A debut novel that landed a roughly $2.4 million deal from Minotaur, an imprint of Macmillan Publishers, has had its international sales halted after the author's representatives said they could no longer verify how the manuscript was written. Sandy Hodgman of Hodgman Literary, which sells foreign rights for the book's rights-holder Europa Content, withdrew the novel from international publishers via email after questions surfaced over whether its author used AI, according to Deadline.

The book is Call Me, I'll Hide the Body, the first novel by Jerry Falade, a graduate student at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Its protagonist, Femi Johnson, is a "cleaner" from Lagos, Nigeria, who moves to Houston to pursue a chemistry PhD. Minotaur's deal covered the novel and a follow-up. UTA and Europa Content are the agencies handling rights sales.

The problem is copyright. Publishers and film companies cannot register copyright or establish a clear chain of title for a work if any AI was involved, because AI-generated text is an amalgamation of many other copyrighted works. Without clean title, a book or its film adaptation cannot be legally protected — and deals unravel.

Deadline, which exclusively obtained and published the full withdrawal email, reported that Hodgman Literary told international publishers it could "no longer authenticate how the manuscript fully evolved from origin to completion." The agency had previously received assurances from Falade that AI was not used in writing the book. It is routine for publishers and their representatives to ask authors whether they used AI in their work; the question has become a standard part of acquisition due diligence.

The withdrawal affects the foreign-rights market, where agents sell translation and international publication rights territory by territory. Hodgman's email pulled the submission from that pipeline. The domestic deal with Minotaur — the US and Canada publisher — has not been publicly changed. Questions about film or television rights, which UTA would typically shop to studios and streamers, now sit in uncertainty for the same copyright reason.

What gives the story its bite is the money. A roughly $2.4 million advance for a debut novel and a second book is the kind of figure that turns heads in publishing, where most first-time authors receive far less. The deal was built on a manuscript whose authorship is now in question, and the machinery that would carry it to foreign publishers and potentially to screens has stopped until that question is answered.

Falade has not publicly addressed the AI questions. Hodgman Literary, Europa Content, UTA, and Macmillan have not made further public statements beyond the withdrawal email obtained by Deadline.

For now, Call Me, I'll Hide the Body exists in a holding pattern — sold at home, pulled abroad, its path forward depending on whether the people who paid for it can be certain of who, or what, wrote it.