For those of you who haven’t heard about this: last week, small press publisher Bona Books announced that their upcoming anthology, Wrath Month, would be delayed because they were pulling three stories from the collection. They had reason to believe those three stories were machine-generated and not written by a human.

Bona Books then went on to chronicle their investigation into those stories — including this bit about a piece by Bella Chacha (probably a pen name), titled “The Machine-Breaker of Aba”:

The closer we examined that first draft, the more the story’s centre seemed absent. The protagonist was active, but lacked interiority. The worldbuilding had colourful details that somehow failed to build consistently. Certain hallmark sentences recurred over and over (“Not X, but Y…”). And the pacing was off, with important story beats given oddly little narrative weight.

Like me, you may have several questions. Questions like: if “The Machine-Breaker of Aba” had all these problems, why was it still considered to be within the best 20 of the 606 submissions the anthology received? Were the other 97% just that bad? If these problems only became apparent after close editorial scrutiny, why was this scrutiny not present before Bona Books signed a contract with the author and (presumably) paid them money?

The post goes on to explain that, following feedback from the editorial team, Chacha’s final manuscript included very few of the changes they’d requested. If the anthology was “inches away” from going to print, why had nobody checked before then whether any edits had actually been made? Why was inclusion in the anthology not contractually contingent on those edits?

The answer to all these questions appears to be that “The Machine-Breaker of Aba” was selected largely on vibes:

It hit our brief with a perfect intensity that felt difficult to resist. A queer woman, building a machine from scrap metal and rage to destroy her colonial oppressors? Of course we loved it. The author was an emerging Nigerian writer named Bella Chacha.

So, to the editors of Wrath Month, actual writing craft took a backseat to a punchy premise and the prestige of putting a rising star in their anthology — one who fed their (admittedly well-placed) desire to elevate marginalized writers.

And to be fair, the editors at Bona Books are hardly alone in this. They were first tipped that Chacha’s story might not be authentic when they learned she’d managed to get 15 other stories published in professional markets over the previous 12 months. That’s an insane number. A lot of people had to get bamboozled in quick succession for that to happen.

If you know anything about how short fiction publishing works, though, it’s not that surprising.

In 2026, both the writing and publishing of short-form science fiction and fantasy is basically a vanity project. Gone are the days where you could crank out one pulp story a week to pay the rent. For one thing, the processing times are too long; most short fiction publications are running on a staff of one or two actual editors and a squad of volunteer slush readers. In some cases you’ll wait a year just to get a rejection, much less an acceptance and a cheque. Most of these publications don’t allow simultaneous submissions, meaning you can only submit a story to one of them at a time. A finished piece can spend years getting shopped around various markets before it’s either accepted somewhere or chucked in the trash. And even the highest-paying SFF markets pay less than $0.15 USD/word; when you consider the hours it takes to plan, write, and refine a story, this rate works out to well under minimum wage basically everywhere that has a minimum wage.

So the only way anyone can afford to write a story and get it published in one of these markets is if they’re already financially secure and can burn many, many hours on work they’re effectively not getting paid for. Which, incidentally, filters out most of the marginalized voices these publications claim they’re so desperate to hear from — unless those marginalized voices (or dishonest people claiming to be such) are churning out passable content very fast and at basically no cost.

One could argue that the economics of short SFF publishing only make sense if you’re using AI.

Bona Books has positioned themselves as one of many victims in an existential crisis facing the entire publishing sector, but what we really have here is this: a niche micro-industry that runs largely on prestige, which claims to vanguard the craft of writing but either can’t or won’t pay writers like craftspeople, and is now reaping the inevitable consequences of this business model. I’m not sure I have much sympathy for that.

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If you’ve written something and your goal isn’t to get the attention of Tor Books or whoever, let me suggest that you’ll reach more people if you just post it online. You probably won’t make any money off it, but you almost certainly won’t make any money submitting it for publication.

-K