How to document that a book is your own work
No AI detector can prove authorship. Keep ordinary process evidence instead: dated drafts, source notes, recordings, tracked revisions and correspondence. An AI Footprint result can flag prose to review, but it is not a provenance record or proof of who wrote the words.
The provenance habits worth starting today
Each takes seconds. Together they are far more persuasive than any tool's verdict, and they cannot be created retrospectively.
- Save dated versions rather than overwriting one file. Eleven dated drafts tell a story.
- Keep every recording, if you dictate. Audio of you saying it is close to unarguable.
- Keep notebooks, and photograph the pages. Handwriting is provenance.
- Keep your research notes, with the dates you gathered them.
- Keep the emails: to beta readers, to your editor, to yourself at 2am.
- Use a tool with version history and don't clear it.
- Keep the bad drafts. They are the most convincing evidence you have.
- Note where each chapter was written. Specificity is persuasive.
- Keep the outline as it changed. Development is what generated text lacks.
- If you use tools, keep a short note of which and for what.
- Back all of it up somewhere you'll still have in five years.
Try a separate free writing review
A separate writing review for clarity and reader impact; it does not check AI use, prove authorship or decide disclosure. Send up to 5,000 words. You get back what the draft appears to be doing to somebody who wasn't there when you wrote it, the strongest thing in it named, the exact place a reader starts to drift, and three revision priorities in order.
A separate writing review for clarity and reader impact; it does not check AI use, prove authorship or decide disclosure. An AI-assisted read of your own pages. Not a human edit, not a line edit, and not a scored report.
Why detector scores are not evidence
AI-detection tools score text for statistical properties associated with generated writing: low variance in sentence length, predictable word choice, uniform register.
Those properties also describe careful editing, formal registers, technical writing, and English written by fluent non-native speakers. False positives cluster in exactly those groups, which is well documented and has led to real injustices in academic settings.
They also miss lightly-edited generated text, because a few human changes shift the statistics.
So a high score on your own writing is not a problem to solve and a low score proves nothing. If someone presents a score as evidence, the correct response is to explain what the tool measures — and then show them your drafts.
What actually demonstrates authorship
Development. Generated text arrives finished; human writing arrives badly and improves.
A folder containing draft one with the wrong structure, draft three with a chapter cut, draft five with the ending rewritten, plus a notebook, plus the email where you told a friend you were stuck — that is a picture of a book being made. It cannot be assembled afterwards and everyone recognises it.
This is why the bad drafts are the valuable ones. Authors delete them out of embarrassment; keep them.
If you dictated it, you are in the strongest position of all
A recording of you telling the story, dated, with your voice, your hesitations and your false starts, is about as direct a demonstration of authorship as exists.
So if you speak your drafts — and many people find the difficult chapters far easier said than typed — keep the audio. All of it, backed up.
The same is true for interviews: forty hours of your mother talking is not just material for the book, it is the book's provenance.
When the real problem is the writing
Sometimes an accusation of AI use is really a reaction to flat prose — and that is a fixable writing problem, not a defence problem.
Prose reads as machine-generated when it is uniform: every sentence the same length, every paragraph the same shape, no idiom, no risk, no specificity. Over-editing does this, and so does anxiety.
The fix is the same either way. Put the specific details back — the make of the car, the name of the street, the thing your aunt always said. Vary the sentence length. Keep one or two of your own verbal habits. Read it aloud and restore whatever sounds like you.
That makes it a better book, which is the point regardless of who is asking.
About Your Book Pro
Your Book Pro is a book-writing platform built in Britain. Start with an idea, notes, half a draft, a podcast, or a finished manuscript, and use our purpose-built AI tools for planning, feedback, editing, proofreading, cover designs, and to create print-ready files. Writing is totally free: you can type, upload or speak your book as much as you like, and use only the editing tools you need with Plus, or go unlimited with Pro.
Produce world-class drafts at the fraction of the cost of hiring a human editorial team.
Every account starts with 1,000 welcome credits, and a plain export of your own words is free.
Each guide says plainly when a person does the job better than AI. Guides on legal topics are general information, not legal advice.
AI Footprint Checker reads the current whole manuscript in parts and flags passages whose style may strike an editor or reader as generic or machine-like. It is useful for finding flattened prose, but it is not a provenance record and cannot prove who wrote the words.
Keep your own dated drafts, source notes, recordings, revision history and correspondence. A plain export of your own words is free, so you can retain copies outside the platform too.
Run the advisory check on your book
Create or sign in, open your book, then choose AI Footprint on Prepare. Credits are required on Plus and included in Pro.
Create or sign inQuestions people ask
- Can AI detectors be wrong?
- Frequently, in both directions. They false-positive on non-native English, formal registers and heavily edited prose, and they false-negative on lightly edited generated text. A score is not evidence.
- What if my publisher asks?
- Answer honestly and specifically: what you used and for what. Vagueness reads worse than any particular answer, and most publishers are asking so they can complete their own paperwork.
- Does using a spell-checker count?
- No. Grammar and spelling tools have been standard for decades and are universally treated as assistance, not generation.
- Should I keep my drafts?
- Yes, all of them, dated — especially the bad ones. Visible development is the single most persuasive demonstration of authorship there is.
- What if my writing just sounds formal?
- That is a known cause of false positives and it is not a fault. If it also reads flat to human readers, add specificity and vary your sentence lengths — that is a writing improvement, not a defence.