Barely a day goes by that I don’t open Publishers Lunch and see yet another book deal for a hockey romance.
This is, of course, in the wake of the success of “Heated Rivalry,” the Canadian sports romance series about two hockey players who have an ongoing romantic and sexual relationship while playing on opposing teams. The series got a ton of views and a ton of publicity when it aired on streaming a few months ago.
It’s been interesting to see the book industry’s response to the popularity of the series, which is itself based on one book in a series called GAME CHANGERS written by Rachel Reid.
Oddly – or probably not oddly – of the half-a-dozen hockey romance books I’ve seen announced in the two or three months I’ve been subscribing to Publishers Lunch and Publishers Marketplace, most of the new novels are straight romance as opposed to gay romance like the popular streaming series.
The latest book to win a contract, the one I saw today, is, as Publishers Lunch reported:
Sunday Times-bestselling author Freya Marske’s THE OFFSEASON, the author’s first contemporary queer sports romance, pitched as for fans of HEATED RIVALRY and YURI ON ICE, in which a former figure skater who walked away from the sport returns home, where reconnecting with his infuriatingly gorgeous childhood rival, now the current national champion, reignites his passion for the ice—and more, to Ruoxi Chen at Putnam, in a two-book deal, for publication in summer 2027.
For all I know, each of the novels I’ve seen announced were in the works for years and are getting publishing contracts only now, after HEATED RIVALRY has made the subject popular for mass audiences.
It’s like another genre of books that I’m seeing announced regularly, the Western.
Who’ll get published first? Who will best meet the demands of readers? Will a half-dozen hockey romance books all be successful or will some corner the market? Or will each one inspire readers to seek out more?
After all, romantasy books – the trend, that is, not just the genre – kicked off somewhere and they’re still going strong.
For most authors, especially indie authors, getting your books on bookstore shelves is a huge end goal.
It can seem like an impossible goal because brick-and-mortar bookstores have only so much shelf space. Your book is competing for space with books by masterful writers and the most hyped – many times rightfully so – books in print.
So as someone who’s recently placed my second crime novel, SEVEN ANGELS, on the shelves of the Hive Bookshop, a local woman-owned store here in Knoxville, I can tell you what steps I took that might have paid off and landed a spot on those shelves not only for SEVEN ANGELS but also my first crime novel, THAT OCTOBER.
(And yes, I say “might have paid off” because, ultimately, who can say why a bookstore owner or manager decides to stock the books they stock? I’m sure there are as many reasons for carrying a book as there are books.)
First, write your book. Finish your book. And work on it, with friends who are willing to read it – not to mention a pro editor, if you can afford it – until you’ve got a good book. Yes, I know that’s highly subjective, but in my case, the Hive owners asked if I could drop off copies of my two books so they could check them out. A few weeks later, they let me know they wanted to stock the books. One of the owners apparently read them, or at least enough of them to know a few customers might consider buying them.
And when I say “work on your book,” I’ll note that I outlined SEVEN ANGELS around 2009 and then returned to that outline to write the novel in 2019, after I’d taken a buyout from the daily newspaper business and could devote time to writing it. I added major characters and subplots years later, in 2022 and 2023 or thereabouts, that made the book more well-rounded. This isn’t a typical book-writing timeline for me, although it did take me about a year and a half to write THAT OCTOBER.
Secondly, timing is important. The Hive is literally a new bookstore, as opposed to the long-established other local indie bookstore that didn’t even respond to my request – in person and through their formal process – that they carry my work. Is a new bookstore less hidebound? Is a new bookstore more willing to take a chance on a new author? Certainly the Hive emphasizes that they’re very focused on community and local authors. Maybe your bookstore is new or they have a new decision-maker or they’re just willing to take that small gamble.
Third, cultivate relationships. I didn’t do a lot of that with the Hive, but I don’t think it hurt that I visited their store during their soft opening and bought a book, DUNGEON CRAWLER CARL, which I’d been wanting to read. Nothing’s better than when your bookstore knows you’ll not only support their store but also recommend their store to others.
Fourth, be understanding and don’t be pushy. Understand what an investment opening and maintaining a good bookstore is. As much as I wanted to, I didn’t “circle back” to the bookstore during the weeks after they had copies of my books and before they notified me they’d carry my books. I figured the owners had enough on their hands without having to respond to multiple email inquiries with an “are we there yet?” type message.
(I have traditionally been pushier with two stores back in my hometown of Muncie, Indiana. The wonderful folks at Ink Drinkers Anonymous and Aw Yeah Comics have been receptive not only when I ask if they’ll carry my books but also when I ask if they need more copies.)
Fifth, have good packaging and presentation. My cohort Jill Blocker and I published THAT OCTOBER and SEVEN ANGELS, the latter through Constellate Publishing, Jill’s book imprint spin-off of her Constellate Creatives company. (Link to Constellate is at the end of this piece.)
Sixth: Try to copy edit to avoid typos – we didn’t manage to have no typos, but I see professionally published books that have typos – and have someone – Jill in this case – who can format the book in an eye-pleasing manner.
Seventh: Have a good cover. I’m lucky that my artist friend Sara McKinley drew the cover for THAT OCTOBER based on my suggestion that I wanted something reminiscent of a dramatic X-Men comic book cover pose for the young protagonists. With SEVEN ANGELS, I knew I wanted a cover that paid tribute to those Robert B. Parker covers for the Spenser books that had one or two or three elements on a background. I found the three elements – a lipstick, a bullet and a badge – and Jill executed the cover.
Eighth: Your book might be totally bookstore-worthy but never find its way onto shelves. I thought that would be the case with mine. I didn’t give up, but I was pretty resigned to never seeing my cover in a bookstore.
And I was doubly thrilled when it happened and hope it happens for you if that’s your goal.
I had intended to follow-up my weekend post about getting my books in a local bookstore by suggesting what authors might do to achieve the same thing, but I’ve delayed that for the moment. First things first, and just like a house on fire, the dual plagues of AI and Amazon get our attention at the moment.
For a few weeks now, book lovers and people who hate AI have been despairing at reports about how companies that steal, buy or pirate books to train generative AI – thus putting creative people at risk of losing their livelihoods – have been buying and scanning books. The revelation comes out of the landmark class action lawsuit Andrea Bartz and other writers filed against Anthropic. Bartz and company won a $1.5 billion settlement on behalf of many, many writers whose work was stolen by the AI company.
Details of Anthropic’s practices came out in the discovery process, and they’re horrifying: The company was buying hundreds of thousands of copies of books, some of them older and out of print, and they’re cutting off the spines and feeding the pages into AI-making programs. The books are utterly destroyed. The judge in the Bartz case ruled that this practice was legal because the company had bought copies of the books, not stolen them. (They’re using older books to ensure no AI writing gets fed into the AI consumption process, of course.) Videos of this process – chopping spines off books and the ultimate shredding of the pages – are disgusting and disheartening.
And of course Anthropic isn’t the only AI company doing this.
Today, thanks to an ingenious investigation by 404 Media, we also know that Amazon is doing it. Maybe not a surprise – Amazon and its owner are widely regarded as awful; most of us who do business through them do so only reluctantly, or at least that’s how I feel – but the confirmation from 404 Media, which was also shared by Publishers Lunch this morning, is damning,
This is the lead of the 404 Media story published today:
Amazon is buying massive quantities of books, scanning them for AI training data, and destroying them in the process.
(I’ll link to the 404 Media story at the end of this piece.)
404 Media cleverly hid an AirTag-type tracker in an old book that was to be sold to Amazon’s book-buying operation. 404 was able to track the book as it and many others were shipped around the country and ended up in Las Vegas, where it went to an Amazon warehouse used by an operation called VGT3. That’s the operation’s logo above. Charming, huh?
Amazon didn’t really address the process or its value to anyone but Amazon in its response to 404.
(404 had, in July, reported on an increase in sales of old books and speculated that the increase in sales was due to AI-generating companies buying books it could scan and destroy. And again, I’ll note that the books being chopped and scanned and shredded were published before 2022 or so to AVOID THE WRITING BEING TAINTED BY AI.
As 404 reported: These booksellers suspected AI companies were behind these large bulk purchases because of the high number of books they were buying, the seemingly random choice of books, and the fact that these buyers, unlike libraries and universities, did not seem price sensitive at all. But booksellers couldn’t say for certain who was behind the large purchases because the marketplaces where they sell their books keep the buyers anonymous. When an order comes in, a bookseller ships the sold books to a warehouse operated by the marketplaces, where books are sorted and then sent to the buyer.
In July, one bookseller told me they received a very large order of around 1,000 books on Biblio, one of these marketplaces. The seller agreed to put an Apple AirTag provided by 404 Media in one of the books included in this order so we could see where the book was going. And by extension, which company, AI or otherwise, was behind this massive order.
404 Media granted the bookseller anonymity because they worried sharing this information would harm their business.
404 found online comments from Amazon employees about the VGT3 facility that virtually all they do there is scan books.
Many thousands of books are being bought, scanned and destroyed by Amazon at that facility and probably others. And that doesn’t even account for other companies that are doing the same.
And as 404 reported:
That employees are scanning the barcodes or ISBNs on books — a unique serial number given to every published book — before scanning their content gives further credence to another theory put forth by booksellers: AI companies are trying to methodically scan every printed book in the world by working through the list of ISBNs. One bookseller told me they suspected this was the case because the very large orders they were getting never included very rare books that do not have ISBNs.
I already didn’t feel good about Amazon, where a large amount of my work can be purchased. Their practices toward employees and authors and the sheer mass accumulation of wealth by its owner were long-known and queasy-making.
Here’s another reason, thanks to the reporting by 404 Media and dissemination to the publishing industry by Publishers Lunch, to dislike Amazon.
I had the coolest experience I’ve had in a long time on Saturday: I signed copies of my novels SEVEN ANGELS and THAT OCTOBER for a bookstore. And not just any bookstore, but my local indie bookstore The Hive, which opened this spring.
(Link to the Hive site at the end.)
I’ve had books in local bookstores for 10 years now, since 2016, when the first of my co-written true crime books, WICKED MUNCIE, was published. Each of the three true crime books that followed were also placed in Muncie bookstores (and in displays at Walgreen’s and other stores) by the History Press. Whatever else you might say about History Press, but they have the juice to get books in stores in and around the area that’s depicted in the book.
Since publishing my first novel, THAT OCTOBER, in June 2025, I’ve tried to get it in stores here in Knoxville, where I’ve lived for not quite four years. The long-established indie bookstore here turned up its nose at my request they carry that first novel. And by turn up its nose, I mean that I brought the book to that store and went through their formal online process for requesting that the store carry a book. I heard crickets back. They just never responded, and it’s been 16 months.
And yes, I know all about how much of a premium shelf space in bookstores is. Spare me that factoid, please. Because even though Barnes & Noble replied to my request that they carry the book locally with a refusal to do so, at least THEY REPLIED. (They carry my books online, as does virtually every other bookseller, so I appreciate that.)
So I didn’t have high hopes for the Hive, even though pretty early on it was obvious how they liked to focus locally, with space on shelves and book clubs and talks and signings. I asked.
So when the Hive responded a few weeks ago with a “we’d be happy to carry your novels” and this past week said, “Your books have arrived, would you like to come in and sign copies?” I was just incredibly, pleasantly surprised.
(When I vague-posted on social media about this, some people thought I had interest in my books from TV or movies and, yeah, I have gotten a nibble in that regard but I’ve yet to see follow-through and yet to ensure it’s legit. So we’ll see.)
I’ve been lucky since THAT OCTOBER came out that not only libraries back in Indiana but two of my hometown bookstores, Ink Drinkers Anonymous and Aw Yeah Comics, have been happy to carry my novels. And it was a hell of an experience in 2025 when THAT OCTOBER was carried in the bookstore at Bouchercon in New Orleans.
So the Hive carrying my novels and asking me to sign them and even marking them with a “local author” tag was the best thing yet.
In this “all about me” celebration and back-patting here, I’ll note that there’s a slightly larger issue here. I self-published, through the good work of my friend Jill Blocker, THAT OCTOBER and Jill and I published SEVEN ANGELS through Constellate Publishing, the indie publishing imprint and spinoff of Jill’s company, Constellate Creatives.
So three things can be inferred from my personal victory of The Hive carrying my books: Indie bookstores are the best. Decisions about what books to stock are best made locally.
And indie authors and small imprints should be heartened by the fact that small potatoes book publishing can get your book into bookstores.
Some of you are old enough to remember July 24, where on this very site I said that I’d unsubscribed from a “help for authors” newsletter because they’d pushed out 14 newsletters in a month and that seemed like a lot.
How many newsletters is too many? Well, we’re about to test that number. This entry that you’re reading now is the eighth new piece I’ve posted here since that July 24 column. Those posts have been fueled by a lot of commentary on AI and some book self-promotion.
Each new item I post results in an email to those of you who subscribe, so it’s almost as if I was sending out some kind of … well, newsletter.
So I’ll be keeping track of how many I post and we’ll see if I exceed 14 in a month. And y’all can keep track too and blast me in comments or social media if (when) I blow past that milestone of 14 in a month.
But today, here’s some housekeeping stuff. As Carl Kolchak of “The Night Stalker” fame always says, item:
Item: Shoutout to Andrew Careaga, in the latest edition of his newsletter today, for citing my August 5 piece on the blog here about AI. You should subscribe to Andrew’s newsletter, Friday Five.
Item: The Publishing Confidential newsletter by Kathleen Schmidt has rapidly become one of my favorite newsletters.
Item: Also essential are the various daily newsletters for subscribers to Publishers Marketplace. There’s an expense to the subscription – basically a dollar a day – but I’m feeling more plugged in to the industry as a result of Publishers Marketplace, newsletters like Schmidt’s and Careaga’s and some others I’m going to cite here from time to time.
Item: As someone who has maintained a Facebook page, Wicked Muncie, for 10 years and this site, which began life as a WordPress blog something like 15 years ago and has now amounted up more than 1,100 posts about pop culture, books, Halloween vintage costumes and a bunch of other stuff, I wanted to mention that it’s hard to maintain an active site or blog or social media account and in particular I wanted to cite Mark Evanier’s News from Me site. Evanier, a veteran writer of comics, TV and books, posts pretty much every day, sometimes more than one post a day. He knows a lot about entertainment and he knows a lot of old Hollywood types and his annual Mel Torme Christmas post is reason enough to check out his site. I’ll include a link at the bottom of this post.
Keep me in your thoughts. I’m editing manuscripts from friends and upcoming books from us at Constellate Publishing and I’m doing a lot of reading for a super-secret project that I’ll detail around the middle of 2027.
And yes, I’ll post here this weekend or early in the week because something very cool is happening in regard to my novels THAT OCTOBER and SEVEN ANGELS. No it’s not a movie adaptation. (Although … no, I’ll tell you that story someday.)
I’ve noted in this space before that most of my books and short stories occupy the same universe that mostly varies from the town of Seven Angels, Tennessee, to the small city of Middletown, Indiana. The former is the focus of my newest novel, SEVEN ANGELS, and the latter is the setting of my 2025 novel THAT OCTOBER.
I’ve plotted references to those locales in most of my fiction, including my upcoming novel GHOST SHOW, which is set in Middletown in 1948 (THAT OCTOBER was set in Middletown in 1984).
And there’s been a few times I’ve had characters cross over from stories to novels. I’ve previously mentioned here Butcher Crabtree, who pops up in SEVEN ANGELS and a few stories.
But in GHOST SHOW, when it shows up this winter, you’ll see some characters I introduced in “A Fighting Life,” a short story in the 2025/2026 anthology FIGHTING WORDS, edited by Scott Bradburn and published by Leonardo Audio.
Four of the Anderson siblings, who are the focus of GHOST SHOW, are in “A Fighting Life,” which is also set in Middletown in 1948.
They’re pretty different characters in some ways, and very much the same characters in other ways. In “A Fighting Life,” siblings Marie, Saul and Peter get into vacant-lot-punchfests when the three, all of them teens or pre-teens, discover they can make money by letting other neighborhood kids fight them for nickels. They’re foul-mouthed little bastards, as Courtney Fabrizio, the marvelous narrator of my story for Leonardo Audio, alludes to. (You should read the story, but you really should get the audio version of the anthology, particularly for the amazing work of Courtney.).
In the story, Marie, Saul and Peter take on all comers – and get rescued by their big sister Rachel as they’re about to be busted by the cops – and it’s a story that is, by turns, fun and dire.
In GHOST SHOW, Marie, Saul and Peter are still the youngest members of the Anderson family and Rachel sometimes rescues and sometimes needs rescuing. GHOST SHOW is a story that’s very, very loosely based on my mother and her siblings when they were young, and the four are based on one of my aunts, two of my uncles and my mom. There wasn’t as much mayhem in real life as I injected into either the short story or the novel.
I’d encourage you to buy FIGHTING WORDS not just for my story “A Fighting Life” but also for the really crisp and tough writing by the other writers in the anthology. And it might tide you over until GHOST SHOW arrives.
A while back I wrote a piece for CrimeReads – link at the end of this mini-rant – about how those of us at Constellate Publishing were getting into the book publishing business even though it appeared to be an uncertain time for the industry: Some small publishers had gone out of business and some book distributors were shutting their doors, and yet such notable independent booksellers as Barnes & Noble – sarcasm there – were opening new stores all over.
So which is it? Are writers and designers and publishers doomed or are we seeing a boom time?
Today, Publisher’s Weekly reported:
The Association of American Publishers put 2025 industry sales at $32.5 billion, a 2.5% increase over 2024. Unlike 2024, when unit sales fell, the number of books sold in 2025 inched up 0.4%, to 3.15 billion.
I copied this to a writer friend who replied, in effect, “So publishers are selling a lot of books but are nickel-and-diming us writers to death.”
And yes, PW reported that religion-themed books had seen the biggest increase, but:
Adult fiction sales had the second biggest sales increase, with revenue up 3.9%, to $7.1 billion.
There’s a lot to digest in the report, but here’s a bookstore tidbit:
In terms of channels, physical stores had the biggest increase in the year, with sales up 6%, to $5 billion, an increase likely due in part to the opening of more Barnes & Noble stores as well as more independent bookstores.
Amazon was still the largest channel for book sales, with $11.3 billion in sales.
“This year’s report reflects a healthy and agile publishing industry,” commented Syreeta Swann, chief operating officer of AAP in a statement. She pointed to the resilience of print even as digital formats continue to grow.
Things can change and there’s just no doubt it’s hard to concentrate to read when it feels like we’re teetering on the brink of climate, social and political collapse with a strong tailwind, but the message to writers seems to be:
Write your asses off. There’s a readership out there.
Here’s my CrimeReads piece from a while back about getting into the publishing industry, with comments from some absolutely first-rate writers:
Now I understand how the characters in the Terminator movies timeline felt when they realized that other humans had totally betrayed humanity in favor of SkyNet.
I missed the first couple of hours of this controversy this morning until I saw writer Coy Hall mention it on Twitter. I then found writer Chuck Wendig’s righteously outraged column about it, so you might be sick of this topic by now, but here goes:
In a Horror Writers of America column in the HWA newsletter that dropped in members’ mail boxes this morning (August 5, 2026), a writer and apparent HWA trustee or board member emulates the whole Bob Knight stance of “If rape is inevitable, lie back and enjoy it” from 1988. Knight, a bully of the first order, surprised no one with this bit of wisdom.
But this new sentiment today wasn’t coming from a bully like Knight. This was coming from, ostensibly, a writer and a person in a position of authority with the Horror Writers Association.
The writer decries all the people criticizing the use of AI to make book covers and argues that “every week,” the gatekeepers of horror writers “have some new witch hunt.” The writer says that those who say AI doesn’t belong in the creative arts are on a witch hunt.
Before I go much further, I’ll note something I’ve said in this space and on social media and even LinkedIn, ffs: AI kills careers and it kills people. It takes work and money away from writers and editors and artists and musicians AND DOES ALL OF THEIR WORK IN A WORSE MANNER and the data centers that power AI are killing the planet, using up mammoth amounts of water to cool their technology, befouling the environment with hundreds of diesel engines that power data centers, committing sound pollution in poor neighborhoods – and they’re often in poor neighborhoods, isn’t that a surprise? – and generally making life worse for everyone except the people who own the AI companies and data centers.
Back to that HWA column: The writer bemoans that people are complaining about AI and THEY”RE DOING IT ON FACEBOOK, WHICH USES AI, OH MY GOD THE HYPOCRISY. That’s the most ingnorant argument I’ve ever heard. Facebook is awful and I wish everyone would abandon it, but people are using it to get the word out about AI, which seems like a victory more than a failure. It’s like those people who project wannabe fascists on the sides of their own buildings. You take your battle onto the enemy’s battlefield sometimes.
“AI is here,” the HWA columnist says, and argues that we should all lie back and enjoy it.
Most people I saw online this morning were saying that the Horror Writers Association had severely damaged, if not destroyed, its credibility with this column. HWA certainly slapped in the face and kicked in the crotch the members who support it and who just happen to be, I dunno, writers and other creatives who have the most to lose to this bastard invention.
The final section is a sham “if you don’t understand AI, just ask” argument and says you should be able to ask without getting “shut down.” The phrase can’t help but remind me of the Republican congressman from a few years ago that said in cases of rape, women had the ability to “shut down” their system and prevent pregnancy, so why would we even need availability of abortion on demand or birth control or, anything like that, really.
Keep in mind the same people who think anything so horrible and injurious can just be “shut down” are the same people who want to “shut down” protections of people who are completely vulnerable. Protections like housing and food assistance and medical programs.
I said I wan’t going to get political with this. Nah, actually I knew I was going to get political with this. Because the same class of people who advocate AI, who will make money from it if it comes into wide acceptance, are interested in nothing but pushing everyone else down and keeping them down.
As much more eloquent people than I have said, fuck AI and fuck you, anyone at the Horror Writers Association, who aren’t standing up and calling it the awful, unwanted thing that it is.
We’re gonna remember who you are.
The great writer Chuck Wendig says all this better than I can, with his trademark angry logic, and I can’t do better than that, but I wanted to give it a shot. Link to Wendig’s post at the end of this piece.)
(The image at the top is of a Stan Winston Terminator endoskeleton for “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” released in 1991.)
The book publishing industry continues to work hard to self-destruct.
Everybody who writes about book publishing and particularly the harm wrought on books, writers and largely unsympathetic publishers is reeling today and writing about this, so while I’m not reeling I am writing – and slapping my forehead.
And yes, I’m being mean with that headline, because it’s not solely, or even primarily, the publishing industry trying to self-destruct. The big tech AI firms, which make generative AI possible, steal everything that isn’t nailed down, whether it’s writing or art or even something mundane that can be used to generate email.
And yes, I feel strongly about this because, last time I checked, two of my early true crime books were stolen to train AI book theft programs. “Wicked Muncie,” my co-written 2016 true crime book, and “Muncie Murder and Mayhem,” from 2018, turn up in a search of my name on the database of pirated books as provided by The Atlantic.
Without going into too much detail, in the course of this week, at least two “big” books have been withdrawn by their authors, stillborn by their publishers or otherwise fingered for having artificial intelligence elements. This can include AI writing or AI editing. A lot of people are giving the authors the benefit of the doubt and I can understand and appreciate that. Others are crediting the publishing companies for throwing a flag on the books because it’s not clear, despite their “we tested this book and our tests show it was written and/or edited with AI” claims.
Everyone from Publisher’s Marketplace to newsletters by Kathleen Schmidt (Publishing Confidential, an essential newsletter) and others have recounted the allegations and resulting controversy.
As Schmidt says, “Things can’t go on like this.”
Why do we care about this? Well, besides the fact that AI is an absolutely unnecessary tool in the creative arts, and besides the fact that data centers used to create AI products and portals are horribly destructive to the environment because they use rampant amounts of water and often run on heavy-polluting diesel generators, the fact is that the use of AI in creating art of any kind is destructive to creators, authors, artists, editors and, as much as we don’t sympathize with many of them, publishers.
As Schmidt notes, “a $2.5 million, two-book deal that was acquired by Minotaur (Macmillan) in a 14-way auction, (was) pulled by the author’s agents due to concerns about AI use in writing .”
This followed on the heels of another book and author questioned. As Schmidt reported, “Earlier this week, the author H.M. Smith was accused of using AI to write her new book, Daggermouth. In that case, Pangram returned the book as 60% AI. It is currently ranked at 73 on Amazon. Before that, Hachette canceled the book Shy Girl because Pangram returned it as 78% AI. What’s notable is that in each case, it was an individual from a media outlet feeding book files to Pangram without the authors’ permission. Welcome to the new world of “Gotcha!”
Schmidt is among those who note that programs that use AI to supposedly detect AI are highly probable to find AI where it doesn’t exist. There have been reports of long-ago-published books that, when tested by AI, come back with a false positive for the use of AI. Schmidt notes that she ran some of her newsletters through Pangram and the result was that they were 80 percent AI. And, of course, she’d written every word.
Here’s where I get to the self-destruction part. As Schmidt notes: Whether you admit it or not, there is A LOT of jealousy in the publishing world, so it wouldn’t surprise me if someone who disliked author X decided to use Pangram on their work and made the results public. This is not the publishing world I want to live in.
As Publishers Lunch/Publishers Marketplace notes, Sources tell PL that more deals are being cancelled behind the scenes following the discovery or suspicion of AI — one publisher noted that multiples imprint have had to cancel a book over this — including books that originate in the self-publishing sphere and are then picked up by Big Five publishers. This usually happens quietly and under the public radar, and is only brought to light by fans online.
There’s plenty of blame to go around here. There are apparently a ton of AI-written or AI-assisted books on Amazon. People who want to be authors but are unable to produce a book themselves or unable to hire qualified human editors to read their work – hell, just find writer friends who will edit your manuscripts and maybe pay them or repay them in kind – are causing readers to buy and read dreck and causing publishers to suspect everybody.
Before this latest AI controversy, I was going to write about another AI controversy: the abysmal practice, which became known in the wake of author Andrea Bartz’ $1.5-billion-winning class-action lawsuit against the AI company Anthropic, of Anthropic and other AI pirate companies, of buying copies of books and cutting off their spines in the process of feeding them into AI readers then shredding what’s left. (By the way, you should follow Andrea Bartz on social media. She’s become the face of authors fighting back against AI, but she’s also a great writer of thrillers.) This slice-and-dice process was allowed by a judge because once you’re bought a physical copy of a book, you can do as you want with it. Including destroying it.
So yes, Schmidt is correct. This mess can’t continue like this. It will, of course, as long as AI companies, publishing companies and some authors continue to make money. But in the meantime, the environment is suffering, authors and editors are suffering and writers whose work was stolen or must compete with AI slop are suffering.
A couple of things I should note right at the top:
When I was a business editor back in Indiana, I wrote a lot of stories about businesses opening and closing and new development and whatever else. I also, for a year or two, wrote a business column called Second Thoughts. In that column, I’d follow up on a recent business story, adding information I’d received since its publication. So be aware that I always have a lot of second thoughts,
And I recognize the irony of writing about too many email newsletters in a post that will generate an email to a couple of hundred people who subscribe to these posts.
So on social media the other day, I noted that I’d unsubscribed from a newsletter from an author and self-described “author help” person, or some phrase like that. And as you know from a post a few weeks ago about how much I hate notifications, I guard my email inbox furiously. I mean, not enough to do more than an occasional, cursory cleaning of said inbox, but still.
I noted on socials that I’d unsubscribed to this “author help” newsletter after I’d received 14 email from them up to that point in the month of July.
I heard back from some people who agreed, yeah, 14 newsletters in less than a month is too many. I think other people – including people for whom sending out newsletters is a huge part of their business plan – probably thought I was being oversensitive. Maybe.
Anyway, I’m feeling right at this moment I’m unlikely to resubscribe to this newsletter. As I cut back on my corporate news media consumption in recent years and quit watching TV news and unsubscribed from the NYT, I’ve been subscribing to more newsletters, including those from Columbia Journalism Review, Oldster and a ton of writers’ newsletters. I’ve so far not regretted any of those. (And yes, I admit that due to my fixed income financial status, I’m a newsletter freeloader, receiving only the free version of most of these.)
I’m sure somebody whose newsletter I subscribe to – one of those that ostensibly isn’t supposed to be delivered every day, like some newspaper newsletters – will test my tolerance for newsletters in my inbox.
I’ll have my cursor on that “unsubscribe” button, believe me.
