Q&A With Alison McBain 

Another amazing guest that Mickey Mikkelson has connected me with is Alison McBain. Alison is an author and ghost writer, who has worked with both celebrity and New York Times Bestselling Authors! Some of Alison’s original works are Author vs AI & The New Empire! 

Q: Alison, welcome to Book Notions! Would you like to give brief descriptions of your books?

A: Thanks so much for having me! I have 4 books published under my own name. My debut novel, The Rose Queen, is a gender-flipped retelling of beauty and the beast where the beast is a woman—it’s aimed at a YA (young adult) audience. My second novel is a contemporary romance called The Impossible Guy, where a woman inherits a lemon of a house and plans to turn it into a B&B, and the contractor and the city inspector are both ready to help her do so in more ways than one. My latest novel is The New Empire, an alternate history set in the 1700s that asks the “what if” question: What if the Chinese Empire sent ships to the Americas centuries before Europeans did—how would that have changed history? I also have a collection of fantasy short stories called Enchantress of Books.

Q: I can tell by the title of Author vs AI, that you have strong opinions about AI. AI is here to stay and while it’s good for somethings, for other things it’s not. What made it important for you to write this book about AI? What do you hope readers ponder after they read it? 

A: My project Author Versus AI encompassed 34 written books, and it was meant to open the conversation about AI and how it’s being used/seen in the creative world. I began it in 2024 shortly after LLMs hit the scene, and a lot of the conversation around these programs was influenced by fear when it came to authors: Will AI replace me? Will AI write all the books in the future? I hoped that by writing a book a week—writing almost as fast as AI, but with much better content—I could highlight the fact that while AI might be here to stay, it’s not going to take away the voices, passion, or careers of writers. And I think that this has played out consistently—readers don’t want books created by AI. They want to have the human connection that is often lacking from AI-generated writing. I’m not alone in thinking authors will be here for many years to come.

Q: What do you hope readers ponder and feel after reading The New Empire?

A: This was a complex project for me. It’s the first novel I’ve written that has perspectives based solely on non-Europeans. It also shakes up the worldview that history is inevitable—it proposes an alternate view of what could easily have happened based on historical trends and paints a reality that is entirely plausible. I’m hoping that it makes readers rethink the world we live in, and their concepts of what it means to live in the Americas (for those of us who do), as well as what identity means to different people. Most of all, I think despite it tackling these issues from a historical perspective, some of the same problems these characters face in the past are things that people are still struggling with today—the idea of freedom and slavery, unequal power dynamics, and the harsh reality when one group of people has been forcibly subjugated to another.

Q: How do you juggle writing your own work on top of ghost writing for celebrities and other New York Times Bestselling Authors? What is your advice for anyone wanting to write their own work as well as ghostwriting for others?

A: There are two ways I handle it: one, I might split my time between projects. For example, I will spend the first half of the week working on my own writing and the second half working for clients. I always joke that I have the world’s worst boss, since I’m my own boss and I work long hours because I love what I do (but it’s still a lot of hours of work).

The second way I handle it is with variety. If I’m working on a romance project for a client, for example, I won’t be writing romance for myself. I’ll be writing in a different genre. One of my dad’s favorite sayings is: “A change is as good as a rest.” I find that holds true with writing too.

However, the number one piece of advice I can give to others is that ghostwriting is not a career for everyone. You can’t be possessive of your own writing in a number of ways, since you’re doing it for a client and won’t own it once you sign a contract and submit your work. You have to treat it as a business, not as a passion project. You can’t be waiting to get inspired—you have to write quickly and hit deadlines, and often those deadlines are short. It’s probably similar to being a journalist, since there’s a lot of pressure to deliver something stellar in a short amount of time. 

Q: Can you reveal who you’ve ghost written for? 

A: Sorry, I can’t. Most of my work for clients includes NDAs. I can reveal that I often work with publishers, as well as directly with authors. Sometimes I’m writing a book from scratch, sometimes completing an unfinished manuscript, and sometimes fleshing out a manuscript that’s written but not publishable (I call it “deep editing,” since often it’s polishing and adding to what’s already been written). Most of my ghostwriting clients are for novels (although I’ve also ghostwritten short stories), and the most common genre that I’ve written for clients is romance (about 80% of the projects I take on).

Q: For original work, what are you currently working on now? Or is it too early to reveal?

A: There are four novels that I’m currently shopping to publishers. One novel is a contemporary romantasy that involves dragons and climate change (Sloshed), one is a fantasy adventure story told from the perspective of Medusa’s sister (Cheaper By The Scoundrel), another is a paranormal romance between a movie buff and her movie crush, a ghost who died decades before she was born (Phantom Crush), and the last novel is a YA horror book about a tattoo apprentice and her mentor, whose tattoos might be driving people crazy (Ink Collector). For anyone interested in learning more about these books, they were part of my Author Versus AI project. Excerpts, as well as their plot storylines, are available on my website: https://www.authorversusai.com/all-the-books.html. Look out for these books appearing on the shelves of your local bookstore possibly next year and beyond!