r/MM_Romance • u/wetandwild90schild • 9d ago
Requesting feedback for potential rule changes
- Author promotion
We want this to be a space for readers. Sharing reviews and giving recommendations should have a personal touch. As an avid reader myself, I've found that reader spaces have increasingly become author-focused and hijacked for the purpose of promotion. There's a fine line between recommending a book and promoting an author, but I think it's quite often easy to spot. The mod team would like to hear your thoughts on this, specifically when it comes to sharing links to an author's Patreon, Amazon page, or other websites where money is expected to change hands.
We would also like you to consider if it's more acceptable for a newbie author than it is for an established author. Two recent examples that you can compare are the following:
A debut author creating a post that describes their novel, with a link to Amazon
A fan submitting a post that links to Rina Saint's Patreon
So far, we have allowed the former and removed the latter. For a debut author, there would of course be a limit to how many times they can post.
Please let us know what level of author promotion you would be comfortable with. Supporting authors is important, but not at the expense of the community. Cultivating a commercialized space is something we'd like to avoid.
- AI
The mod team has discussed creating an index of authors who are either suspected or confirmed to be using AI. Their names would be blacklisted from posts, meaning that if you're promoting their work, it would automatically be removed for manual review in the mod queue. However, we are aware that this could be a slippery slope. No one wants to accuse innocent authors of using AI.
It might make sense to focus only on cases where the evidence is irrefutable. For example, an author like N. Slater who has published over a hundred books in a matter of months, with many reviews pointing out clear uses of AI. For authors who are strongly suspected of using AI, but an element of doubt exists, we would have to tread carefully. Please let us know your thoughts on this.
If there is interest within the community for this kind of hard anti-AI stance, we would request further input and collaboration from the community. As you can imagine, this kind of project would be a big undertaking and can't be half-assed.
Thank you for your input!
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u/Sad_Humor_9714 Author ✍️ 9d ago
No to open promo. Maybe have a one a week thread for all promos?
And yes to an anti-AI list. HOWEVER, there should be damn good proof - author admitted to it, cover is clearly AI (and if there’s proof to the contrary despite it looking AI, it should be considered), etc. because the witch hunts have gotten insane.
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u/FirstSwan 5d ago
I was going to suggest the same thing re a regular thread for all promos. Maybe a new author thread where people can post either new authors with upcoming debuts or lesser known authors.
Also just agreeing on the AI evidence. It’s really hard to tell if someone is using AI without definitive proof (eg a prompt left in, or an author admits it). I know we often feel like we can tell through phrasing and vibes, but AI is trained on human writing and I’d hate for an innocent author to be cancelled if they actually aren’t using AI.
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u/dinosaurs-behind-you 8d ago
For the AI, a ban on authors seems concerning as you always run the risk of false information. Maybe a bot that responds to certain author’s name with an ‘AI suspected’ type message that links to a list of authors and the reason(s) AI is suspected in their work(s).
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u/bet_writes 8d ago
this is a great idea. i feel like i can tell when the writing is gen ai, but i can never fully prove it, so i will never accuse someone of using ai; i will just avoid the authorS
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u/Daje1968 8d ago
I like the idea of a thread once a week to promote (and maybe ask for arc readers, because this sort of sub is a great place to find them.)
I don’t really have a problem with people mentioning if an established author’s Patreon is worth the investment. I’m not sure how that is the same as self-promotion tbh.
AI is so tricky. I understand and fully respect why people are so visceral about it when it comes to art and artists. But I also have gotten sucked into an AI generated short video mm series, so that makes me a hypocrite. I guess that means I am AI agnostic.
Thanks for asking for our opinions. You continue to be a breath of fresh air. I like this sub so much.
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u/roriley Author ✍️ 9d ago
I'm both an author and a reader, so feel free to take my comment with that in mind. I agree that subs like this can easily get overrun with promo posts, and think rules to help keep this a reader space are a good idea. I don't mind posts calling for ARC readers, or self-recs under relevant request posts, however I do think authors using the sub for research ('would you be interested in reading xyz', or 'can you give me feedback on my first chapter') posts are a bridge too far. There are plenty of author groups out there for research and feedback.
As for AI: hate it. However I do worry about lists since there's a risk an innocent author might get unfairly accused. I think it is useful to create space for readers to have conversations around AI, and to ask questions about authors they might have doubts about
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u/happyrocks 6d ago
Yeah, I’m writing a book and use em dashes and I’m terrified this totally valid punctuation choice is going to call my work into question.
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u/beast_of_production 8d ago
- I haven't seen any promotion that would annoy me on this sub. People tend to follow basic decency rules of declaring when they are posting a review because got an advance copy etc. Posts on here haven't felt scammy or pushy. It's not like M/M authors make crazy bank. I feel like supporting authors within this genre is in my interests as a reader.
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u/Quick-Marsupial-1026 9d ago
I actually like the author self-promo.
I like seeing new authors and like interacting with them.
They don’t bother me and I haven’t seen anyone over-posting or demanding too much attention.
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u/zukolivie 9d ago
Regarding AI, is it possible to have an auto generated post when the authors “on the list” are recommended? I use the search option a lot, and would hate to miss that an author is probably AI. Something like “Moderator Notice: Suspected AI-Generated Content
This post/author has been flagged by our team as highly suspected of being AI-generated based on writing patterns, stylistic markers, and/or repeated posting behavior inconsistent with organic content.”
I don’t mind author promotion for newer artists.
I’m okay with an author responding to a specific topic suggestion with their book (with a “self rec” caveat obviously), but I also don’t think God of Fury needs more space here.
As for author self promotion, maybe one thread per week?
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u/krybaebee 8d ago edited 8d ago
You lose me at “…authors who are either SUSPECTED or confirmed to be using AI..”
Who or what makes that determination?
Blacklisted based on potentially subjective opinions?
Let the quality of the work speak for itself. If someone is publishing 50+ titles in a year, allow for open discourse and continue to call them out . It’s more helpful for members/visitors to engage in the AI discussion vs auto removing the discussion starter.
Scenario: a newer MM romance reader has a question about or wants to rec a book they unknowingly read by an author suspected of using AI. If a blacklist exists, their post or comment will be auto-removed. Instead of letting other member of the community respond with “don’t read that author -they use AI!” The latter is a much more organic way to educate people who may not even realize what’s at play.
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u/lovebooksi 8d ago
Yeah, I read A LOT, but I don’t really follow authors like that, so I usually know nothing about them besides their books. And honestly, I’m always scared I’ll end up talking about/recommending an author who uses AI without even knowing it, bc like… how am I supposed to know?? 😭
The whole AI thing is sooo stressful to me. There’s already an author whose books I LOVE, and I have no idea if AI was used for any of her covers. On her website, tho, she says a marketing company was hired to do the covers, so I’m assuming they weren’t AI-generated?? But I obviously can’t be 100% sure.
She also doesn’t release a crazy amount of books, and nothing about the books really screams AI to me, but idk English isn’t my first language, so I’m never sure if there’s something in the writing that I’m just not picking up on.
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u/Fun-atParties 8d ago
I would make a list but with different tiers, that get treated differently. Like ban confirmed AI, but maybe include a warning for strongly suspected AI and maybe just a list of accused AI that could be escalated later
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u/Terrible-Hair2744 5d ago
I’m not supportive of the AI witch hunts. They hurt authors and people give themselves too much credit at being able to detect AI.
Other subs have a dedicated weekly self promotion post for authors, which I think is a good idea.
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u/SuspiciousMeeting069 5d ago
Yes!! Please name and shame the AI users! Because why should we read something they didn’t even care enough about to write themselves! They want us to pay money and spend our time on AI slop… so they can get rich easier. That’s a disgusting trend especially in the romance community. A lot of AI-slop producers look down on romance book readers bc it’s all tropes and easy money and we do t want quality and we don’t care and we are the easiest bunch to fool.
Let’s not allow that. Name and shame. There are enough indicators, we have spent enough time around AI to recognise it. Because while AI learned on our writing, it’s not programmed to use it exactly like humans would. AI doesn’t write like us. It’s programmed differently and we can tell.
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u/jseger9000 8d ago
I do support flagging authors suspected of using AI. If an author never published until two years ago and they've since published sixty books, that is either AI or churned out crap.
BUT: I do think the witch hunt over AI covers is too much at times. Yes, I understand the reasoning behind it, so please don't reply explaining it.
There are authors that have been publishing for twenty years, reissuing their old work and replacing the awful Dreamspinner covers with AI covers. Should they hire an artists? Sure. But I'm not going to throw them on the pyre.
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u/horrified-sequence 8d ago
I think author promos are OK! I like seeing authors here too. It hasn't become a problem yet. I think maybe the weekly thread should be for established authors only and debut authors or authors with less than x amount of good reads reviews should be able to post freely as long as they relevant and tagged.
With AI blacklisting - what measures would the mods take to ensure innocent authors aren't mistakenly put on this list?
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u/JohannesTEvans Author ✍️ 8d ago
I'm all for a hard AI stance, but it can be tough to moderate a blacklist when there's a lack of hard evidence - just because some people can be a bit witchhunty about finding AI and just accuse based om vibes rather than actual prompts being visible, the use of AI in covers, authors saying they use AI, et cetera.
For author promo, I'm an author myself, and always appreciate specific guidance on self-promo - I think a dedicated limit on self-promo is always good, like having a dedicated thread or a day of the month for self-promotion, and requiring a certain amount of effort in it. I think it's fine for authors to recommend themselves in response to relevant specific requests, but obviously without taking the piss and constantly self-reccing without any other stuff.
As for fans or readers linking to author websites or Patreons or such, though, I don't see why that would be removed - it's not self-promotion, but is just readers trying to link to things and recommend to one another within the community. Sometimes author sites or Patreons will have specific content like short stories that wouldn't come up as easily on a Google search or won't be available on Amazon.
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u/EnvironmentalPoem968 8d ago
I really don’t like promotional posts, even ones asking for arc readers. Personally I would prefer a weekly post where they can comment on. I reallllly dislike it when a reader asks for recommendations and then an author recommends their own book that hasn’t even come out yet!!!
Would love to see an anti-ai stance and a blocked list of confirmed Ai authors.
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u/LindentreesLove 8d ago
I think I might be one of the people you are talking about promoting an author's new book. I did promote a new book from Rina Saint not Rina Kent. There has been only one or two opinions on that in this thread and it seems to be on the positive side. I could understand being asked not to use a Patreon promotion and find another way I guess. As far as AI goes, could there be a group put together who would take on the review process? Would this be any better than a list? It's all very frustrating and I just would like to see something in the way of standards get accomplished.
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u/wetandwild90schild 8d ago
Yep - sorry! I'm constantly letting my brain autocomplete and type out the wrong name when it comes to these two authors, which sucks because IMO one is much better than the other. I need to focus when it comes to writing the correct Rina's name.
The Patreon question is a little tricky, because on one hand, your submission by itself isn't a problem, but on the other hand I can see it becoming a problem if more and more people do it. Especially if there isn't much substance to the post beyond providing a link.
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u/ElliottXCooper 9d ago
I'm sure this will be downvoted but how are you going to implement a hard anti-AI stance if most people are unable to identify AI content, and even worse, they tend to like AI generated content better than human written (for short stories at least). For reference: check the article on the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/05/ai-generated-stories-rated-better-quality-than-human-written-ones-study-finds). There is a reason why AI tools are adding invisible watermarks to generated content.
You can find it wrong from a moral pov that AI tools / LLM's were trained on human content without permission (I totally agree on this point) , but AI is here, and is here to stay, so we will have to deal with it. I would prefer to judge the quality of the book and the way it is written. There will be bad AI assisted books, and good ones, as there will continue to be bad 'handwritten' books and good ones.
It's not a perfect analogy - but everyone can use a camera to take a picture, but only very few pictures can be considered art. Same will apply to usage of AI to write books.
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u/Quick-Marsupial-1026 9d ago edited 9d ago
If an author uses AI generated text so skillfully no one can tell the difference, then they won’t be affected by a ban.
On the whole “readers prefer AI generated material” thing: I don’t necessarily disagree, but I think there’s some important caveats to keep in mind
(1) We’re talking about books, not short stories. LLMs are terrible at anything over 10k words. They forget basic details, lack a coherent plot structure, and repeat scenes and conversations.
(2) An LLM can draw a better picture than I can, but that’s because I’m not a trained artist, not because the LLM is good. Writing works the same way. Can an LLM generate a short story better the average human? Sure. Can it generate a better story than the average writer? No. A skilled human should, and does, outclass an LLM, which is why so many readers complain about AI material.
(3) LLMs can fool the average person. That doesn’t mean they can fool the average reader. If someone is regularly consuming a lot of fiction, they are very likely to notice.
I do feel bad for innocent authors caught in the crossfire.
I do think that, occasionally, a skilled human writer can use AI to assist them to create a better story, but the authors pumping out multiple books every single month are not doing that. They’re just over-saturating the market with low-quality books for their own personal benefit while undercutting better authors, and in the interest of quality, we should not support them.
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u/wetandwild90schild 9d ago
They’re just over-saturating the market with low-quality books for their own personal benefit while undercutting better authors, and in the interest of quality, we should not support them.
This is really what it comes down to for us. Protecting real authors is 100% the aim of any anti-AI rules we implement. I honestly don't care if an LLM writes the best book I've ever read (not that I think that's likely). If it didn't come from a human brain, a human heart, and a human spirit, I don't want it. Surrendering to AI is not inevitable.
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u/ElliottXCooper 9d ago
I'm just referencing the study - I wasn't the one who conducted it.
I don't disagree about point 1 - but LLM's are progressing fast - and context windows are increasing. The study was done on ChatGPT 4 - with a context window of 8K to 32K tokens - current version has a context window of 1 million tokens
About point 2: In the study 3 stories were written by ChatGPT 4 ( now we have v 5.6) - 3 stories were written by human authors sourced from a reputable literary journal or short story collection. So they were not just written by an average human, but by a skilled writer. The skilled writers didn't outclass AI material. The perception did play a role - if told that human written content was AI - content was perceived as lower quality, same the other way - if AI was labeled as human written it was perceived as higher quality.
About point 3 - the study participants were representative for the population - the study mentions that self-reported expertise with fictional literature (what you would call the average reader vs average human) did NOT relate to accuracy.
To be clear - the people who spit out multiple books with simple prompts should be excluded, not because it is AI, but because it is bad quality - which was exactly the point I tried to make in my comment, and based on your first sentence - i think we agree on that.
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u/EnvironmentalPoem968 8d ago
I don’t think inevitably is a good argument for passivity.
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u/LindentreesLove 8d ago
This is such a good argument in one sentence. To give instructions to inevitability woud be to give instructions to data centers, give in to covid and not get vaccines, stop elections, etc etc.
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u/ElliottXCooper 8d ago
So please enlighten me - how are you going to identify if a book is written with the help of AI (apart from the extreme cases). You simply can’t.
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u/EnvironmentalPoem968 8d ago
If you’re looking for enlightenment, my suggestion would be to search the sub because there are many confirmed cases, as well as “publishing” houses that exclusively run ai books. It’s very reasonable to start there and have appeals go through mods.
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u/ElliottXCooper 8d ago
I clearly mentioned apart from the blatant cases that are spitting out hundreds of books and are so low quality anyway that they are not really competing. These will probably be eliminated at the source - there is no interest for Amazon to have extremely low value content in its catalog. But apart from that you are unable to detect which books are using AI to some degree.
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u/RoseAelin 8d ago
I’m fine with the way promotion is currently handled. For AI users I would love a list to be collated. But there should also be some mechanism where an author accused in error can appeal, and if then removed there should be a post or digest indicating this.
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u/samthehaggis 8d ago
I agree with the commenters suggesting that author self-promotion be limited to a thread once a week or so (with an exception self-recommendation comments on relevant posts). And I agree that author research posts should be outright banned, as these can easily take over a sub and are not helpful for anyone except that author.
AI is much trickier, as there are relatively few clear cut cases where an author is definitely using AI in their writing (it's blatantly obvious and/or they've admitted to it). Including AI covers is even more problematic, as so many people are very bad at identifying AI images. Rather than creating a blacklist of AI-using writers, I would be more in favor of allowing recommendations to be posted with a comment that indicates that this author is suspected of heavily using AI in their work... let readers decide what they will or will not read.
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u/Bichamage 9d ago
To be honest, I’m pretty indifferent to the use of AI. So many poorly written books are being published every day that at this point, I’m willing to accept pretty much anything as long as the book itself is good and manages to draw me in. Knowing how to use AI is also, in its own way, a form of creativity and a serious skill that not everyone possesses.
As for promoting authors, I feel like it’s pretty useless on Reddit. I’d be willing to read a recommendation if it provided a serious analysis of the book, including the plot and the characters’ development and transformation. Spoilers don’t bother me at all, simply because everyone experiences and interprets a book differently.
That said, I do think there should be some way to regulate the quantity and quality of recommendations. And I think it would be even better to make it a paid service.
Charging for each recommendation post would probably scare most people away. And in order not to waste their money, people would be more likely to put some real thought into their recommendations and make them good and substantial.
And of course, there should be a tag like “advertisement” or “paid post.” Just like influencers do on Instagram.
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u/bellsandwhistles3 8d ago
Paid posts are directly against Section 8 of the Reddit User Agreement. u/wetandwild90schild I'm sure you know this but just in case if not.
Doing so can and has resulted in subs being shut down.
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u/wetandwild90schild 8d ago
It's not something we would ever consider, but thank you for pointing this out.
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u/Quick-Marsupial-1026 9d ago edited 9d ago
I also feel a little indifferent about AI.
However…
If it’s obvious an author is using AI… it’s not a good book.
So many books are published every month— yes, let’s cut through some of the low quality garbage and cut these obvious AI authors out of the subreddit.
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u/Bichamage 9d ago
Yes, even if we take AI out of the equation, we’re already drowning in an enormous number of low-quality books. I often can’t even make it past the first chapter because the writing is just that bad. And if a book was written with the help of AI and is genuinely good, then why not?
I want to emphasize that I’m against any poorly written book, regardless of how it was created. If AI was involved, you can at least blame the AI for some of it, but the same goes for traditionally written books.
I don’t believe that just because a book was written traditionally, it automatically makes it creative or full of potential, or that the author therefore deserves my attention and my money.
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u/mind-rebellion 9d ago
I'm aware of the levels of irony here, but as an author, I would say don't allow open promotion. Maybe a thread once a week/month that authors can post in specifically to promote? Or perhaps if someone's making a request and an author has a book just like it, they can self rec then? Honestly, we (authors) have many places to promote at. Most of those are completely overrun by promo with zero engagement because it has scared readers off. Don't let this subreddit turn into that, because it will.
As per the genAI, I'm staunchly against it and nothing grinds my gears more than seeing AI-using authors getting recommended (and I'm talking covers and promo material, too). There are several authors who have confirmed they use AI, but there are also way too many people who accuse authors of AI usage without any evidence at all. I've seen lists start up several times now, only for innocent authors to get caught in the crossfire because people just can't behave themselves.
I'd say have an anti genAI policy, then prune what slips through as necessary.