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Humazon
Two of my favorite authors growing up were Franklin W. Dixon and Carolyn Keene, authors of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books. I read everything I could get my hands on from both of them. It would be decades before I learned that neither author actually exists.
Both were the creation of Edward Stratemeyer, who owned Stratemeyer Syndicate, which sounds like a place that hires a lot of henchmen. What Stratemeyer recognized is that readers’ appetite did not match an author’s output. So he created a system, one of the very first content farms in publishing. And it was wildly successful.
James Patterson created something similar, leveraging the skills of unsung writers to feed a single brand. These publishing schemes have been long known and given a bit of side-eye by other authors and scrupulous readers, but publishers and bookstores have been absolutely delighted. Voracious readers are the bread-and-butter of this industry.
However … the efforts of the Stratemeyer’s and Patterson’s of the world still took real effort and real people. There were limits to how far they could take things. They bent the system, but nothing really broke. That is now changing. AI removes the friction from content farms, allowing publishers to crank out hundreds of books a day. Fractal Enigma is one of these publishers, and pretty soon there will be hundreds of these, each publishing thousands of books a week. I’m not kidding. Check out their author page. None of these people exist.
Now, if you read my blog post from last week, you’ll know that I have a very nuanced and generous view of all these developments. For decades I’ve been screaming a single mantra into the publishing void: Readers and Writers. These are the people who matter. Yes, they matter more than bookstores. They matter more than publishers. Or agents. Or editors. All these components are important, but if publishing ever got strange or whacky or you couldn’t make sense of what’s right and wrong, dial your attention back to the only two parties who truly matter: Readers and Writers.
And when I say these are the only two parties who matter, I mean that in a vacuum. I mean that solely as well. There’s nothing wrong with a writer who has no readers. Journalists, people who write and don’t publish, private poets — these people matter to me. There are also plenty of readers who rarely touch a living writer. You can read out-of-copyright fiction for the rest of your life, and not a penny goes to another soul, and we all celebrate the hell out of this. There’s something pure about writing for oneself or reading among the dead that doesn’t trouble us. Because we get that reading is a noble pursuit all on its own and so is writing.
Which is why — and I get that this upsets folks — I see nothing wrong with readers gobbling up AI-written books for the rest of their lives. It’s like reading Tolstoy (a real person, soul-to-soul, but zero money changing hands) or Carolyn Keene (not a real person, the soul sanded down to “standard practices,” but someone is getting paid). Snatching an AI book out of a reader’s hands reminds me of the folks who say audiobooks aren’t real reading, or comicbooks don’t count, or a manga isn’t a book. There are many different kinds of enemies to reading.
I also get writers leaning on or relying on AI to write a book. Writing is hard. I’m forever grateful that I wrote before this age and proved to myself that I could make it on my own. But I’ve been a big supporter of fan fiction for years, which relies on someone else doing all the world-building and character creation (it’s like playing with dolls instead of building them from scratch, and it’s an important onramp for lots of budding authors). I think AI might help some non-writers become writers. It might help lots of authors clean up their grammar (I’ve noticed Word has massively improved its proofreading tools, becoming a first great editor before handing off a manuscript to my human editor). Nothing angers me