to think this couple in the guardian are strange and this was not an appropriate subject for a book?

[HildegardVonBingham]

My jaw was on the floor as I read this. Obviously it’s awful that they were subjected to a campaign of harassment, absolutely no excuses. But I do think it’s insensitive to write a whole BOOK about it, given that the perpetrators killed themselves in a double suicide?! I also don’t know who just lends a neighbour £10k!!! Whole piece compounds my suspicion of everyone who chooses to live in the arse end of nowhere…. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/05/dream-home-turned-nightmare-in-wales-stalker-neighbours-stalked-book

If it is AI use - is that the first time in UK. as opposed to Shy Girl in US:

Hachette pulls horror novel Shy Girl after suspected AI use | Books | The Guardian

It's a massive embarrassment for HarperCollins that they are/were going to publish this book, given the dreadful, clunky, painful to read narrative. What was their editor thinking? Was an editor even assigned to the book?

I imagine the serialisation in the Guardian attracted thousands of disdainful comments, much like this thread, and everyone involved in the commissioning and publication process is now feeling pretty uncomfortable.

Bad feedback was almost to be expected because they could not have genuinely expected Guardian and Times readers to read two pages of slop and not notice the terribly quality of writing. It was extremely bold (almost cheeky) to market the book at prolific readers, many of whom probably work in publishing or hold writing degrees themselves.

However the question is whether poor reception alone is enough to get a project shelved a week before launch? Surely if thousands books were already printed and shipped to bookstores, they might as well just put on the shelves and see how sales go? Statistically, there would still be a few people buying it so they could recoup part of the cost. It would also be an insane waste of PR since all the articles had a direct shop CTA at the bottom which are now gone. How many aspiring authors could only dream of getting serialised in every major national paper?

The most intriguing part is how the project even came this far. Were the couple offered the book deal after the trial or did they personally know someone at HarperCollins? Did they work with an editor or ghostwriter? It seems extremely bizarre for a first-time author to receive such massive promotion across all media. Was the project given favouritism over other books and why?

The aforementioned Shy Girl book from Hachette had a different context in that it was previously self-published and already very popular online. So despite the use of AI, the quality of writing was readable. The author ended up blaming an unknown editor, but even if that wasn't the case, it makes sense why AI might get through in a self published book.

The most intriguing part is how the project even came this far. Were the couple offered the book deal after the trial or did they personally know someone at HarperCollins?

I did look for who is the literary agent of this couple as they are the ones who would negotiate the deal. The Salt Path literary agents were previously ghostwriters, for example, but it isn't that agency.

Who is the agent, out of interest?

I couldn’t see that anywhere in the public domain? It would have been on the book, obviously

The Salt Path was written before AI was a widely used tool, but the writing style is very similar to this book. It’s rammed with invented dialogue with no acknowledgement that the dialogue was invented. It isn’t plausible that the couple remembered these conversations word for word, so the invented dialogue draws attention to the ‘fabricated’ nature of any memoir. (I DON’T mean ‘dishonest’, but ‘fabricated’ as in ‘created’.) There’s something jarring about memoir that tries to recreate scenes as if someone had been there with a voice recorder. Dialogue like this feels contrived and exhausting on the page, to me at least, so it ends up undermining the feeling of ‘truth’ in a story (even though this one seems eminently verifiable.)

There are ways around this, like using dialogue VERY sparingly.

As to the OP, people can be really naive and trusting, and they’re allowed to tell their story. The fact that the other couple died is really horrible, but doesn’t mean that the writers shouldn’t talk about what happened to them.

It would be perfectly possible to feed some raw text into AI and prompt it to write it in the style of Raynor Winn. I agree many of the beats are strikingly similar.

Not outside the bounds of possibility that someone thought ‘The Salt Path was a similarly dark tale of betrayal, homelessness and terminal illness, but managed to strike readers as feelgood and inspiring by passages of purple prose about nature. Shall we try that, because it really worked for Raynor Winn?’

Not a clue but of if I see them I will definitely ask.

I think they desperately need to recoup some money, I would hope the book itself goes a bit deeper into the trauma, it was absolutely awful for them.

Yeah, I did wonder about that.

Well, not if it’s never published because they used AI to write it!

How can we tell if AI wrote it? The so-called ‘tells’ all exist in previous books written well before AI, like the paring of a concrete and abstract noun, e.g., badger/ despair, because AI draws on them. Lots of books pre-AI were generic and bland.

This is a genuine question! How can we know for sure?

But it’s not any one thing, it’s a combination, and the absence of the quirks that make writing individual. Detection software (again, sometimes involving running the same piece of writing through several) is increasingly sophisticated, too.

They have recouped the money already. They were paid an advance while working on the manuscript and for a book of this magnitude with a giant publisher like HarperCollins, it was almost certainly five figures. Sales don't usually have a big effect what the author receives unless it's an runaway success and gets optioned for TV or film. They will continue to earn a bit but the majority of payment comes from the advance.

I agree that it's hard to tell whether a book is just a badly written or AI assisted. However in this case, the red flags is that AI tech has exploded over the past 3 years and coincidentally, a publisher comes out promoting a first time-author into every national paper without any prior experience or fanbase. The couple ran a business selling bathtubs and there was nothing in any of the interviews to suggest one or both are writers. As a PP said, maybe they were lured into a bad literary deal with the promise of film and TV money and the actual writing was done by an unnamed agent or ghostwriter. However the book was published under their names so they end up taking the fall.

It reads like an extended Take A Break cover story.

That's exactly how it reads. The writing is so jarring and annoying that my main feeling when reading their story was irritation. Clearly this was a very traumatic event for them and I hope they have recouped their money but the writing is so poor that I'm amazed this has been published in The Guardian.

I predict a movement back towards non-digital writing methods, keeping copies of every draft, etc., so that writers can provide proof that they have developed and written a work themselves!

Do we know that they’ve been accused of using AI (hence the publication date changing) or that just speculation on this thread?

We know that it was being heavily promoted, days before release, followed by erratically delayed very suddenly (ie the 2 new release dates currently showing on the Harper Collins site!) - we do not know why.

It will be nothing like five figures for a fairly standard one-off 'something unfortunate that happened to us' book by two unknowns! You might get that if you were a celebrity memoirist who had a huge online following and/or the kind of fame that meant publishers could rely on having a built-in audience for, say, Graham Norton getting caught in an avalanche and surviving a week in a crevasse in the death zone while climbing K2, or in a world without NDAs or defamation law, 'I was a Kardashian Surrogate!' Or even if you were a recognised academic expert on something currently topical and with a big SM and TV profile who was reliably bankable. Say, David Olusoga on having a racist stalker will get a far bigger advance for a book about it, that an unknown person to whom exactly the same frightening set of events happened.

And most advances are now paid in thirds -- one third on signing the contract, one third on submission, one third on publication. But sometimes quarters, so the final quarter might not be till a year after publication. Publishing atm is all about risk mitigation.

But I'd be very surprised if the authors have made much money from this. It may have been optioned for TV or film, but even then, the big money won't come until/unless someone picks up the option, and the option could be quite small, depending on how eager a producer is to adapt it for screen. (And obviously, the negative response to the Guardian piece and the pulling of the book so close to publication doesn't bode well.)

A friend had her novel optioned by a famous actress turned producer who was very enthusiastic about it for years and kept renewing it for about eight years. It was never made. The option was something like £1k annually, or every 18 months.

Just my opinion, but I don't think it really matters if anyone can know for certain if AI wrote it all, or in part, or not. Just the fact that there can be a question about it is devastating for publishing, journalism, education - infact every aspect of life. Already we are in a position where it isn't possible to know if any written word came from a human or not. To me this is an absolute tragedy.

And, no, it really shouldn't have been a huge advance! They are unknown with a mild to moderately interesting story. If HC paid a lot for it they were very silly indeed.