Recently, I’ve seen some posts from authors on social media about negative reviews. Negative reviews can come with publication, but these ones are erroneous – the reviewers are giving books a single star because there’s a note on the copyright page that the book is Made with Vellum. These reviewers believe that this means the book is generated by artificial intelligence software.
Vellum is formatting software. That’s a link to the website, which shows its abilities. You’ll see at a glance that “writing books” isn’t on the list. Vellum works from a text file to create a beautiful book interior. It generates a table of contents. It allows you to add and position graphics, to set chapters to begin only on right hand pages, and can apply a text style to an entire book easily. It lets you set margins and style your headers and footers, etc. etc. etc.
Vellum is used to format for ebook and for print. It does not write books. It is not at all like any of the many (many) AI book generators. It’s quite a fabulous product and I’ve been using it for years.
Vellum does add a little note at the bottom of the copyright page that looks like this:
This can be toggled off when books are generated, but I usually leave it in. It’s a kind of advertisement for Vellum, and since I love the software so much, I don’t mind having that note in my books.
They posted in their socials that they’ll be updating this message to make it more clear:
Of course, that means that bunches of existing ebooks need to be regenerated and updated at the portals, a job I’m not looking forward to doing.
I don’t use AI at all in plotting, writing or creating my books. I don’t hire designers who use it for cover design or illustrations. So, if you choose to post reviews on my books making accusations of my using AI, you’ll just be wrong.
The thing about this kind of accusation and review is that there’s no defense possible for the author. Book sales may be influenced for the worst and people’s reputations can suffer. Before you weaponize reviews, make accusations in social media or start a witch-hunt, please have your facts straight.
Deborah Cooke: Author 