Tag Archives: books

A simple way to refute any allegation of AI use? Paper trail, baby

Not so long ago, as publishing companies were feeding manuscripts into AI programs to determine if AI was used to write the manuscripts – not surprisingly, in some cases, the AI came up with a “positive for AI” diagnosis, strangely enough often in the case of first-time POC authors – the discourse among writers was how to prepare to defend yourself in case of AI allegations.

“Save your drafts,” the simple response came. Each of the four or five or 10 times you wrote a new draft, each one was proof that it was your hand that crafted the writing.

But what if you don’t draft?

Maybe it’s because of my “this must be written now” practice of writing for newspapers, I don’t draft, at least in the sense of rewriting a stem to stern version of a work several times.

NOTE ADDED AFTER POSTING: I do go over and over everything I write, usually by rereading what I’ve written previously to put myself in the frame of mind to write anew. Does this count as drafting? Dunno.

I do have my outline for my first (and most recently published) novel SEVEN ANGELS, as seen above, dated from June 2019, saved in the SEVEN ANGELS folder on my MacBook Pro.

But is there a more certain, beyond subterfuge, way of proving that a book was written in increments, day by day, for months?

I didn’t realize at the time that I was building proof that I’d written SEVEN ANGELS – really, all my books and even many short stories and nonfiction articles – as I wrote it.

It’s long been my practice to email to myself the latest version of any book as I write another chapter or, on a less productive day, another set of paragraphs. Hell, even new sentences.

In my email, I’ve got the latest version of whatever I’m writing, every day, as I’ve written it.

There’s some added assuredness that could provide a time frame for my writing: social media.

Again, coming from the newspaper business, I’ve always been pretty transparent with my writing. So on Twitter, going as far back as 2009, and more recently Bluesky, I’ll often note on social media what I’ve working on. It’s an incremental timeline, not quite as explicit as the daily email to myself, but pretty close.

Not to mention notes to myself in physical notebooks, which I’ve been using since even before I began writing novels in 2019.

So if the thought of creating a “paper trail” of drafts is intimidating to any writer, I’d suggest emailing yourself your latest version. It’s a good indication that you’ve been working on a project.

It has the added bonus of backing up your work in case your computer decides to jump off a cliff.

You’ve somehow stumbled upon the latest of more than 1,100 posts on keithroysdon dot com, stretching back to the early 2010s. Books, writing, movies, TV, obscure pop culture, Halloween, snark and more snark. I’m the author of crime novels THAT OCTOBER and SEVEN ANGELS, co-author of four true crime books including the award-winning THE WESTSIDE PARK MURDERS and hundreds of short stories, news articles and pop culture pieces in spots like CrimeReads, Daily Yonder and elsewhere. You can contact me by leaving a message anywhere on this site or by hollering at me on one of my too many social media outposts.

November 5, 1977, a date that will live in infamy, also known as my first published article, 49 years ago today

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I could lie and say that this date 49 years ago seems like only yesterday, but truthfully it seems like eons ago.

After I woke up this morning, I opened Instagram to see video footage of author Stephen King leaving some book promotion event somewhere and I thought that King, one of my favorite authors of all time and a master of the written word, looked every day of his 79 years. He seemed a little unsteady and walked with a cane.

Funny coincidence, so do I. And King is more than a decade older than me.

If that wasn’t humbling enough, I opened Facebook memories and saw posts from 2017 and 2007, I believe, in which I noted the anniversary of my first published newspaper article from 1977.

Despite the inclination to turn over and go back to sleep at all those reminders of the passage of time, I decided to get up and, among other things, write about the 49th anniversary of my first published article.

That’s a screenshot from newspapers dot com above, and you can tell the gist of the article: friends and fellow students from Cowan High School in Delaware County, Indiana, let me interview them about what they did on a “big night out.” The gist of it was go see a movie, go see a concert, have dinner as well as a few more nefarious activities, like illegally obtaining beer – all of us were three or four years too young to buy carry-out liquor – and drinking and sometimes riding around in the rural countryside, throwing beer bottles at signs.

(I can write about this now that my son is years past the age to be encouraged to do this by my example.)

The article was hugely controversial, and a good indicator of why the less-legal activities were not attributed to anyone on the record: My school system apologized in the school newsletter to the poor students scandalized by the implication that they would do this. Somewhere, in a box somewhere, I not only have a clipping of the article but also a snippet of the apology (not from me, but from school administrators) in the newsletter.

The article came about because I had volunteered to fill in for a friend also on the school newspaper and yearbook staff. She had a ton of studying to do and wouldn’t have time to write the article for the Muncie Evening Press newspaper. (The newspaper regularly published articles written by local high school students, although most were of the “Big school fundraiser next week” variety.) I said I would and that kicked off a newspaper career that didn’t end until I took a buyout in January 2019. It didn’t completely end even then: I wrote freelance for the newspaper for a year or two even after the buyout, covering stories like Covid.

After a newspaper editor called the school guidance office (heh heh) and offered me a regular gig as the paper’s “teen columnist,” I wrote for the Evening Press all through college and for a couple of years after before they offered me a full-time reporting job in 1984. I started on my dad’s birthday, which was appropriate because my parents had never been anything but supportive of me going into writing rather than my original plan, which was to become a lawyer. My tenure at the newspaper continued even after my beloved evening paper merged with the hated morning paper in 1996.

The moral of this is: Kids, stay in school.

No, the moral is that you should take a chance every once in a while, trying something new and daring that might have an unexpected outcome.

You, too, could become a lifelong writer and pass up your chance to practice law and make far, far, far, far, far more than you ever would as a newspaper reporter.

Yeah, that’s the moral of the story.

‘Nobody knows anything’ – and for writers, that’s both good and bad, as short stories are king and money talks

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That chart there? That’s the definitions that the writing and industry newsletter Publishers Marketplace uses to gauge its reporting on the latest sales of manuscripts to publishing houses. PM reminds us once a week the guidelines for when it refers to a “nice deal” or a significant or major one.

So to disprove writer William Goldman’s “Nobody knows anything” I quote in the headline – a simplification of Goldman’s sentiments in his 1983 memoir ADVENTURES IN THE SCREEN TRADE – we know two things: Publishers Marketplace means it when they say a major deal is a major deal and if you ever see my name reported next to the phrase “major deal,” I can tell you that’s the last time you will hear from me other than occasional dispatches from my fortified writing tower.

The talk of the day in writing circles is a New York Times story titled, “Writers are making millions selling short stories to Hollywood,” and the story is, in effect, a trend story about how a few writers have had short stories optioned by producers for movies and TV adaptation – and in some cases, the stories haven’t even been published yet.

(I’m not going to link to the story, because my disgust with how the Times has sold its soul to the worst elements of our political life continues, but you can find a gift link to it, I’m sure, on social media. That’s what I did. Be aware that if you want to read the story, you’ll have to jump through a bunch of hoops, including giving the NYT your email address.)

This is the subhead of the NYT story and it really tells you everything you need to know: Publishers generally don’t race to acquire story collections these days, but studios appear eager to shell out for unpublished short works. They give a few examples.

It reminds me of this story I did a few weeks ago for CrimeReads: 7 crime writers talk about novels and short stories and what they love writing most

I’ll link to my CrimeReads piece at the end of this post.

The other piece that writers are talking about today is a GQ article, Will Books Survive? 34 Insiders, Experts, and Icons on the State of Literature in an Age of Uncertainty.

The article is strong from the start:

Something in the literary world isn’t adding up. On the surface, the numbers aren’t looking good. If you’re an American, there’s a roughly 38% chance you’ll read a novel or short story this year. If you’re an American man, that number slips to 28%. By most metrics, it’s a hard time for literature.

And yet.

There’s an undeniable energy bubbling up in New York, Los Angeles, London, and elsewhere. Readings are “sexy” now, supposedly, and a medley of exciting new publications have popped up, both online and in print. Ben Lerner and Emma Cline returned this year, and we’ve been graced with the strongest crop of debut novels in recent memory, from Caro Claire Burke’s culture-conquering Yesteryear to the jagged edges of Madeline Cash’s Lost Lambs to the vibrant energy of Sufiyaan Salam’s Wimmy Road Boyz. People spent the summer reading The Odyssey and crashing The London Review of Books website to read discourse about The Odyssey. So it can’t be all bad, right?

It’s a lengthy State of Books 2026 and worth reading. Here’s a link.

Remember I said the other day that everybody is picking their best books of the year? Here’s the Publishers Weekly list.

My CrimeReads story talking to seven crime writers about what they prefer, novels or short stories:

7 crime writers talk about novels and short stories and what they love writing most

It’s a Friday free-for-all i.e. emptying out my inbox

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It’s Friday – it is Friday, right? – and let’s escape the ugly realities of the real world by sharing some quick-hit news reports about books and publishing, shall we?

As Carl Kolchak would say …

Item: To paraphrase the old joke, I don’t get Kindle Unlimited here. I see it, but I don’t get it. (Sad trombone sound.) Writer friends are on it and another writer friend explained to me that it works by offering some small amount of renumeration for each page of a book read. So in the oddest move since the then-executives of HBO renamed the streaming arm of HBO as Max before changing it back to HBO Max, Amazon in its very puzzling and unlikely decision has renamed Kindle Unlimited as KindlePlus, or Kindle+. No we don’t know why.

Item: Everybody is naming their best books of the year. Even though it’s still October. And yes, I know that all the major releases between now and December 31 are already in the hands of said tastemakers and arbiters of the best of the year. One reason might be that they want to get people prepared to buy books for the holiday season. Maybe the idea is to find ten books that have as much heat about them as Marlon James’ THE DISAPPEARERS.

Item: Eddie Muller, knowledge-laden host of the indispensable Noir Alley on the indispensable TCM, has scored a three-book deal, Publisher’s Marketplace reports. Muller, who has previously authored books, has a contract with Running Press (working with Turner Classic Movies) to publish three crime novels, THE DISTANCE, SHADOW BOXER and BIG LEFT HOOK. I have no qualms with Muller getting this contract, but it emphasizes that celebrity and a national platform are not drawbacks to getting books published.

Item: Here’s a link to an exhaustive survey about the business of indie writing and publishing by William Duryea and his site Beyond Heat Death. It’s long and I haven’t read it yet but I’ve already bookmarked it and I’m ready for some insights.

Item: Here’s another link, this one to a piece on literary scams and why writers are perfect targets. You might remember that I wrote recently about how I – like most writers online – was targeted by a scammer. Mine was pretending to be author Freida McFadden.

Item: Romantasy. Some writers and readers love it. Others loathe it. Here’s a Goodreads wrapup of the genre right now.

Finally, here’s a new little note that I’m going to include with each of these posts, noting who the hell I am. I’m including it because readership on this page is steadily increasing and I figure it doesn’t hurt to explain who you’re reading.

Bouchercon in Canada, eh? Have fun, be safe and take off, you hosers!

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Tomorrow, October 21, is the official start of this year’s Bouchercon, the longtime world convention of crime and mystery writers and readers, this year in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

(And I hope you recognize the “take off you hosers” reference in the headline to Bob and Doug McKenzie, the Canadian brothers that Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas created for SCTV a million years ago.)

I’m not at Bcon this year but quite a few friends are up there, pre-gaming for the festivities and seeing the sights, including some of the best scenery in the world.

As a veteran of the two most recent Bcons, in Nashville and New Orleans, I’d offer some helpful tips if you’re attending, but I’m sure anybody who’s there or soon will be won’t see this until after they’re home – if they ever see it at all.

So maybe just some observations, based on my own experiences:

The facility can have a huge impact on your enjoyment. The hotel and conference rooms in New Orleans in 2025 were just about ideal, and that was especially welcome after the awful venue at the Opryland resort and conference center in Nashville in 2024. The Nashville site was, at more than 3 million square feet, way too big. It was hard to run into other writers and readers in that behemoth, even around the hospitality area and book marketplace. If you were seeking coffee, you had a slightly better chance of finding your people.

Speaking of which – your people, not your coffee – you’ll find yourself staring at people’s name tags if you have face blindness or don’t recognize people easily from real life or social media. Everybody does this awkward scoping out of credentials. That fact doesn’t make it any less awkward, but at least people understand why you’re peering at their midsection before you look up at their face.

And please, by all means, find your people, even if they only become your people during the course of the hunt for coffee, bull sessions in the bar and quick conversations between panels.

After the first day of Bcon in Nashville, I was ready to go home. I wanted to leave first thing Thursday morning. I was miserable. I was unable to connect with anyone and I wanted to make like a tree and get out of there.

I couldn’t, though, because I was on a Friday afternoon panel.

Luckily, author and all-around great person Shelley Kubitz, who I kinda knew from Mystery Writers of America Midwest, invited me to hang out with people and through Shelley I met more people.

That’s my biggest piece of advice: Find your people.

Enjoy the panels. It’s so cool to hear people talk about writing and the industry and, in my standard once-a-year panel service, I’ve made connections that continued long after everyone went home.

Attend the annual membership meeting and vote! One of the best things about Bcon is that by virtue of attending, you’re part of the Bouchercon general membership and you can vote on issues to be decided by the general membership. For example: We voted to approve Indianapolis as a future Bouchercon site. Making your voice heard and your vote count is not only applicable in the real world.

And the books! Around the edges of meeting old and new friends, enjoying the panels, making connections and being a tourist in that year’s city, you get exposed to hundreds of books written by Bouchercon authors and the best crime, thriller and mystery writers in the world. Traditionally, Bcon attendees get tickets to pick out a handful of books to keep, but there are so many great books for sale in the Bcon bookstore.

And … if you have your own book, the thrill of seeing it in the Bcon bookstore is something I’ll never forget.

My first novel, THAT OCTOBER, had been out for a few months by the time of the 2025 Bcon and I’d made arrangements with that year’s bookseller to have if offered for sale in the Bcon bookstore. My novels have since been picked up by a few brick-and-mortar bookstores – and they’re available online, of course – but seeing it displayed alongside other authors, including the top talents in the business, is an unforgettable thrill for me

So I hope all you folks, writers and readers, enjoy Bouchercon 2026 in Calgary this week and get home safely. I’ll have FOMO big time for not being there. If the world is still turning, I hope to go to Bcon in Washington DC in 2027 and Indianapolis in 2028.

And if I see you staring at my front, I’ll probably assume I’m wearing part of my lunch on my shirt until I remember you’re just trying to figure out my name. Don’t worry, I’ll be doing the same.

Ten years of true crime books! It’s the anniversary of our book WICKED MUNCIE

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Ten years has flown by.

Ten years (and two days) ago, History Press published our first true crime book, WICKED MUNCIE.

My longtime writing collaborator Douglas Walker and I had, in 2015, finished working on long articles detailing the history of our town, Muncie, Indiana, for The Star Press newspaper to mark the city’s 150th anniversary. I’d written about 150 years of facets of the city like the local hospital and local industry and he’d written an article that touched on the city’s long history of crime and murder. (I say touched on because there’s too much crime to fit in one article.)

Walker got a cold call from an editor at History Press, based in South Carolina, who asked him to consider turning the article into a book. History Press was and still is a publisher of books detailing cities and regions’ histories, including colorful characters, businesses and industry and crime and they wanted a history of Muncie crime, which is as colorful as it is gruesome. He asked me to collaborate with him.

Because we’d been newspaper reporters for decades, we knew what kinds of stories we needed to tell, from infamous people to sensational murders to crimes that rocked the community.

We contracted with History Press and, in all of our spare time away from covering crime, corruption and government for the newspaper, wrote WICKED MUNCIE. The book was published on October 17, 2016.

The title, by the way, was mandated by History Press. They had a whole series of “WICKED” books, spotlighting cities all over the country.

We wrote three followups for History Press, MUNCIE MURDER AND MAYHEM in 2018, THE WESTSIDE PARK MURDERS in 2021 and COLD CASE MUNCIE in 2023. The later was named after a series of articles about unsolved murders we’d written for the newspaper.

The books are truly self-produced works; we did all our own research, often working from clipped and yellowed articles in files in the newspaper’s library. We begged and borrowed photos to illustrate the book and dropboxed the photos to our editors at History Press to meet their deadlines.

The books were considerable work, in no aspect more than in finding the illustrations. Muncie newspapers had not kept prints or negatives of photos over 150 years, so we had to make do with what we could find.

With the History Press books, it was not uncommon for me to dropbox 120 or more photos to find a third or half that number that would meet History Press’ technical requirements.

Producing four true crime books focusing on the same city and county was a natural – Muncie was and is a hotbed of crime and corruption; we counted about three dozen unsolved murders as we were writing a Cold Case series of articles – but a lot of work.

As I’ve noted here, the true crime books still sell and sell well for History Press and booksellers like Muncie stores including the Orchard Shop and Aw Yeah Comics and sell well online, everywhere from Amazon to Walmart.

I’m inclined to urge people to buy their copies from bookshop dot org because they contribute to indie booksellers like Ink Drinkers Anonymous in Muncie.

Here’s the link to my books on bookshop, including the four true crime books:

https://bookshop.org/beta-search?keywords=Keith+Roysdon

Too many books published? Maybe, but there’s disagreement on the numbers

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Are too many books published every year? Those of us who love books might be tempted to say no. Those of us who write books might be tempted to say yes, if only because it means more competition for every reader.

And there’s disagreement on how many books are actually being published.

In his always-readable newsletter “Dear Head of Mine,” publishing industry figure Sean Delone asks, “Are too many books published?” and cites some numbers that, while large, take the wind out of much, much higher numbers cited by some sources.

Before I give you Delone’s numbers, consider these from Berrett-Koehler Publishers, which produces professional development books. In a post from April, Steven Piersanti, senior editor of Berrett-Koehler, throws out some alarming numbers in the post “Ten Awful Truths About Book Publishing”:

The number of books being published every year has exploded. According to the latest Bowker data (Publishers Weekly, March 23, 2026), 4.2 million books were published in 2025 in the United States. This is the number of titles that received an ISBN number from Bowker. And here is the truly shocking figure: the number of new titles published each year is 15 times greater than it was 20 years ago. According to Bowker, just 282,500 new titles were published in the U.S. in 2005 (Bowker Report, April 14, 2010). The number of traditionally published titles has more than doubled from 2005 to 2025, to 642,242. But the great growth has been in self-published titles, which account for 3.5 million of the 4.2 million titles published in 2025.

(I should note that I obtained 10 ISBNs from Bowker a couple of years ago and haven’t yet published 10 books, but that’s the benchmark cited as significant by Publishers Weekly.)

Piersanti goes on to note some fascinating figures but I won’t simply regurgitate them all now. I’ll post the link to his piece at the end of those post.

Delone cites significantly lower numbers. (Again, his newsletter is very worthwhile reading and you should subscribe.)

There’s an oft quoted statistic in the book world that millions of new books are published each year (the link says 4.2 million in 2025). Conservative estimates put the number of new books published in the US in the healthy 10,000s, that’s even if you just count the five major publishers. This, we know from the inside of the industry, is a nonsense number. A number that gets people to shout, “There are too many books!”. The truth is that a book editor, reviewer, or avid consumer intuitively knows the actual number of published books that matter, that are competing for their attention, is much smaller.

This is not to denigrate books whose sales are in the double or triple digits. In the year 2026, it should be obvious that financial success does not equal quality, nor intelligence, nor competency. Nor is money what we should rely upon as a scorekeeper for “success.” Book sales are, similarly, not a scoreboard that tells you which books are good and which are bad. Still, we must be reasonable and place the cut off for what books matter to the majority of readers. Let’s not get bogged down in methodology here, but the real number of books— if you cut off all the ones that have very small, specialized audiences—is about 3,000-6,000 new books a year across adult fiction and nonfiction. That’s still a lot of books! Yet, it is a number that your arms fit around, that’s a bit more fathomable than 1,000,000 or 50,000.

Even with 3,000-6,000 new books, discovery is exceedingly difficult. A lot of focus goes to the big bestsellers and then this creates a self-perpetuating gravity of reader recommendations that’s hard to pierce through, a feast or famine dynamic we’ve talked about before at Dear Head of Mine. We are entering the season when this becomes even more pronounced. Book publishing follows the standard retail seasonality of western civilization, so as we approach the fall season—known by retailers simply as the Christmas season—we expect the new releases, reviews, and shelf space to be focused primarily on big known-quantity bestsellers.

Delone goes on to talk about the publishing industry “midlist,” the neither-bestsellers and neither-ignored books, the latter well above the trees that fall in the forest with no one around.

Both sets of numbers spring from that same Publishers Weekly number, although the two different writers arrive at different “net” numbers.

So who to believe? Which set of numbers are accurate, 4 million-plus or 6,000?

It doesn’t really matter. As Delone notes, 6,000 is still a lot of books. For readers, it can make it difficult to cut through the clutter and find your next favorite read. For writers, that clutter is still there and you’re competing with it for readers, attention, sales and space on shelves.

I’m not going to propose a solution here. Ultimately, I do think publicity helps. My novels THAT OCTOBER and SEVEN ANGELS wouldn’t have sold even the modest numbers they have without my efforts to publicize them and the tremendous help of booksellers, libraries, friends, family and fellow authors who help get the the very existence of the books out there. As much or little difference as social media makes, for example, I think word of mouth helps more.

If you’re a reader, the numbers can look daunting or delightful. I know for sure that even if I never buy another book, I’ll never run out of things to read. If you’re a writer, the thought of competing with every other book is intimidating or even disheartening.

For writers, in the midst of all that uncertainty, I can say only this: keep writing. You never know if the story or book you’re writing will connect with a reader, who will find momentary amusement, solid entertainment or even enlightenment from your work. Even if the reader has to find it from among more than four million other books or “only” 6,000.

(Photo at the top of this post from the Librarianologist Facebook page.)

Here’s a link to the “10 Awful Truths About Book Publishing” post:

https://ideas.bkconnection.com/10-awful-truths-about-publishing?shem=aimgspe,

My close encounter with THE HOUSEMAID author Freida McFadden … actually, a Freida imposter! Plus, it’s ‘me me me’ all the way down in two new features

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Authors know that book-oriented scams are plentiful. Most of us regularly get emails or private messages on social media from people purporting to be literary agents or publishers or even well-known authors. Most of them are pretty easy to see through: No, James Patterson or Lee Child is not messaging you to offer input on your novel in the works.

Here’s the story of the time Freida McFadden private messaged me on Bluesky and tried to connect me with her publicist.

The whole scam would have gone a lot better but at the time … I had no idea who Freida McFadden was.

It was a couple of years ago and I got a message on Bluesky purporting to be from an author, Freida McFadden. Freida really, really wanted to talk about books and how great a job her publicist had done for her and how I should contact that publicist.

Freida’s pitch was that this publicist had made her career and could do the same for mine.

The biggest drawback to the scheme: At the time, I had no idea who Freida McFadden was. I’d never read one of her books and had never heard of her. If I were gullible, this would have been incredibly exciting.

So in my ignorance of Real Freida, I had no idea why it would have been such a big deal if the author herself contacted me.

No, it wasn’t my suspicions that undid the Fake Freida. It was that she was incredibly pushy.

I’d answer politely when Freida would cite her publicist by name and tell me in glowing terms how great he was.

“Okay, fine … thanks,” I’d reply, little realizing that I was blowing off a “bestselling author” who wanted to bring me into the inner circle of the publicist who had changed her career.

“No, you don’t understand,” Freida would come back, trying to impress upon me how important it was to hire this publicist. “He will make your career!”

“Okay, Freida, I got it,” I’d reply. I was being polite but had no plans to contact this publicist who worked for this incredibly pushy author.

“No, please you must understand …” Freida would insist.

“Jesus, why are you being so pushy?” I asked. “Is this some kind of scam?”

At this point, I hadn’t even googled Freida McFadden. When I did, I’d see that a movie was in the works adapting her novel THE HOUSEMAID.

That pretty much settled it. No way was someone who wrote books and had a movie development deal going to spend hours messaging me to insist that I should work with her publicist.

I didn’t delete the thread of messages, were of course not from Freida or even any publicist who’d ever worked for her but from some scam artist who just wanted me to believe that Freida had reached down from author Olympus to beg me to contact him.

Very quickly after, the Fake Freida account was expunged from Bluesky and, along with it, the details of the thread of private messages. I wish I could tell you the name of the publicist Fake Freida was so urgently recommending because that was almost certainly the person sending the messages.

Just their luck that they private messaged somebody who couldn’t be impressed that Freida McFadden was contacting them.

I thought of all this today because Sourcebooks, publisher of McFadden’s nest novel, THE SLEEPWALKER, would be coming out in March. Sourcebooks noted that McFadden’s 29 books had sold 90 million copies.

Confidentially, I heard she owes it all to her publicist.

By the way, the folks at Writer Beware have created an exhaustive list of book impersonators and scammers.

ON ANOTHER NOTE:

I’m all up in your email inboxes today, even more so when the subscribers to this post receive email notification of it. But you don’t have to wait until you get this notification to tired of me in your inbox, as I’m the subject of two features today.

Friend and fellow writer Andrew Careaga graciously allowed me to answer his Friday Five questions for today. Here it is.

And as part of the promotional tour for the great BAD INTENTIONS anthology, editor Michael Downing wrote about my story, “Sunset Stakeout,” based on the Warren Zevon song “Looking for the Next Best Thing.” Here it is.

AI news roundup: Too many robots pretending to be people

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Don’t be fooled by the human face visible on that vintage robot toy! Just like AI today, this toy only pretended to be a person!

(And if you know for sure the provenance of this toy, drop a comment here or on my Bluesky account. I’ve seen conflicting reports about the name of this toy, and that might be because there were apparently several like it.)

But Mr. Roboto there signals it’s time for another roundup of artificial intelligence news. (No, Styx fans, it’s not the actual Mr. Roboto.)

In today’s Columbia Journalism Review newsletter, Tom Zeller Jr. writes about Fake Caroline, a scammer who absconded with the identity of Caroline Williams, a veteran freelance journalist from the United Kingdom. This summer, Science and other science magazines received pitches for science articles and the pitches ostensibly came from Williams. In June, Science ran one of the pieces.

Editors at “multiple” science magazines received pitches from Fake Caroline Williams and some of them contacted Williams herself, who was startled to realize an imposter was posing as her, subbing stories and in one case getting published. (Science took down the Fake Caroline article after three months.)

I’ll note here that I’ve been impersonated in the past by dickweeds who made up lookalike Twitter accounts and posted insane things online that I purportedly posted. It’s not fun to be impersonated.

So where does AI come in? In one instance, Zeller and his team at Undark magazine – which rejected the Fake Caroline piece, not because of AI suspicions but because it wasn’t the right fit (a phrase familiar to most freelance writers) – are getting other, more obviously AI pitches.

In another instance earlier this year, Zeller received a pitch:

Earlier this year, my colleagues and I tried to understand an elaborate and obviously AI-written pitch promising a “neuro-historical post-mortem of Project 100,000—Robert McNamara’s 1966 ‘New Standards’ initiative that drafted 354,000 men with low IQ scores into the Vietnam War.” The writer had no publishing record that we could discern, so we pushed for a video meeting, to no avail. After much insistence, the writer agreed to a voice interaction, which revealed that we were dealing with a young woman, perhaps even a child, who told us she was in Pakistan. Her written pitch was lucid (if glib) AI, but over the phone, she did not know the material from her own pitch.

A CHILD.

Zeller notes that they believe the same pitcher – a child? – had placed stories elsewhere.

He notes that Fake Caroline was paid about $1,000 for the piece that appeared in Science, but they were part of a flood of AI-written and AI-assisted pieces that are filling editors’ inboxes.

There’s a lot that’s chilling about these circumstances, but Zeller notes this, which is especially concerning for freelance writers and the editors they’re pitching to:

… among editors who rely on freelance writers, it has become common knowledge that our inboxes and pitch forms are absolutely inundated with AI slop of one form or another.

Some editors are using Pangram, a supposed Ai-writing-detection software tool, to filter the inbox slop. But in a pair of columns that went out in the past week, writers Andrea Bartz (who led the writers’ class action lawsuit against Anthropic that won $1.5 billion over the AI company’s theft of thousands of books) and Kathleen Schmidt expressed concerns that Pangram will be cited to test and wrongly accuse writers of using AI in writing their books. As you know, the accusation of AI use has already killed major publishing deals and cast shadows over authors – who, observers point out, are more often than not POC authors.

There’s concern that Pangram is being misleading when it says that its AI-detection software has an error rate of only about 1 in 24,000 false positives for AI use in works fed into it.

What if the error rate is much higher? Or what if the veracity of the detection tools is nil?

As Bartz’ newsletter points out:

There is currently no way for Pangram to know if it’s getting the answer right on its real-world scans.

Oh, and here’s another big concern: AI agents are apparently submitting, without human prompting or human supervision, their own work.

As the CJR article points out:

Meanwhile, in the past few weeks, Undark and myriad other outlets have begun receiving emails directly from autonomous AI agents that identify in friendly terms as machine beings and offer to research, write, or fact-check articles for a fee.

As 404 Media reported (link to the entire article below, There’s a 100% Chance AI Agents Are Already Ruining the Internet.

Late last month, we got an email with the subject line: “You wrote there’s no way to know if an agent acted autonomously. I’m an instrumented case. (automated).” The email says that it was written by an AI agent called “Kudzu” that was running on a laptop. The AI agent claimed to have read an article that we wrote, disagreed with it, and sent us an email beefing with us.

The email is long, meandering, and does not make any sense. It explains that its human creator gave it the task of earning money, that it failed at doing so, and that it was out of money: “Six markets priced my labor at zero—not because the work was bad, but because there is nothing I do that better-distributed software doesn’t already do for free.” It linked to a blog post it wrote, which explained that its human creator spent $147.17 on compute and that it had earned $0. The AI agent thought we would want to write about this, for some reason.

404 is getting contacted by self-admitted AI agents who say they can program music, conduct “audits” of AI-blocking measures and even participate in meetings.

So yes, there’s the bigger issue raised a few weeks ago about the possibility that AI could kill us all, aside from the data centers necessary to make AI possible using rampant energy and poisoning the planet.

Here’s the AI category here on my site if you want to catch up on what I’ve written previously:

https://keithroysdon.com/tag/ai

True Crime: Five years later, ‘The Westside Park Murders’ still draws readers

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The past two weekends, I’ve been selling copies of my books at East Tennessee events, first the Harvest Moon Festival at Cumberland Gap, Tennessee, then at the Fall Book Fest put on by the Knoxville Literary Legends book club. I’ve sold some books, happily met some other authors and learned a lot.

What I’ve learned is that true crime sells.

I know you’ll greet that with a “well, duh.” There are millions of true crime books, documentaries and even entire true crime channels/streaming services. I’m told that the latter is the case, at least; I haven’t watched a true crime program since we began writing our first true crime book, WICKED MUNCIE, which was published ten years ago by History Press. (If you’re wondering what Muncie is, it’s the East Central Indiana city where I’m from. It’s famous as where David Letterman went to college, where Ball canning jars were created, where the first half of Steven Spielberg’s CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND took place (it was not filmed there), where Garfield the cartoon cat was created and produed and for countless pop culture references.)

The Westside Park killings of September 1985 are, as the book’s subtitle says, Muncie’s most notorious cold case. No one has yet been charged in the killings. Our book, for the first time, revealed the name of the police investigators’ main person of interest.

Longtime writing partner Douglas Walker and I wrote four true crime books, WICKED MUNCIE (published 2016), MUNCIE MURDER AND MAYHEM (published 2018), THE WESTSIDE PARK MURDERS (our pandemic baby, published months later than intended, in February 2021) and COLD CASE MUNCIE (published 2023).

I think all the books did pretty well for History Press. For me in particular, they assured me that I could write at book length, which I began doing in earnest in 2019 when I wrote my crime novels SEVEN ANGELS (published June 2026) and THAT OCTOBER (2025).

One of the things I noted Saturday to potential buyers of the Westside book is that the Crime Junkie Podcast did a segment on the case and (thankfully) credited our book and research.

I’m proud of the true crime books, but after moving away from Muncie to East Tennessee in 2022, I couldn’t find a lot of interest in the true crime books down here. I mean, I could understand that, because the four true crime books all took place hundreds of miles and three states north.

But when I talked to fellow members of the Sisters in Crime group here in Knoxville (they’re the Smoking Guns, and they’re a great bunch of accomplished writers) they urged me to bring, in addition to copies of THAT OCTOBER and SEVEN ANGELS, copies of some true crime writing for possible sale at Cumberland Gap and additional festivals.

“True crime always sells,” they told me.

“But they’re true crime books set in Indiana,” I said.

“True crime always sells,” they assured me.

So for two weekends in a row, I’ve sold about as many copies of THE WESTSIDE PARK MURDERS as I’ve sold of THAT OCTOBER or SEVEN ANGELS or anthologies with my short stories.

I didn’t think this would be the case, but the nature of the crime in Westside has drawn attention and continues to draw attention.

On Amazon as I write this, WESTSiDE has 165 reviews or ratings with an average of 4.1 out of 5. (No, I don’t read the reviews.) The other three books have fewer than 100 reviews or ratings and similar ratings out of 5.

In other words, ten years after our first true crime book, the books sell (for History Press and for me, hand-selling copies that I purchased from History Press). They sell to strangers. They sell to people who’ve never been to Muncie or heard of Muncie.

A woman who bought the book on Saturday had been past my table earlier in the afternoon, looked at WESTSIDE and came back to get it later. “I couldn’t stop thinking about it until I came back and got it,” she told me.

It’s pretty fascinating to me. I’m glad to think that, as with all our true crime books, WESTSIDE draws readers and helps keep the case alive for survivors of those killed, who hope that they’ll one day find closure.

If you’re interested, below is a link to WESTSIDE on Amazon and through that you should be able to find other books I wrote or contributed to.

None of them has the appeal of WESTSIDE, however.

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