Honey, We Bought an AI Story — Bona Books

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Honey, We Bought an AI Story

7 Jul

Written By Bona Books Ltd

This post discusses suspected AI-generated fiction submissions, author verification, and their impact on small presses.<br>You can also read and download our full report: The Machines Are Coming for Your Masthead

Are you worried about AI?<br>We were asked this question on a small-publishers panel at the World Fantasy Convention in 2025. Our Managing Editor, C.L., remembers answering pretty confidently. AI is glorified predictive text. It can produce words that technically hang together, but it cannot innovate, cannot imagine, and will never write anything worth reading.<br>He still believes that. We still believe that. Mostly.<br>What we no longer believe is that we will always be able to look at an AI story and know.<br>Bona Books accidentally bought an AI story. Indeed, we very nearly bought two, with a further three longlisted.<br>And this is a problem bigger than just us.<br>How did we get here?<br>For a micro-press with a volunteer team, this has been a nightmare of epic proportions. Months lost, huge energies expended, new emergency procedures built from scratch. Bona Books is dedicated to promoting human authors, and will never tolerate AI-generated work. If we’d caught this even two months later, we’d have been in production and facing the very real prospect of pulping an entire print run, without money for a reprint.<br>Since June 2025, the team at Bona Books have been ploughing our energies into our sophomore release: Wrath Month. A scrappy, angry, punk anthology of queer speculative fiction. We hoped it would be a way to channel some of the anger that so many LGBTQIA+ people (ourselves included) have been feeling at the state of the world into something meaningful.<br>The community seemed to agree because stories flooded in: 606 wild, furious tales from queer writers around the world. We had magical punk rockers, trans weredingoes eating cops, zombie gays refusing to be buried. Cutting it to just twenty stories was a challenge, but we were punching the air.<br>One chosen story was a steampunk, anti-colonial fantasy, titled “The Machine-Breaker of Aba”. It hit our brief with a perfect intensity that felt difficult to resist. A queer woman, building a machine from scrap metal and rage to destroy her colonial oppressors? Of course we loved it. The author was an emerging Nigerian writer named Bella Chacha.<br>We also accepted an epic fantasy romance called “The Rot Beneath”, in which a young man merged with a mycelial network to bring down a fascist regime (and rescue his boyfriend). The worldbuilding was messy, but it offered an imaginative, epic scale that expanded the tone of the anthology. As far as we could tell, this would have been the author Stephen Jackson’s first professional publication.<br>(Note: We are naming both authors here because we are confident of the process we have run and able to defend the claims we have made. We also note both these names are pseudonyms.)<br>Much later, after months of diligent work from our tiny team, Wrath Month was inches away from going to print.<br>Then everything went wrong.<br>A Timely Warning<br>Another editor alerted us to the problem. Several SFF magazines had received numerous submissions with AI hallmarks from an author publishing under a familiar name: Bella Chacha.<br>Once we’d picked our hearts off the floor, we started digging: Bella had minimal online presence, first appearing in May 2025. Since then, she’d accumulated a remarkable publication record (we counted 15 published stories in 12 months), across name publishers and small or community-minded outlets, including several paying SFWA rates (like us).<br>That proved nothing, of course. Writers can be prolific. They can be private. A Nigerian bisexual woman (as Bella self-identified) may very well have more need of privacy than most.<br>So we went back to Bella’s original submission and read it again, this time with our antennae raised and with a little enforced humility.

AI-Writing Alarm Bells<br>Many short fiction markets, understandably, are looking for stories that are ready to publish. One way Bona Books tries to support emerging authors is by accepting stories from talented writers that still require some additional editorial support. Bella was one of these; a relatively new author (as we understood it), writing from a different literary context to most of our submissions. Turning back, many features we had previously considered distinct, took on worrying resonances.<br>The closer we examined that first draft, the more the story’s centre seemed absent. The protagonist was active, but lacked interiority. The worldbuilding had colourful details that somehow failed to build consistently. Certain hallmark sentences recurred over and over (“Not X, but Y…”). And the pacing was off, with important story beats given oddly little narrative weight.<br>Revisiting the editorial process was revealing, too. After we accept stories, we...