Ghostwriting AI guidelines; bookstore explosion; shareholder AI tropes: Newsletter 22 April 2026

Newsletter 148. An AI negotiation tool for ghostwriters and their clients. Plus, resurgent indie bookstores, AI news regurgitation, three people to follow, three books to read, and one extremely worthwhile doppelgänger.

How to talk to your clients about AI

How should writers use AI?

That is a far more complicated question than it first appears. Some might say, “Not at all.” Or maybe, “Just for research.” Or, “Any way you want.” But attitudes and behaviors are all over the map.

Research I conducted last year suggests that 61% of writing professionals use AI, but that use is diverse. Different types of writers behave differently; 84% of thought leadership writers use it, as compared to 68% of ghostwriters and 44% of journalists. About seven out of ten writers use it to do Web search, as a thesaurus, or for brainstorming. But other uses are more controversial. More than 60% use it to draft content, and 7% publish that content without editing it further.

As a working writer, I’ve found the biggest challenge is not how to use AI, it’s how to communicate about it.

Writers do not work in a vacuum. They have colleagues, clients, collaborators, editors, and publishers. It’s extremely common for these people working together to have tacit beliefs about AI — and to become surprised when their collaborators are using AI in a different way than they expect. We spend too much of our time talking past each other on this topic and becoming frustrated. That’s wasteful.

It’s also fixable. We just need a way to clearly describe what we do and our expectations for others.

That is why, when the leading ghostwriting agency Gotham Ghostwriters asked me to participate in a committee developing AI guidelines for ghostwriters, I gladly volunteered. I wanted to contribute to creating a practical guide so ghostwriters and their clients could be clear about their AI use and expectations and then focus their attention on creative work, not blaming and shaming. (I also hoped that the guidelines we created could be a framework for other types of writers and editors who needed to collaborate.)

The effort took months and contributions from more than dozen different writers, editors, agencies, and publishers. Now that it’s done, I think it’s a real contribution to our ability to work together.

Here are some highlights from the guidelines, which you can read here:

• A statement of principles. These include “Human-created writing has desirable qualities that AI-created writing lacks” and “Writers and their clients need a mutual understanding about the use of AI.” Our intention was to ground the guidelines in clearly described attitudes that everyone could get behind.
• A list of recommended disclosures. We recommended that all ghostwriters disclose the ways that they use AI, so clients would know what to expect. The checklist ranges from uses that nearly everyone would accept, like “transcribing audio interviews” and “AI-augmented Web search,” to uses that some would object to, like “Generating initial drafts of text” or “Generating text that will not be revised further.” The point was not to decide for everyone what ought to be allowed. It was to make sure ghostwriters and clients had a common understanding of how they were working.
• A list of risks. Using AI carries risks. Rather than catastrophizing, we wrote them down. The list included not just the risk of material that couldn’t be copyrighted, but the risk of inadvertently contributing content to AI tools for training, the risk of inadvertent plagiarism, and of course the risk of publishing hallucinated errors.
• Rules for clients. In my experience as a writer, a lot of the challenge comes not from how writers use AI, but how our clients do as they create and contribute source material. So the guidelines also explain what we expect from clients, not just what they can expect from writers.

Collaborating on this document was challenging, not just because of the rapid change in the writing profession, but because it required negotiating agreement among many people with diverse viewpoints. But it was worth it. The result doesn’t read like a document written by a committee. It reads like a tool that everyone who writes for hire — and everyone who hires writers — ought to adopt.

The rapid and chaotic rollout of AI throughout the writing world may be the backdrop. But starting from common principles, we can work together far more productively. The AI Guidelines for Ghostwriters document is a worthy start.

News for writers and others who think

Reports of the death of the bookstore are greatly exaggerated. In the last five years, the number of independent bookstores in the US increased by 70% (Fast Company, register to read).

After reviewing shareholder communications by companies, Barron’s found that the AI hallmark constructions “It’s not xxxx, it’s yyyyy” increased four-fold between 2023 and now. It’s not just bad writing, it’s a sign that your communications staff need a human editor. (Yeah, I wrote it that way on purpose.) (register to read).

According to Futurism, a branding agency called the TOP Agency has created a “news” site that rips off legitimate journalism by washing it through AI and republishing it (without attribution, of course). The most absurd part of this? Most of the names in the articles are replaced with “Jane Doe”, including the NASA astronaut Jane Doe who named a moon crater after his late wife who is also apparently named Jane Doe.

Wired editor-at-large Steven Levy says AI can draft his stories “over my dead body.” Drafting is thinking. (subscriber link).

Is AI going to undermine creative workers’ wages? As Doug O’Laughlin points out, it happened before, at the dawn of the industrial era.

Three people to follow

Pamela Slim, who will help you productize your expertise

Joanna Wiebe, who has forgotten more than you will ever know about copy that sells

Henneke Duistermaat , purveyor of writing courses that will shake loose your creativity

Three books to read

The Long Run: Steve Prefontaine, Frank Shorter, Joan Benoit, Grete Waitz, and the Decade That Made the Marathon Cool by Martin Dugard (Dutton, 2026). The long road to marathons as a sport worth watching — and participating in.

This Land is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History by Beverly Gage (Simon & Schuster, 2026). Perversions of commemorated history, just in time for the nation’s 250th anniversary.

The Land and Its People: Essays by David Sedaris (Little Brown, 2026). Something new from America’s foremost smartass essayist.

Do this before you write

Ask my doppelgänger if it’s a good idea.