I'm going to start by saying everything is changing AND nothing is new. I hope you are comfortable with cognitive dissonance. The one constant is discoverability—the ability for a book to be found when someone who doesn’t know me or my books “discover” it through search or word-of-mouth or paid advertising.
Competition is definitely up, advertising is less effective without considerable monetary investment, and reading is competing with all kinds of media options for people to choose.
In this three-part series of posts over several days, I’ll be sharing both my research around the impact and promise of AI, as well as the difficulties of accepting and creating change for myself and the struggle to continue writing in a changing publishing environment and a changing life as I get older.
COGNITIVE DISSONANCE DEFINITION: the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially as relating to behavioral decisions and attitude change. – Oxford Dictionary
Here are some examples I’ve experienced with cognitive dissonance in my publishing career over the past five years. I wonder if you suffer from some of this as well.
All the marketing that used to work between 2012 and 2018 no longer works, but I keep trying it anyway from time-to-time because it worked before and lots of bestselling authors, or those who provide courses for author marketing, keep telling me it works but I just don’t try hard enough. In some ways, that’s true. It does work today—sometimes. But it costs five to ten times more to get the same results and the overall profit (for what I can afford to pay) is significantly less.
I’ve always been an early adopter to changing technologies because it helped me work faster or at least more efficiently. But now the change is happening within weeks instead of months or years and I can’t keep up with it. Much of it is around generative AI. I wrote about this last year on one of my blogs. In just one year, AI capabilities have grown almost beyond recognition in additional things it can do. The question is to love them, hate them, or something in between.
I know I am significantly older than the average indie author. I’m a proud 70-year-old. My mind is slower than it was twenty years ago, yet I still hold myself to the standards of my creativity and the publishing of three books a year that I was doing in my fifties. I haven’t made that mark in the last six years. This results in me constantly feeling I’m no longer good enough.
I begin with these examples because they are as much a part of managing a publishing career as any single new practice or new technology or latest genre to make millions for a few lucky writers. These very examples, among many others, are what is true for me and many other authors whether published with a traditional publisher or indie. The act of creating a story and knowing, believing, hoping it will find an audience is in itself a practice in cognitive dissonance. If one looks at the statistics for financial book success it is enough to make most people give up and run away. Yet those of us who have a need to write stories persist against the odds, and many of us still expect our story to be the one that will make it and be read by many readers.
What I’ve learned over my 27 years of publishing full length books is that it is constantly changing. Both big publishers and indie authors are trying new things all the time, and success is always unpredictable. It is also very predictable that some things won’t work year in and year out. Politics, media advertising, influencers, and generational changes impact success and even the types of books that are popular. More competition heavily impacts indie authors as more creators enter the field and take advantage of technology to get their book to market.
When I switched from traditional publishing to indie publishing in 2011 there were approximately 300,000 new books published by traditional publishers each year. In comparison, in 2011 there had been 87,000 self-published books. Ninety percent of them were ebooks. It was a rare self-published author who would do print back then and distribute to bookstores or online stores. Today, there are more than 2.3 million indie author books being released every year and and approximately 500,000 new books released each year by traditional publishers.
NOTE: The traditional publisher number is very hard to get and sometimes portrayed as a million or even 2 million each year. This is because they also do many backlist books 2nd, 3rd, or 4th editions as new releases. They also do “new” releases of public domain books with a new forward, new cover, or some critical analysis as part of the book front matter or back matter. The numbers above are based on never-before published books in fiction and nonfiction.
To get a good sense of all the changes, particularly technology-driven changes, in publishing over the last decade read the Alliance of Independent Author’s post Ten Years of Self-Publishing 2012 to 2022. Even having experienced all these changes myself, I was heartened to be reminded that these changes were as much or more of an impact on my ability to compete in the marketplace than my aging mind or competing life responsibilities.
Today the technology that is having the largest impact in indie author’s ability to be equal in the publishing marketplace is the increasing use of AI in the creative space of book creation. AI has always been a part of publishing but more on the production side. Now it’s clearly in the creation of books and book derivatives. Let’s explore those four examples of AI encroachment and what is changing or how one might proceed even with cognitive dissonance about using it.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
DEFINITION: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages. –Oxford Dictionary
I can remember the first AI program I saw my freshman year of college in 1972. It was an artificial psychology program that would respond to your questions and elicit your response like a therapist would. As my long-term plan was to be a counselor, the AI responses and how well done they were scared me to death that therapists would be replaced by computers. I couldn’t imagine anyone being interested in talking to a computer about their problems or believing in the efficacy of the proposed solutions. Later, when I completed a Master’s in Counseling I realized how little that program could do. Also, now 50+ years later therapists have not been replaced by AI.
Research around AI use shows that it has been around since the 1950s. Many programs we all value actually use AI to help us, though that acronym was not in use in any marketing of the programs. Instead, the marketing was about what the program would help you do.
Spell checkers and grammar checkers
Online maps like Google Maps for navigation
Electronic Health Records for managing and providing diagnostic assistance and comparisons
Voice assistants like Siri and Alexa
All shopping, product recommendation, and check-out systems online from Amazon to Netflix, Walmart to Home Depot, and even on individual author websites that have some direct sales links with places like PayPal, Payhip, Stripe and others
Fraud detection contains AI-driven programs now used in every bank and financial institution
Any robots used in factories, recycling centers, or warehouses are all AI driven
Most large research programs begin with AI reviewing databases of content and other research to provide a preliminary hypothesis, or sometimes suggest a conclusion and then provide all the relevant data to the human doing the research.
All of the above has been used through the last two decades or more with only a small amount of pushback . But now that this technology is being used in the creative endeavors of writing and publishing there is an uproar among creatives who participate in this work.
What is the reality of this use? Should you use it yourself? Who are the winners and losers when AI is used in publishing?
Licensed from DepositPhotos. Ethics rally in in front of art gallery in Vancouver, Canada.
Photo by Margarita Young
AI FOR INDIE AND TRADITIONAL PUBLISHERS
Let’s look at the problems some creative folks have with AI. There are four areas of AI currently where writers and artists are most concerned—translation, narration, cover design, and writing. There are two primary reasons for concern in these four areas:
Is copyright being infringed in the training of the AI software and the building of large databases from other copyrighted material (primarily books and images)? There are multiple lawsuits about this problem. The Author’s Guild has successfully sued a couple of companies. You can keep track of their progress here. on AI Licensing for Authors: Who Owns the Rights and What’s a Fair Split?
Will the people who are currently do these four jobs—translating, narrating, cover design, and writing—be replaced by AI and thus deprived of a living?
I am definitely with the Author’s Guild on this problem of copyright infringement. Though there is progress, I doubt that all the AI that has used copyrighted materials to build their database (and all of them have) will ever be compensated. As the saying goes: Closing the barn door after the horse escaped, doesn’t bring the horse back.
As to taking the jobs of people doing things where AI is taking over, I have some mixed feelings on this myself. The discussions around this are often emotionally driven (including my own emotions) and advocacy driven (me too). As with most new technology, the fear is how it is used, if it will change the publishing landscape so that even fewer people can participate, and how someone without insider knowledge can assess its decision-making process to determine if it is breaking any laws or cultural rules. Also, there are thousands of small business people who do some of these jobs as an independent consultant. What will happen to them.
Most of you are probably familiar with this statement or something similar: “It is not technology that is evil, it is the people who use it that make it evil.” I do believe it is true. That’s the difficulty, deciding if I use a piece of technology how will I use it within my values? What am I endorsing by using it?
Why is AI being used in the creative space? The answer is intertwined with personal productivity and financial gain. Companies do not invest in creating a new technology unless it benefits them financially AND/OR they see there is a wide need for it and they can sell the technology to others. There are also those people who create technology not for the purpose of making billions of dollars, but for the purpose of making the world a better place or serving a particular group of people they want to help have more access to upward mobility.
In the past two decades of publishing technology has cut costs significantly for both large and small publishers. It has allowed indie publishers (self-publishers) to be present in the same marketplace that large publishers use. AI driven programs that began to surface in 2008-2012 made book formatting easier and quicker, helped create covers to the proper dimensions for uploading to printers, and helped make distribution of books around the world to multiple vendors as easy as a single load to an aggregator and then a click of a button to start the distribution. This means books are for sale with a small investment to get them to a worldwide market.
IMO that is a good thing. There are now a lot more choices of content and story point-of-views that would never have been selected by major publishers because the “marketability” of a book is always backward looking—based on the past three years of successful books. Those people who could never get a book deal, can self-publish easily. Those people who had many book deals in the past but were no longer their publishers “favorite” list of authors, started leaving publishers and self-publishing and made more money.
The current technology puts the small publisher’s book in ebook and print into the marketplace fairly easily and inexpensively. Today, indie publishers also have access to print-on-demand hardback books and special edition books via Book Vault. (i.e., sprayed edges, unique end pages, multiple cover treatment options, inside color images without having to pay for the entire book being in color, and book sizing options) It isn’t as inexpensive as a straight black and white paperback, but you also don’t have to order a thousand of them to get it. Just one is fine. Or perhaps 10 or 20 for a special promotion. All of these capabilities are possible because of AI programs.
Now with additional AI programs, one might be able to also afford derivatives of their work through audiobooks and translations with a reasonable low-investment of money. Again, I think this is a good thing because it expands the ability to use a single creative work and gain more readers and sales through these other derivatives.
The downside to both indie authors and traditional publishers is competition. Because of the relative ease of getting a book to market, there are millions of new books competing for readers every year. Because of large database management, those millions add up. Currently, Amazon is reported to have a database of over 20 million books, of which approximately 12 million are active (meaning they sell a certain number of books every year).
Getting “discovered” is the problem and it continues to get harder for a book to be shown based on a general search without spending significant money on advertising, placement, influencers, reviewers, and other marketing. This likely is also why authors are scared that AI will increase that tension for them.
In Part 2 of this post. I will look in depth at the four primary areas of AI Creative Intervention. How it works, compare costs to human options, review AI reliability/quality as of this date, and provide some pros and cons of the various options.
In Part 3 I’ll share what I’ve decided to do and how I view the ethics of this situation. I am a not a trained ethicist, but I suspect neither are the people who read this post. We are all trying to evaluate and make our own decisions that support our creative goals and our values.
I hope you are willing to stay with me and share how you are thinking about this, too.
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