Shitty Casual

I've been sitting on this for a bit, chewing on it, and my takeaway is Hatchette is full of assholes.

I was already annoyed by the innovative new tradpub acquisition process wherein the indie author does all the work (gets the idea for the book, writes the book, edits the book, gets a cover for the book, publishes the book, does the marketing for the book, builds the platform, attracts readers, gains momentum, starting selling lots of books) and Hachette swoops in to offer a deal and take the lion's share of the profits, because Traditional Publishers Don't Actually Know How to Sell Books They Just Sorta Get Lucky Sometimes (United States v. Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster), and letting the author do literally everything and establish the book has legs saves them the trouble.

The only thing worse is the audio pubs hoovering up every audio book right they can find by low-balling clueless indies with pocket change offers. (Do your research and counter-offer Podium. I'm begging you.)

Hatchette knew what they bought. They knew the beef with the stolen cover, they knew the rumors the book was written with AI. They thought they could make a buck off Mia Ballard with frankly minimal effort on their part, and they didn't care about the AI stuff until they started to get heat. Then, instead of supporting the author THEY APPROACHED, they threw her to the curb like trash.

When faced with accusations of stolen cover art, Hatchette actually commissioned A DIFFERENT artist to do a similar cover instead of working with the og artist. (?WTF?)

Now, Hatchette has the gall to say they are "committed to protecting creative expression." Eat my whole ass.

Wanna sign with trad? Better be sure, because once these people get their hooks into your book anything goes.

Anyway, my official stance on is it ok to use AI in your self-published book is: Fuck Hachette.