Why I am looking forward to the publishing AIpocalypse

In the beginning, there were publishing companies. The variety of books available to readers was scarce. There wasn't a lot of diversity. And if you wanted to get into some of the weirder corners of science fiction and fantasy...you couldn't. The publishing companies were businesses. Each book was a huge investment, and so each book and series was selected with something of a safety net for the publisher.

You didn't really see things pushing the edge--something like Dungeon Crawler Carl never becomes famous in those days. On the other hand, you could be pretty well assured that, upon purchasing a book, it would have at least a bare minimum of quality to it.

Then the e-book revolution hit, and the reverse became true. Everything was on the table. And I mean everything. If you wanted to read it, it's out there somewhere. The problem flipped on you, though. There was no filter anymore. No editor selecting from a slush pile. You, the consumer, effectively became the slush reader. There's online communities like Goodreads or Reddit that might help you find something, but ultimately there was no real tastemaker.

Amazon, however, quickly changed that. The Amazon algorithm became the true tastemaker. You want to read a book? You scroll through the front page of your selected category. In the 2010s, the talk about marketing was entirely about how you could make it to the front page of your category on Amazon. Entire strategies were developed about pre-release orders and launch celebrations, all of which existed to compress single-day sales spikes for a book in order to drive a high Amazon ranking.

Due to certain laws of the Internet, Amazon decided to make this process worse. You see, from Amazon's perspective, it would prefer that a reader get hooked on a series or a writer with a lot of books. Why sell two Patrick Rothfuss books when you can sell one hundred fifty books written by blah-blah? And so the Amazon algorithm began to tilt things in favor of authors who (1) Agreed to participate in Kindle Unlimited, and (2) Produced books consistently and at volume.

This gave rise to the 20 Books model. And now I'm going to say some things. The 20 Books to 50k business model is just that. It's a business model. And when it was first put in place, it was a viable business model. Here's the very, very simplified idea: in order to boost your revenue, it is not necessary to sell 10,000 copies of one book. Instead, get a core group of about five hundred fans that are yours, and sell them 20 books each. In the process, you'll generate more hits on Amazon because you're turning out books at speed. 20 Books was, for its time, a very good business model for authors to make a living as authors. It had some...side effects for readers. I'd run into authors at conventions whose first credential was the number of novels they've written. I remember being on a panel with someone bragging about having self-published over two hundred novels--and this person looked to be in their mid thirties. Now, not all authors who can produce that sort of volume are terrible. There are some who can produce both quality and at volume, and these people amaze and delight me. And, as someone involved in this business myself, I cannot knock any who chose this route to profitability, because as a business model it worked. But there was a downside. And that downside was the incredible acceleration of the number of books available online. As a reader, it became nigh impossible to find anything good amidst the veritable flood of books that had been written with speed, and not quality, in mind. The fact is, if you tell me you've written more than two hundred books, there's very good odds that I don't want to read any of them. 20 Books is quickly losing relevance as a business model for authors to make a living as authors. AI is killing it. You see, if your business model is simply producing a huge volume of content with secondary regard to quality, AI is going to eat your lunch. In terms of quality, AI novels aren't there. In terms of volume, though--even the fastest author can't keep up with AI. I mean, there's just no way to keep up with a service that advertises like this:

This is what we're dealing with, here.

If you can create, design, and publish an e-book in two minutes without writing a word, then you are going to absolutely smoke a flesh-and-blood author on volume. AI publishers--I refuse to actually call them 'authors'--can crank out volume on a scale that the 20 Books model simply did not envision.

Which means that anyone interested in competing on volume has to use AI now.

But here's the thing: even outside the (many) ethical issues with AI (like the fact that they pirated some of my writing to train it), AI content is flat as hell. It generally comes up with the same plot structures, the same sorts of dialogue, etc. Nobody really has a burning desire to read AI content. AI might be able to put together a book, but it's not yet writing really, really good books. So, that's where we are. Readers are choking on volume and trying to find a book they don't hate. Authors are competing with this fire-hose of competition from AI-generated material for the attention of those readers. Both readers and authors want to find each other through this murky haze. That's where I think we come in. There are a number of small press publishers out there who are devoted to producing quality. I count Impulsive Walrus among that number, of course, but we're not exactly alone. Our goal--the goal of all small presses, really--is to establish trust. We want you to know that our tastes and yours align. We want to be known for making good books--not just a lot of books. Which means when you're looking for something to read, well. You have trusted places you can turn to where you're not just looking at a storm of AI-generated slop.

I'm looking forward to AI's expansion. The more it expands, the more it forces its way into every nook and cranny of the larger distribution systems, the more people are going to want to look to those of us down here. We labor over our books. We sweat and we strain and we polish our books. We want to give quality instead of quantity. And we'd like to believe that selling quality books is a viable business model.

AI is forcing people to us--and that means that unwittingly, AI may be spurring on the resurrection of the well-made, good book. And I, for one, intend to do all I can to make that happen.