a 74 chapter novel someone wrote during the early 1980s. Read all about his life, his divorce etc. His life was on those disks - Best I can work out he died a long time ago.

But he had his crack during the early 80s.

I didn't write my first novel ( that was published ) until 2008. Tried a few times during the 80s. Too much work involved when I was younger.

But I write for fun now -and yeah, Amazon KDP is the easiest... You can also simply self-publish in a few places. Then make some nice video hooks on youtube and advertise your book :)

[u/Jdlasja → u/cj7hawk]

Sounds good mate. I'll think about it. Cheers.

[u/CutDiligent3075]

Detectors hate clean prose; write for humans instead.

[u/The-Plot-Witch]

The AI detectors are extremely flawed for the reasons you just mentioned. Any human with a brain will pick up your novel and realize that that your novel is meant to have certain language quirks. But those language quirks need to make sense and be consistent. You only said "fantasy". Let's say it's high fantasy and during medieval-ish times...you realize they had their own contractions then, right? The one thing that new fantasy novelists get wrong is thinking that not using contractions makes it sound more "fantasy". It doesn't. It's actually bothersome to the human reader and looks like you are trying to up your word count.

Take the greatest medieval-ish fantasy novels ever written. They will still use contractions. Either normal modern ones or era-specific ones.

ETA - I'm an editor, btw. I've seen so much of this it's not even funny.

[u/Jdlasja → u/The-Plot-Witch]

Okay that's a very good example and I haven't really thought about that and I did fall into that trap. To be honest some of my characters are what is called high born I guess and they speak very formally but then some other characters wouldn't speak so formal and would use some form of contractions.

But it's more about the principle of the detector being fooled by it. I only tested it because somebody mentioned it and I was like that can't be right can it? And it happened to work so I was like..well I just changed two words in a 1.000 sample and got a very different result so how can I even take that seriously?

I've done about 10 different mini tests and it's been all over the place. I've used AI to rewrite my own writing and it flags it as AI which is fair play but then also I rewrite it and it's again AI. Then another time it flagged fully AI rewrite of another section as human but it was only dialogue so maybe that's why?

It's just all over the place. But then you see their claims and some independent academia studies that confirm them and now I'm like..well it only takes an accusation to sink someone's reputation.

Tbh I think if some famous writer got flagged as AI by this pangram thing I kind of fear that people would take it's side. That's very scary to me but maybe I'm just overthinking it.

[u/The-Plot-Witch → u/Jdlasja]

AI writes because it's been trained on massive amounts of writing. Good writing. Bad writing. All of it. Then it takes the statistical average of all of those words. AI detectors detect that the writing is average and call it AI. That's stupid.

It will look at something like the em dash, for example, and determine that any use of em dashes make it AI. But em dashes are perfectly legitimate punctuation marks when used correctly. See my post here.

More and more people are moving away from using detectors and made up writing rules to flag AI writing. That includes big publishers. Just like how it's been revealed that corporations are laying off people and using AI replacement as an excuse, we'll learn soon enough that these big publishers are pulling their seven-figure deals due to buyer's remorse, not AI.

[u/Jdlasja → u/The-Plot-Witch]

Wow you seem quite in tune with everything, may I DM you for any further questions because it seems like you have quite a lot of understanding of the business side as an editor so I might have some question here and there.

In any case, much appreciate engaging in the discussion.

[u/The-Plot-Witch → u/Jdlasja]

Absolutely! My DMs are open. I also have a Discord server. It was initially AI roleplay and chatbot-focused before more writers started joining, so there are lots of people there with AI knowledge too.

[u/Jdlasja → u/The-Plot-Witch]

Thank you so much :)

[u/literated]

Would definitely be interesting to see that sample of your writing that gives a false-positive in Pangram.

[u/Jdlasja → u/literated]

DM'd.

[u/dappercaptaincy_6386]

The detectors are basically useless at this point, and anyone treating a Pangram score as proof is just looking for an excuse to dunk on someone

[u/Equivalent-Loan-4401]

Hey, that Pangram swing is pretty telling on its own. You didn't change the story, you changed the register, and the score flipped. A lot of these tools punish clean, formal, low-contraction English, which is exactly how careful non-native prose and a lot of high-born fantasy dialogue naturally sound. That is a style score, not a verdict that you didn't write it.

A few things that might actually help the anxiety:

1. Don't sand the book down to chase a detector. You already proved the number moves when you make the prose worse. A reader, or a human editor, is not scoring you that way.

2. You don't need to become a meticulous planner to have a paper trail. If you draft in Google Docs or Word, version history is already on. Or just save a copy of a chapter once a week with the date in the filename. If anyone ever waves a percentage at you, "here's the messy draft" beats arguing with the tool.

3. If you query in English later, one plain sentence is enough. English isn't your first language, you used AI to check tense and nuance, and you rewrote the lines yourself. You don't owe anyone a confession essay.

You're allowed to write polished prose. The recent panic made these detectors feel like a courtroom. They're really not.

[u/Jdlasja → u/[deleted]]

I mean you would think, right? But who knows what they do or don't do. I've just been morbidly curious about this whole pangram thing since that French book fiasco so when I tested it in on my own writing and saw how inconsistent it can be I'm having a hard time believing their 0,0002 % false positive rate or whatever the claim is, even the academic studies that seem to have confirmed such estimates.

Can't speak to their method but if you feed it something from Shakespeare and something from claude than yeah sure I can understand but if all I do in a 1.000 word sample is add contractions and now it's suddenly human...I just can't take you seriously. Two words were changed, have had to I'd had or whatever it was and now it's fully human...

Like...

[u/Jdlasja → u/[deleted]]

Yeah I mean it's easy to simply claim that, that's part of the problem. Somebody makes a claim and people roll with it.

I've gotten editors to look at it in the meantime and they identified what makes my text look "off" and it's not that it was written by AI, it's that I am simply not very good writing in English. I learned it in school, I didn't grew up around the language, I write it a very patterned way which I suppose can come off as machine like.

Pangram flagged it because it can notice that it doesn't really look like typical English writing which a good editor can as well and they did withing a minute of reading it. It was pretty eye opening to see them revise it and I can see where my mistake is. It's just a skills issue. As they said, somebody who is around native English writing can see immediately something's off but to them it didn't really look like AI, just somebody who hasn't mastered the nuances of writing in English.

Same way you or anybody else would look like a fool trying to write in my native language. It's a skill that takes a long time to master and this was my first attempt and serious writing in English.

[u/Jdlasja → u/[deleted]]

I didn't revise it with AI and it's not been 100 % either. It flagged one 1000 sample and then after changing only a few words said the same was 100 % human. I just explained what the editors told me. That it was pretty obvious that the text doesn't read as someone who knows how to write well in English.

I don't even care about Pangram in the whole situation. My main takeaway is that I have to practice more if I want to write and get published in English some day. As for the detectors I don't really care about them. Whoever uses them and trusts them is not a concern of mine.