Your sermons may already contain your book.

It will not correct you quietly

When something needs changing, Your Book Pro keeps four things separately: what you originally said, what the verified source actually reads, what it proposes, and what you finally approve. Nothing is silently repaired in your manuscript.

That matters most with audio. If a transcription altered a verse, you should be able to see exactly what happened rather than finding a tidy correction that no longer matches what you preached - or, worse, one that matches nothing at all.

Scripture, commentary and your own interpretation are different things

In the pulpit these blend, legitimately. You read a text, you draw on a commentary, you explain what you believe it means, and the congregation follows without needing the seams pointed out.

A book cannot do that. A reader who cannot tell your interpretation from the text is being misled, however unintentionally.

Your Book Pro treats them as distinct layers: the sacred text itself, the translation you are quoting, published commentary, theological interpretation, liturgy, historical documents, and your own paraphrase. It will not let commentary be presented as Scripture, or a modern translation stand in for the ancient source.

Which translation, and whose licence

Verification runs against openly licensed texts held locally - the World English Bible British Edition, the Berean Standard Bible and the Open English Bible Commonwealth edition.

Proprietary translations are handled differently, because we respect their licences. Your Book Pro can identify the reference and tell you when your wording belongs to a translation it cannot hold a copy of, which is precisely the moment to check what permission your book needs. Depending on the source, verification may run against a licensed service, a read-only reference, an edition you supply yourself for use in your project alone, or a specialist review where automated checking would be inappropriate.

Most modern translations set a limit on how much you may quote before written permission is required, along with a copyright notice the book must carry, and the terms differ between publishers. Confirming that with your translation's publisher remains your responsibility. What Your Book Pro can do is make sure you know what you have quoted, and from where, before you ask.

Four questions, asked separately

A quotation can be accurate and still be a problem. Your Book Pro keeps four questions apart, because passing one does not settle the others:

• Is the wording accurate?
• Is it attributed to the right source?
• Is it the translation or edition you think it is?
• Are the rights, the context and the confidentiality acceptable?

The fourth is the one that catches people out, and it is the one a sermon archive raises most often.

What was said in confidence should stay that way

Sermon illustrations are full of people. A marriage that nearly ended. A diagnosis. A conversation in a hospital corridor. Spoken to a congregation who knew the context and the boundaries, that is pastoral. Printed and sold to strangers, it can identify someone who never agreed to be in a book.

Your Book Pro asks you to name the contributors on any recording before their words are quoted, and records what each has agreed to. Confidentiality is one of the four gates a passage has to clear, so a story that needs permission is raised rather than assumed.

The decision is yours. It should be made deliberately, chapter by chapter, while the book is still a draft and permission or anonymity is still easy to arrange.

Where preaching borrows

Preaching absorbs material. A commentary read years ago, an illustration heard at a conference, a phrase from a study guide that became your own through repetition. In the pulpit that is ordinary. In a printed book it is a problem, and sermon plagiarism has ended ministries.

Your Book Pro flags unattributed quotations, close paraphrases, explanations reproduced too closely and material whose source is unclear, and it keeps your research separate from your manuscript so that background reading does not quietly become your prose.

It is not a similarity scan of the internet, and we will not pretend otherwise. It cannot know what you read in 2009. What it can do is make it difficult to publish something you have not looked at properly.

Nothing unresolved is called finished

A significant quotation that remains unidentified, unverified, uncertain as to edition, or waiting on specialist review does not quietly disappear as a book approaches completion. It is recorded as unresolved, and it stays unresolved until you or an appropriate reviewer settles it.

A book can be finished. A quotation cannot be left hoping.

On writing your own book

There is an active argument in the church about preaching written by machine, and we are on the same side of it as you.

Your Book Pro does not write your book. It reads what you have already said, tells you what it finds, and proposes structure. Nothing reaches your manuscript that you did not write, dictate or approve, and drafted text is marked in red italics until you accept it.

It also includes an AI footprint check. This reads the finished manuscript and estimates how much of it is likely to strike a reader as machine-written, showing you the specific passages responsible and why - a stretch of summary where the detail dropped away, an abstract phrase that could have been said by anyone. It is an estimate of how your book will be read, not a judgement on how it was written, and zero per cent is not the target.

For most authors that is a commercial concern. For a preacher it is closer to a pastoral one. Your authority rests on people believing that the words are yours, and a congregation who suspect otherwise will not say so - they will simply stop trusting the book.