I came to Casover Publishing as a published author of poems, short stories, and essays. And having dealt with many editors at various organizations I was elated to come across ones as diligent, supportive, and most of all as caring as those at Casover Publishing. From start to finish the product they delivered with accuracy and alacrity was by far the best I have ever received in my career. Their clever and innovative use of AI has astounded me in ways I would never have imagined. When it comes to cover design they are hands down the best. So to any writer out there whether established, new or even just aspiring I would highly recommend they place their faith in a future with Casover. They’re more than a publisher they’re a partner.

My experience writing for Casover Publishing has been extremely positive from day one. I’ve found it invigorating to write books to the best of my abilities and then have them significantly uplifted by Casover by a clever use of cutting-edge new technology that is very swift and impressive (their covers, to take just one example, are brilliant) but is also very balanced, always putting the author first. I would unhesitatingly recommend them to other authors.

First, I have to make a ‘declaration of interest’ as I have known the Casover team from past publishing activity. However, Casover does offer a seriously different approach to us authors, be we novices or experienced practitioners when it comes to the literary game.

Above all, they bring a personal approach to their authors and it’s not just me as I have had contact with others in the stable in the past. My experience with the major houses by knowing a few of the movers and shakers in the industry is that this is only possible with household names and, as we have seen, it can even border on the Public Relations field.

Now through Casover, they are adding to this with their stable of tools that are AI driven. I’ve tried three of them, partly in testing how they work.

Top of the list for me has been the editing/proofing tool. This is far more than just checking grammar, typos and spelling as it drills into the text to look at consistencies, whether sub-threads have been closed off and even into aspects such as whether personalities in the text need any enhancement, particularly when it comes to secondary ones. It even goes as far as indicating if some chopping or re-writing of superfluous text is needed though, ultimately, it doesn’t automatically change the text – that is your decision whether to and to execute the changes. Also, I suspect that it may come up with suggestions if the novel is lacking ‘emotional input’, this being something that many novices have to learn to develop.

Second up, we have used AI to generate the image – take my recent children’s book, ‘Arthur the Burglar’ for example. Inside an incredible short time, less than three hours, I had seen six or seven options and, subsequently, we edited on to produce the image that’s posted today. It’s amazing! And I have no idea how it works, my input being a number of factors that should be taken into account, the eventual location, the two main characters, the type of cake and even the mackerel.

Thirdly, I tried out the story idea generator – and that’s incredible too and actually quite frightening in that I could see a case for AI totally-generated books and I believe publishing-houses already are having to test for this to reject them. Frankly, I’m not sure that they can generate the emotional or personalisation input. I may be wrong on this.

Normally I am a person who likes to make a spider-chart of my potential story threads and key stages and then allow for some organic growth. I’ve tested the Casover model on ‘Arthur the Burglar’ putting in a condition that I didn’t want Arthur ‘scaring’ the target audience, rather making him roguish and what came back certainly added to my ideas. The same has proven to be true with my latest novel, the model throwing out three secondary threads to weave in for character development and I have taken up two of them, these suggestions I had not even thought of, though they could have evolved.

So – using the Casover ‘Artificial Intelligence’ models can help add to creativity and an increased level of professionalism in your writing – and speed of delivery too. And Casover have had the ‘Sensible Intelligence’ to keep it on a personal pitch.

Ultimately, you are still in control though – your novel is, after all, yours, not a product of some distant computer whirring away and doing its own thing.

I had been trying to publish my novel (the second one I had ever attempted to publish) for several months, and had received nothing but blanking and form rejections from all parties that I had approached to date. I found Casover Publishing through a chance Reddit recommendation. It was the first time upon my quest that I received a genuine human response, and I cannot overstate the importance of this. I would particularly like to commend Phil Stevens, co-editor, for helping me (an inexperienced writer) through all stages of publication, even responding to my questions at weekends and odd times of the day or night (does he ever stop?). The procedure was relatively simple and painless, with a reasonably competent AI being used to create cover art and blurb, though I had editorial control of this and could object to either. The AI cover art was pretty good (although I appreciate there is some controversy over its use among authors, at least) and it seemed to understand the gist of my story pretty effectively. The "blurb" - I think maybe I could have done better, but we will see next time - the point is there will be a next time as I intend to submit my next novel here as well! There were a couple of website glitches, but these things happen - the important thing was that I got rapid and effective support to resolve the issues when they happened. I would not hesitate to recommend Casover Publishing to authors both established and aspiring, and wish them every success.

H. H. Bassier, June 2024