Spines came to my attention born aloft on a wave of anger. This new publisher has claimed they will ‘disrupt’ the publishing industry using AI. Obviously, the authors I follow on Bluesky were not happy about this.
So in a few hours of hyper focus when I should have been sleeping, I did a deep dive into Spines. I was expecting to pull it all apart, to conclude that it was nothing but a scam, but this time a scam with some AI thrown in.
I’m not sure that’s what it is, though.
In fact, were it not for a few AI elements, I don’t think Spines would be very remarkable at all. Just another service out there doing something that could actually be useful, were its target market not people willing to cut corners.
‘$5,000 for an AI proofread and cover’?
A lot of the aghast author reactions were based on an article by The Bookseller, who interviewed one of the company’s founders. Here’s the intro to the article:
“A new publisher has claimed it aims to “disrupt” the books industry by publishing 8,000 books in 2025 alone using artificial intelligence (AI). Spines, founded in 2021 but which published its first titles this year, is a startup technology business which—for a fee—is offering the use of AI to proofread, produce, publish and distribute books. The company charges up to $5,000 a book, but it can take just three weeks to go from a manuscript to a published title.”
Let’s dissect the parts of that which are causing the most problems.
Disrupting the publishing industry
First up, does the publishing industry need disrupting?
Absolutely.
Authors – you know, the creators that make the whole industry possible – have seen earnings drop significantly over time. The Society of Authors reported in 2022 that median earnings had fallen 60% since 2006.
The average advance has fallen, too, assuming writers even get one.
Publishers themselves are increasingly risk averse – at least in some senses, and don’t want to risk paying out big sums of money to first time, or even well established authors, whose books may never ‘earn out’. So instead they resort to eye-watering sums for celebrity autobiographies and novels, banking on name recognition and a pre-existing fanbase to shift copies (copies of a book that, often, is actually written anonymously by a professional writer).
Add in things like Kindle Unlimited, where for the price of one paperback book you can read as many as you like each month. But the tide has been turning for a long time now: things like the end of the UK’s Net Book Agreement in 1997, which removed the requirement to sell books at the price specified by the publisher, means you can now buy paperbacks and hardbacks for less than half their RRP.
This has, unsurprisingly, hit publishing hard, driving those risk averse behaviours and a tendency to back the bigger names with existing brand recognition, or strike deals with influencers online who have an audience, writing ability be damned.
So, does the publishing industry need shaking up? Absolutely. Is publishing 8,000 AI-proofed and designed books a year going to disrupt it, or be the disruption it needs? Er, I don’t see how it would.
8,000 in of itself isn’t a disruptive number. OK, it’s nearly five times more titles than Penguin publishes in a year, but self-publishers on KDP release that many books every 1-2 days (source). And 8,000 is a drop in the ocean considering millions of books are self-published each year in the US alone. Does that make it disruptive? That sort of depends on a lot of factors. Are these books a serious threat to traditionally published titles?
Publishing 8,000 books in 2025 alone using artificial intelligence
First point here: what Spines actually does (explored in detail later on) is bring together all the stuff self-published authors have to do before they can use a service like KDP or IngramSpark onto a single platform.
Of course, we’ll get on to whether or not a quick proofread and an AI cover is going to help people with great books, or lazy people with crap books. But flooding the internet with shite, this isn’t. It’s small fry. It’s not doing anything to help the already bloated market, of course.
Second point: ‘Using AI’ is a true statement, but too easy to take out of context here. It makes it sound like Spines is going to use AI to churn out books. I’ve seen this take several times on the internet. But they’re not. Yes, they’re using AI to help people churn out novels, but it’s not the same thing.
What we’ll come back to repeatedly in this article is the idea of AI over-inflation. The part that AI plays in all this is smaller than it seems at first glance. To understand why, we have to move on to the second bit.
Charging up to $5,000 for AI proofreading, cover art, etc
I think it’s this part that has seen lots of people branding Spines as a scam or vanity publishing (which is basically the same thing). And I would argue that’s not really accurate.
For starters, Spines offers three packages. The first two include AI proofreading. If you pay for the top-tier package, which is around $5,000, you get a human editor and a human cover designer.
Of course, it’s not clear to what extent those humans would use the same AI tools to make their job a lot quicker. The $5,000 package is for books up to 200,000 words. Remember, Spines’ main selling point is that they help you go-to-market fast.
But the statement that this company charges you $5,000 for an AI proofread and DIY cover isn’t true.
So what is Spines, really?
Let’s start by asking ourselves – what is the problem Spines is claiming to solve?
Apparently, Spines is “a new concept”, because it is a “publishing platform” that brings together proofreading, cover design, formatting and distribution. And it’s true that places like IngramSpark and Amazon’s KDP require you to come to the table with your ducks in a row: a ‘finished manuscript’ (not that they care what that looks like) that is properly formatted, a cover, an ISBN (for the former; Amazon can provide them), and so on.
A one-stop-shop for self-publishers isn’t a bad concept.
What do you actually get for your money?
Let’s take a look at Spines’ lowest value package: the Essential package, priced at $1,824. For that you get:
Production of your book*
o Print-on-Demand (PoD) soft cover with unique ISBN**
o Cover design tool, including AI generated art
o Proofreading tool, also AI-powered
o Formatting
o Copyright protection tool***
o 10 ‘free’ author copies****
Membership
o Spines Academy – videos courses on book marketing
o Distribution of your PoD book on Amazon*****
o Custom author page for your book, hosted by Spines
o Metadata optimisation******
o Access to marketing resources – a place to create and distribute ads to social media and then track clicks and purchases
o Royalties management*******
o Unlimited email support
*Note that there is a 50,000 word limit on said novel. For a 100,000 novel, there would be an additional charge of $600.
** So in other words a platform where people, yourself included, can buy the book. Each copy is printed when the order is placed. ISBN aside, what you’re getting here is access to a marketplace.
*** You get a certificate of copyright.
**** I added the inverted commas. Seems a bit cheeky to claim you’re getting them free when you’ve paid nearly two grand.
***** Is this different to the first bullet? I don’t know.
****** Metadata is all the information about a book, from title and author to genre, keywords, even the front cover. Basically ‘optimisation’ means making sure you’ve got it right and included as much relevant information as possible to improve the discoverability of your book.
******* Minimum earning of $25 for drawdown.
So what does this actually mean in terms of value?
Print-on-Demand file
First up, for your money you get a PoD file with an ISBN. That means that you have a file you can submit to any Print-on-Demand service. It enables you to let people order a copy of the book and have it delivered to them. Other services don’t charge for this, but they do take a percentage of each PoD book sold, so Spines is instead factoring the value of this into the price.
Which is interesting, right? Spines could be missing out on a lot of money here by not taking a cut. But also it could be that they know your book is unlikely to ever sell enough copies for this to really bother them. But, but, to be fair to them, the royalties model isn’t great either. Most authors get that advance and then have to wait and see if the book sells beyond a certain amount of copies before they start earning royalties.
So Spines is just doing it differently; you could argue they’ve just understood the reality of book sales and therefore are offering up a different pricing model. Admittedly, it is one that involves the author shouldering all of the risk.
Which is similar to vanity publishing, except you’re not forking out for hundreds or thousands of copies instead of the publisher doing it. And, given that investing all your money into creating a book and then having no one buy it is a risk you have to take anyway as a self-publisher, this doesn’t seem so bad. A vanity publisher makes you cover all their costs – pay for what they as the publisher are supposed to pay. Spines is making you pay for the same things you’d pay for as a self-publisher anyway.
Such as ISBNs. Lots of places sell ISBNs. They range in cost from $20 to $125. I’m not sure why.
Cover design tool
What’s next? Ah, the cover design tool. Now, if you’re into AI, you’ll roll your eyes at this and think ‘well of course he’d say that’, but here’s the thing: the covers look awful. AI-generated images currently look AI generated. Let’s just pause though and admit how amazing it is that a computer can do this. The technology is fantastic. But the results aren’t great.
The real mystery though, isn’t actually in the AI art bit, but in the other cover design options – e.g. the text placement and formatting. It looks self-published. This is the bit I really can’t understand. These covers all scream ‘self-published’. Why doesn’t the end product look more professional? Very few of the examples on their site look anywhere near professional. So this tool, which is included in the price, is producing something bad. Like, seriously bad. You can get something as good or better on Canva for free.
You can get something ten times better on Fiver for under £100 ($125). As low as £10 ($12.50). The less money you spend, obviously the more likely your cover designer is falling back on templates and shortcuts, but they still look better and more professional than the AI-generated examples on Spines’ website do.
AI-powered proof reader
Next up, AI proof reading. Firstly, note that even in the lower tier packages you can get a human ‘expert’ to proofread your work, although all the pictures on their website look like stock photo people. This comes at a cost of $300 per 25,000 words, so my 100,000 word book would cost $1,200 to proofread.
And let’s just pause to unpack the word ‘proofread’. In the editing world that just means reading through it to find spelling mistakes. Like where you’ve written ‘They threw bread at the dicks’ instead of ducks. But there’s also developmental editing, which looks at the construction of the book as a whole, and line editing, which is a sentence-by-sentence approach, considering things like pace, flow, tone, and so on.
Now, some places on the Spines website suggest you get a bit more than just a spellcheck from the AI and/or ‘expert’ real people proofreaders, but it’s not clear.
$1,200 isn’t an insane amount of money for… let’s be generous and say it’s copy editing rather than just proofing. A leading agency that has worked on 200 New York Times bestsellers would charge £2,300 ($2,880) for such a service. But that’s premier expert advice you’re getting. Meanwhile a top-rated editor on Fiver with an aggregate 5-star review score from over 500 clients will do it for around £550 ($690).
So basically you can use their included AI tool or pay probably a slightly inflated amount (and that’s giving them the benefit of the doubt) to get an unknown human to do it for you. Assuming they don’t just run the AI tool over it themselves and then add a few comments.
But what we’ve got so far is a file you can get anywhere (that you would pay royalties on from a lot of other providers), a crap cover design tool, and a questionable copy-editing tool or the option to pay going market rates for proofreading – one of those things Spines is supposed to help you avoid.
Use the AI…or pay for a human
And let’s just stick with that point for a minute. If the AI tool is so good, why the option to pay for a human? It seems like they’re hedging their bets, because doesn’t ‘pay going market rates for a human proofreader’ go against their purpose? Why pay them a load of money for a proofreader you don’t know, can’t vet, and haven’t seen anything of, when you could find a person yourself?
The answer is speed. This is much faster. But – and I’ll undoubtedly make this point again during this article – the kind of people who can’t be bothered to do the work involved in putting together a good book are unlikely to have written a good book.
Book formatting for print
Let’s move on to formatting. This is something it pays to, well, pay for. You don’t want your book printed back-to-front or in pink Comic Sans. You can find people who will do this on Fiver for £40-£250 ($50-$314 – and bear in mind these costs often include multiple formatting, i.e. a PoD and an ebook version – the Spines package is just for a PoD).
By the way, I’m not sponsored by Fiver or anything. It’s just that most of these services do the annoying ‘I can’t tell you the price upfront – you need to email/call me’ thing, so this is the quickest way to get an idea of the going market rates in order to make a comparison.
Copyright protection tool
Copyright protection tool: I’m not really sure what this is. In some parts of the Spines website it says that you get a certificate of copyright upon submission of your work. But here the word tool suggests something more. There are tools that monitor whether your work is being pirated and alert you. That seems excessive for this offering.
As for a certificate of copyright, that’s not really of much value. The usual text you put at the start of your book asserting that you own the copyright and the year of publication is enough. You automatically own the copyright to your work – you don’t need a certificate.
However, it’s more a question of how easily provable your copyright is. For instance, you can register your copyright in the US for a fee with the US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). There is no such register in the UK. Having a certificate that proves you’re the copyright holder may make your claim more defensible in court if you ever had to take it that far, but the question is: would a certificate from Spines be any more weighty than the copies of the book you’ve had printed with the date and your name on them?
Free author copies
10 ‘free’ author copies. Again, I maintain that calling them free is a little bit cheeky. 10 paperback copies of a 400 page, 5” by 8” book from Amazon KDP would cost under £50 ($63).
That’s the production stuff covered, which accounts for $2,100 of the total cost, based on a 100,000 word novel.
And based on an hour of early-morning research, you could get all this yourself for just over £1,000 ($1,251). Some important things to bear in mind here:
- This doesn’t include any official form of copyright protection, although the benefit of that is questionable anyway.
- I’ve deliberately chosen the upper end of things like graphic design, which will give you a markedly better looking book.
- This is including human copy editing – something that Spines charges a lot extra for.
- Also bear in mind that it’s just unclear what some of the stuff Spines is offering actually does. The copyright tool could be amazingly useful and give you ironclad proof that your work is yours. The AI proofreader could be amazing.
- There’s also some stuff in the package I didn’t bother covering, like the video course on book marketing (unlikely to be anything better than what is available for free all over YouTube) or the author webpage (again, useful, but you can do this with Wix or WordPress for free).
But this, their cheapest package, really doesn’t seem to add up to a saving, unless the convenience of having it all in one place, regardless of quality, is worth like $1,000+ to you.
Other packages
The next tier up is the ‘most popular’ Signature pack. You get all of the above, plus the maximum limit of your book (without incurring additional fees) is 100,000 words and you get a hardcover and ebook versions, with ten extra ‘free’ author copies (it’s not clear whether these are softcover or hardcover). You also get global distribution of your books – i.e. to more platforms than just Amazon KDP, so people can buy it from a lot of different places.
Finally is the Paramount package, for $5,496, that has caused most of this kerfuffle. You get everything in the last two packages, the aforementioned pro editing and cover design, and the AI generated audiobook, plus your book can be up to 200,000 words. Spines also distributes your audiobook globally. Oh, and you get 50 author copies this time.
So at the top tier you actually get real people instead of those controversial AI proofing and design tools. Of course, you also get an AI audiobook. According to the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA – that acronym just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?) the minimum rates per hour of finished audio is $250. An audiobook narrator speaks at a rate of about 9,300 words per hour, so for my 100,000 word novel that’d be just under 11 hours, for a cost of $2,750. That’s the minimum, mind. It could easily be double that for a pro.
So again, with each of these packages it seems you’re paying a premium for convenience, but that convenience comes not just at a financial cost but also one of quality.
The final verdict – what’s the impact going to be?
I think the whole Spines saga is a classic example of ‘AI over-inflation’. The Bookseller article focusses on the AI, because it’s a hot topic, the company push the AI parts, because it’s a hot topic and that’s what investors want to see (they’ve just raised $16m in funding), and authors are focussing on the AI because it’s dangerous and there’s a lot to hate about it.
Although can we just take a moment to get thoroughly annoyed that this platform has raised $16m because of some AI buzzwords? A platform that is unlikely to make many, if any, self-published writers financially successful? A platform that is all about getting their costs upfront so they don’t need to worry whether you sell even one copy? You could give 3,200 authors a $5,000 advance for their books for that money.
But Spines is not about leveraging AI to write a load of books and flood the market. It’s, as far as they claim, not a scam to trick people into submitting their books, which the AI will then train on to be able to write its own.
(And let’s take a minute to ponder what a truly awful plan this would be. If you were going to train an AI model to write books, you’d train it on bestsellers, not unpublished manuscripts from aspiring self-publishers.)
Although it is going to create AI-voiced audiobooks and clone authors’ voices (with their consent). And can ever really trust any AI tool that you are feeding your creations into? When do they pull out a sneaky Microsoft-style T&C change that does allow the AI to train on your work?
But really, what Spines is supposed to be, at its core, is actually quite a good idea. Remember, there are a lot of things self-publishers have to do before they even get to the KDP or IngramSpark stage, including:
- Create a thoroughly edited and proofread book (many skip this step though…)
- Get a cover designed
- Buy an ISBN (some services give you one as part of the publishing package)
- Format the book for print or digital
What Spines is trying to do is roll these all up onto one platform. Which isn’t terrible. It’s actually useful; the issue is the execution.
As I worked out above, you could get way better results across print and digital for less than the cost of their basic, PoD only package. Not the same results, notably better ones.
The Spines argument will be that you’re paying for convenience: less managing multiple moving parts, and quicker turnarounds.
But you’re paying an awful lot for those things. Go for the top package and things seem a lot better value. Editing, cover design and an audiobook of up to 200,000 words would probably cost a lot more than $5,000 to do on your own. But we don’t know to what extent those professional services are being augmented by AI (for instance, does the pro graphic designer still use an AI-generated image for your book cover?), and of course the audiobook is itself AI-generated.
Would I ever use Spines? No. There is a lack of transparency over who’s doing what and how they’re doing it. The fact they lean on AI and think those covers and audiobooks they put out are great products means they and I have very different ideas of what the final product should be.
But are they a scam, or vanity publishing, or tech bros looking to spit AI generated books out at machine gun rates? Also no. What they’ve done is consolidate lots of different aspects of the self-publishing process together into one platform. The value for money is highly debatable, and this is more likely to appeal to aspiring authors who are willing to cut corners. But self-publishing always has.
And while the use of these AI tools on the face of it threatens editors, proofreaders, narrators and others, again we have to return to the question of who is this marketed at? The people who are happy to have an AI tool proof their work probably wouldn’t pay for a professional editor. Same goes for cover design. And narration.
There will be some people who just love writing and don’t want to have to deal with all the stuff that comes around it. I sympathise. And so for those people, being able to get it all done quickly and easily is a big bonus – one worth paying a premium for. The problem is they’re getting a sub-par product and adding to the already burgeoning pile of sub-par products on the market. Even if their book is amazing, wrapping it in one of these AI covers isn’t going to do it any favours, like dressing a lingerie model in bin liners.
If someone took out the AI, made the whole thing more transparent, priced it competitively, there’s actually a useful business in here. But like so much AI stuff, once you get past the AI, things become less clear and the benefits are questionable given the costs. Spines is an expensive and flashy shortcut for people who have money and are willing to pay, that’s it.
I wouldn’t be scared of it, or particularly angry about it. But I’d certainly never use it.
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Cover photo by Vadim Sadovski on Unsplash
