About the AI, plainly
A lot of readers are wary of AI right now, and I think that is fair. So here is exactly what happens here.
BookSignal does not write books. It reads them. When an author lists a title, my system reads the whole thing and describes it: how fast it moves, how dark it gets, whether the ending resolves, how much the characters drive events. Then it looks for readers whose taste matches that description.
Online booksellers are filling up with machine-written books. An AI-slop factory can put together something that looks like a book, stuff the metadata to appeal to the algorithms, and publish in minutes, burying human-written books in a pile of, well, you know. I built BookSignal to help human-written, quality books get found.
So what stops the slop getting in here?
Every book is uploaded by a named author who is accountable for it, and every book is read and scored for writing quality before it reaches you. That score covers the things that give machine-written text away, and it is one of the things that decides which books you get shown. I cannot promise you that no bad book ever slips through. I can promise that quality is something I actually measure, rather than a claim on a page.
What happens to an author’s manuscript
I keep the file for one week after it finishes processing, because processing sometimes has to be retried, and then it is deleted automatically. I do not sell it, share it, or publish any part of it. The analysis stays; the book does not.
It is not used to train anything
Not by me, and not by the companies whose models I use to do the reading. Anthropic’s terms rule it out, and Voyage keeps nothing on disk and has training switched off on my account.
What I keep about you
The answers you give in the taste quiz, and what you click. That is what the recommendations are built from. You can delete your account and it all goes.
If that is not good enough, I would rather you knew now than found out later.