Tag Archives: publishing

The Futile Attempt to Ban AI Writing

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If you want to submit a short story or novel to any publisher today, you will inevitably find a disclaimer on their submission guidelines page that forbids submitting a story that used AI. But what exactly does “using AI” entail? If you dictate a story with an app that uses AI to transcribe it, is that using AI? If you then use Grammarly to proofread and edit, is that using AI? If you upload your manuscript to use Perplexity as a fact-checker and research assistant, is that using AI? If you use ChatGPT to help generate ideas during the outline phase but then write the actual story yourself, is that using AI? If you generate the first draft of a story with an LLM, but then rewrite every single word, is that still considered using AI? What if you only change 95% of the words? 75%? 50%?

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Indie Publishing is Free Market Publishing

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Professional publishing is fiat publishing, while indie publishing is free market publishing. The professional publishing industry, which consists of the “Big 5” book publishers (Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Hachette Book Group, and Simon & Schuster) and literary agencies, are like central banks in the economy: they manipulate the market and create artificial scarcity by limiting which authors and books can be published. Indie publishing (self-publishing and small independent presses) is the free market for books, as it has a more natural flow of supply and demand. Everyone has the same opportunity, and success is more closely correlated with merit—or how much readers actually enjoy a book.

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Algorithmic Fiction is Not For Me

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Welcome to the age of algorithmic fiction. Thanks to tools like GPT-4, a human writer with a library of previously written books can simply write a one-page outline for a new novel, and AI can write an entire novel in their style. In many cases the book will be good enough to pass as if it was written by the human authors themselves, allowing writers to publish more frequently. However, GPT fiction will only work with formulaic writers whose books are all similar. In other words, those writers who were already writing algorithmic fiction before the aid of AI.

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Content Creation in the Coming Attention-Based Economy

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Writers have always struggled to get adequately paid for their work. Before the internet, publishing companies (for books, newspapers, and magazines) had the power as gatekeepers to take advantage of writers who had no other means to get their writing to the public. Publishers would take a large percentage of the pay—because they could. Today, the internet provides a way around traditional gatekeepers, but some writers still struggle to get paid. This could change in the future with the development of currently existing technology.

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The Art of the Novella

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I am growing tired of trilogies these days—and series in general (in both books and film). It seems like every successful piece of intellectual property in the entertainment industry must be prolonged indefinitely. What happened to a single complete story with a beginning, middle, and end? Most series would best be novels, most novels would best be short stories, and most short stories would best not exist.

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How to Learn How to Write Fiction

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Writing fiction is not something that can be taught with a simple “how-to” book. A creative artistic endeavor like fiction writing is something you have to learn by doing yourself. Each writer is different—at least the good ones are—therefore their method to write fiction is different. So this post is not “how to write fiction like others” but “how to teach yourself to write fiction your own way.”

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Good Art and the Posthumous Success of H.P. Lovecraft

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When writing fiction, you can either write for now or forever. To become a successful bestseller you need to appeal to the masses, and the masses are, by definition, average. That is average intelligence, average creativity, average originality, average in taste and interests, etcetera. The masses don’t like the most creative, innovative, transgressive, and artistic works of art—and they never will. There’s only ever a small subset of the population with refined enough taste to find and appreciate the diamonds in the rough and discover a truly creative artist—someone like H.P. Lovecraft—during their lifetime.

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