But obviously, if people are choosing to go down the self-publishing route, they have to make these decisions for themselves and so they need you know it's like how do they know when it is the right time to invest in a copy or or and a line edit what are the things that they should look for that can kind of be a signal or a signpost that they're ready for this stage

I think when they have already spent a lot of time with their manuscript and they've so it has to be more than they've just written it and got to the end not a first draft it has to have been through a developmental editor or maybe you've been doing book coaching you know because a developmental editor is is a big investment it is the ideal way to start especially if you're an inexperienced author, there's expectations of genre, there's expectations of story that, I mean, we're all kind of innately aware of as readers, but if you're writing a novel for the first time, you're not necessarily aware of, of what the reader's expectation is and how that emerges.

Beta readers can help at that stage as well.

So that you feel you've been through as many elements of the story as you can, the character arcs.

So you really need to have kind of exhausted your avenues at that stage.

And you need to have done revisions to the point where, like the expression you used earlier, you can't see the wood through the trees.

But yeah, at that stage, that's okay because that's what editors are for, is to help you kind of... step back.

Now, putting aside the ins and outs of that particular circumstances, because all kinds of questions arise out of that admission, how are AI tools changing what you do? And in your opinion, can AI ever replace you?