Shy Girl is a window to the future

This is the 320th edition of SHuSH, the newsletter of The Sutherland House Inc. If you’re new here, press the button—it’s free:

Sutherland House is always happy to receive submissions of manuscripts or proposals for nonfiction books. If you are looking to get published, contact submissions@sutherlandhousebooks.com. Agents welcome, but no agent required.

---

My friend Thad McIlroy just landed the scoop of the year in book publishing. Not that you’d know it. Here’s what happened.

Thad is a publishing consultant, author, journalist, and expert on AI as it intersects with the world of books. SHuSH readers will remember him from our past conversations about AI and other publishing matters. Anyway, Thad was talking about publishing issues with an account executive at Pangram, an AI detection software company. He learned there was chatter on social media, particularly Reddit, about a book called Shy Girl that people believed was generated in whole or in part by AI.

The book was originally self-published by little-known author Mia Ballard. Hachette picked it up and published it in the UK last November and was set to release the “unapologetic, visceral revenge horror novel” in the US in April. This was the Hachette US acquisition announcement:

Thad went to some trouble to track down a UK version of the manuscript, convert it to a .docx file, and send it to Pangram for analysis. The outcome: “78.4% of the document is Al Generated.” Two other services confirmed that result.

Worth noting that even AI acknowledges that AI detectors are not very reliable. False positives are a real problem, something Thad knew well. He nevertheless had the makings of a story. All he needed was an outlet. He thought about Publishers Weekly, where he’s a contributing editor, but “the magazine no longer runs substantial investigative pieces.”

So he went to The New York Times. The Times told him his status as an industry consultant ruled him out as a reporter on the piece. The story was assigned to publishing reporter Alexandra Alter, with the assurance that he would be fully credited as the source. Thad had worked with Alexandra on previous stories and was satisfied with this arrangement. Numerous exchanges and several phone calls later, the Times published the following about Shy Girl:

On Thursday, a day after The New York Times approached Hachette citing evidence that the novel appeared to be A.I.-generated, the company said it was pulling the book from publication. By Thursday afternoon, the novel was removed from Amazon and the Hachette website.

Hachette told The Times that its Orbit imprint decided not to publish “Shy Girl,” which was due out in the United States this spring, after conducting a thorough and lengthy review of the text. Hachette said it will also discontinue the book in the U.K., where it was published last fall and has sold 1,800 print copies, according to NielsenIQ BookData.

A second, longer piece followed in the Times. It ventured that Shy Girl is the first significant novel from a major publishing house cancelled over possible AI use. The article leaves you with the impression that Pangram and The New York Times took the initiative of running the novel through AI detectors. It credits online discussions with surfacing problems in Ballard’s work, which is fair, to an extent (more on this below)—it’s just not how the Times learned about it.

The piece goes on to discuss how publishing houses have been slow to develop policies for the handling of AI and were more or less asking for this sort of controversy. What rules exist are vague. Some writers are leaning heavily on chatbots, others are using them selectively, and still others find them evil. Readers and, it seems, publishers don’t always know what’s written by a human and what isn’t. Thad is briefly quoted on these points as a publishing expert. There’s no recognition that he handed the story to the newspaper. The longer article has racked up 700 comments, a spectacular number for a publishing piece.

So Thad wrote this in his blog:

While it’s great to be quoted in the New York Times, and I think highly … of Alexandra Alter, I’m distraught that I received not much more than a passing mention in the main article (and a quote in the short news piece). None of the news coverage of the Times article even hints at my role, and so there’s near-zero value to me from my involvement.

I brought the story to the paper and was assured that I would be credited as the source. That didn’t happen. I’ve not had any follow-up queries — why would I have? — my role in the story was apparently unimportant.

A great deal has been written about Shy Girl this week. Apart from giving Thad his due, I want to raise a few points I don’t think have received sufficient attention.

First, Hachette may have more to answer for than Ballard, whose career has been damaged. She disputes that she used AI, although she admits “an acquaintance she hired to edit the self-published version of the novel did.” The Kindle Direct world from which Ballard was plucked is rife with AI use, much of it loud and proud. I don’t know if the publisher asked her directly, before signing her up, if she’d used AI (or, if it did, how she answered), but as Thad says, the first accusations of AI use on Shy Girl pre-date Hachette’s acquisition by about six months. The company seems to have been hugely incurious about this. It told the Times that it decided to cancel the book after “a lengthy and thorough analysis” and that the company “values human creativity,” etc. Its lengthy and thorough analysis appears to have been conducted with twenty-four hours of learning that the Times was working on the story.

Second, the first two paragraphs of Shy Girl:

I wear a pink dress, the kind that promises softness and delivers none. Its tulle is brittle and sharp, brushing against my fur like a thousand tiny teeth, a cruel lover that bites with every move. Every scratch keeps me in place, a reminder of what I am: a pet, a thing shaped for looking, for praise, for command. The bows on my pigtails pull too tight, yanking the skin and stretching my head into something neat, into something pleasing, a quiet violence made beautiful. White socks climb my legs, their frills delicate, a whisper of innocence over the bruises beneath, the ones he says shouldn’t happen if the socks are there—but they always do.

The ache is low and rhythmic, a second heartbeat in my ribs, steady and insistent, the kind of pain you get used to until it becomes part of you. Then the door bursts open, and he enters like a storm, dragging the sour stink of liquor behind him, his presence filling the room and turning the pastel air brittle. In his hands is a cake, gleaming, its pink frosting too smooth, like plastic dipped in sugar, like something that belongs on a screen, too perfect to hold.

I’m not the audience for this, but AI or no AI, I have a hard time imagining how Hachette, the second largest trade publisher in the world, home to David Sedaris and Donna Tartt, read that and thought, “I’ve got to have this book.”

The final point, related to both of the above, is one I discussed with Jane Friedman a couple of weeks back. Increasingly, as she has documented, big publishing houses are generating hits by trawling self-published offerings on Amazon and scooping up anything with sales momentum. They are ever so slightly moving away from being reliable curators of fine writing and great storytelling to acting as distribution outlets for whatever is hot, because it’s hot. To borrow a term that was popular in the telecom world I briefly inhabited, publishers are edging toward becoming dumb pipes, carrying data across a network without adding any value or control over it.

I don’t want to overstate this, because much of what is being published is being published as ever it was, but there’s definite movement in the dumb pipe direction. The big houses are increasingly relying on upstream signals—whether Amazon rankings or TikTok virality or Goodreads buzz—rather than editorial conviction in their acquisitions. When they do so, they’re outsourcing judgement and chasing proven demand. They’re acting less as book publishers and more as logistics companies engaged in platform arbitrage.

When you start thinking this way, it’s difficult to apply the brakes. An absolute disaster of a book takes off on Kindle Direct, you have to take it or you’re leaving money on the table, and your competitor will grab it.

If that’s where things are headed, Shy Girl isn’t an aberration, it’s a preview.

---

Side note: I don’t want to be too hard on the Times because it gives great coverage to books, but if we’re being straight here, it didn’t really break the Shy Girl story. It simply took a story that was live on new media and told it on old media. While the Times should have credited Thad, the real hero of this whole affair is Frankie of Frankie’s Shelf. Frankie, who I think is Canadian, deserved credit in the Times, too. For a riveting devoted two hours, forty minutes, and thirty-three seconds, Frankie’s Shelf dissected Shy Girl line by line, evaluating its slender merits and building the case that it’s AI slop. This was way back on January 29. It makes for spectacular viewing, with special effects and several costume changes. I’m in awe of Frankie. We complain a lot in this newsletter that book reviewing is dead. Frankie is the counterargument, with 1,369,677 views on this show alone.

Final note: An amusing headline, courtesy The Atlantic, hit my feed as I was finishing the newsletter: “How AI is Creeping Into The New York Times: Artificial Intelligence seems to be turning up, undisclosed, in the opinion pages of major news publications.” The story goes on to show how the Times and other news outlets have vague policies and problematic relationships with AI, just like book publishers.

Extra note: A great summary of all the issues around AI and book publishing is here on Jane Friedman’s site.

---

Start the year informed

As a SHuSH subscriber, you are eligible for this special offer: buy a subscription to Sutherland Quarterly (or treat a friend) and we’ll send you the Sutherland House book of your choice at no charge.

Launched in 2022, Sutherland Quarterly is an exciting new series of captivating essays on current affairs by some of Canada’s finest writers, published individually as books and also available by annual subscription—four great books a year, mailed to your door, for just $67.99. Subscribe now at sutherlandquarterly.com and we’ll immediately be in touch to send you the free book of your choice.

Sutherland Quarterly is also pleased to announce its next edition, coming January 27, will be Richard Stursberg’s Lament for a Literature, a sweeping account of how English Canada once forged a confident literary culture—and how that culture has steadily collapsed.

For decades, books provided the country’s most searching reflections on its history, politics, and identity; they shaped the national conversation and anchored a shared sense of who Canadians were. Author and media executive Richard Stursberg traces how this ecosystem emerged, flourished, and then eroded. He follows the rise of a vigorous publishing industry in the 1960s and ’70s, the period when Canadian writers reached international prominence, and the subsequent decades in which foreign ownership, shifting cultural priorities, fragile institutions, and policy failures hollowed out the sector.

Clear, forceful, and grounded in deep research, Lament for a Literature shows what happens when a nation loses the infrastructure that sustains its stories—and outlines practical reforms, including a Canadian Book Law, to rebuild the foundations of a literary culture capable of renewing itself.

ORDER HERE NOW

---

Thanks for reading. Please either:

Our Newsletter Roll (suggestions welcome)

Banuta Rubess’s Funny, You Don’t Look Bookish, reviews five books a week.

The Bibliophile from Biblioasis, an independent publisher based in Windsor.

The Literary Review of Canada’s Bookworm, “your weekly dose of exclusive reviews, book excerpts, and more.”

Art Kavanagh’s Talk about books: Book discussion and criticism.

Gayla Gray’s SoNovelicious: Books, reading, writing, and bookstores.

Esoterica Magazine: Literature and popular culture.

Benjamin Errett’s Get Wit Quick, literature and other fun stuff

Lydia Perovic’s Long Play: literature and music.

Jason Logan’s Urban Color Report: adventures in ink (sign-up at bottom of page)

Anne Trubek’s Notes from a Small Press: like SHuSH, but different

Art Canada Institute: a reliable source of Canadian arts info/opinion

Kate McKean’s Agents & Books: an interesting angle on the literary world

Rebecca Eckler’s Re:Book: unpretentious recommendations

Anna Sproul Latimer’s How to Glow in the Dark: interesting advice

John Biggs Great Reads: strong recommendations

Steven Beattie’s That Shakespearean Rag, a newsy blog about books and reading

Mark Dykeman’s How About This: Atlantic Canadian interviews and thoughts on writing and creativity.

J. W. Ellenhall’s 3-Page Book Battles: Readers help her choose which of three random books to review each month.

Donald Brackett’s Embodied Meanings: “Arts music films literature and popular culture.”