This Crazy Writing Life: Four Million And Counting! Please, Somebody, Make It Stop!

By Steven Womack

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As I mentioned in a previous installment of This Crazy Writing Life, it’s impossible to determine how many books are published each year throughout the world. However, most experts seem to agree that our best guess estimates now pop four million a year.

Four million books a year!

It gobsmacks the imagination. And with the advent of generative AI, that number’s going nowhere but up. It’s indicative of how much alarm this has caused that Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP)—Amazon’s indie pubbing platform—now limits you to publishing three books a day. If you’re good with AI, you can produce a “book” in under an hour. There’s evidence that there are thousands of accounts out there uploading more than 100 books a month.

It’s insane.

So when British writer and indie pubbing guru James Blatch (who is perhaps best known as Mark Dawson’s partner in what used to be called Mark Dawson’s Self-Publishing Formula before rebranding itself) wrote a Substack post a couple of months ago in which he suggested that KDP should charge $300 per upload…

Well, as we say in the screenwriting biz, chaos ensued.

This sent people straight into panic mode. I get it; most self-published books don’t earn $300 over the course of their entire lives (and a lot of trad books don’t). This would put a ton of folks out of business. And it’s going against the tide of where the indie-pubbing industry is headed. Ingram used to charge to upload a book, but now they’ve dropped that.

Apparently, Blatch (who is a genuinely nice guy; I had dinner with him and Mark Dawson at the Novelists, Inc. conference a few years ago) received nothing short of an avalanche of insults and threats over this idea. In a follow-up to the original Substack post, he wrote that:

Clearly the figure of $300 was the main issue. Even if it covers all derivatives, including translations, it would adversely affect more authors than I considered. But I will stand by the theme of the post.

Blatch makes a good case for putting up some kind of seawall against this word tsunami. If there’s no limit to AI slop, then we’ll all soon be drowning in it. Let’s also not forget The Elephant in the Middle of the Room, which is that a great many human-written indie-pubbed books should have never seen the light of day either (okay, there, I said it).

Of course, I’m not talking about your book or mine, but c’mon folks… We’ve all seen indie-pubbed books that are, frankly, embarrassing.

Prior to AI, my reasoning would have been that the market would have been the seawall. Word gets around that a book sucks and nobody will buy it. But these AI-generated tomes are also encased in AI-generated covers and backed up by AI-generated marketing. And if you’ve ever noodled around with AI covers and marketing (I have), you’ll soon learn that AI can produce some pretty good B.S. Their covers aren’t bad either.

This massive digital landslide hurts serious indie-pubbed writers. Amazon doesn’t give a rat’s rusty flip about you as an author. What they do care about is profit, and how do you protect profit?

By not p^*#ing off your customers.

Blatch wrote that Amazon has achieved this by altering its algorithm so that indie titles are penalized and held back from some chart positions. The algorithm has been tilted to the conservative side, so that books that make the best-selling charts tend toward those with a larger sales history.

I get why Amazon does this.

But it still hurts.

What we’re up against is the business model of AI-generated books. Humans who take writing seriously want to produce quality work that sustains itself over a long period of time. In the early days of my writing career, I imagined that my books would be a kind of annuity that would support me in my dotage and then continue to produce for my family after I’ve gone (reality quickly shut that dream the hell down).

AI-generated books are a new business model. When you’re producing a hundred books a month, if each one sells a couple dozen copies before people realize they’re drek, then you’re on your way to making a good living.

All this sounds like there are people running clandestine AI-slop farms from obscure offshore locations with no extradition treaty, like the folks with exotic accents who call me ten times a day offering me help with Medicare or make an offer on my house. That’s not always the case, though. Consider romance novelist Coral Hart, who was profiled a couple of months back in The New York Times. Ms. Hart is open and aboveboard about it: she creates romance novels with AI (specifically Anthropic’s Claude). She produced more than 200 last year, selling over 50,000 copies, and earning a good, solid six figures. To prove it could be done, she generated one while being interviewed.

It took her not quite 45 minutes.

So that’s what we’re up against. The competition was bad enough before AI. Now it’s even worse, and it’s not going away.

Now this effluent storm has even hit the trad publishing space. Hachette cancelled publication of the horror novel Shy Girl by Mia Ballard in the wake of The New York Times raising suspicion about the book. The cancellation of the novel, originally self-published and then picked up by Hachette after presumably good numbers and reviews, has caused a real ruckus in publishing. Apparently, there was a lot of speculation about AI content in the book from the get-go, but Ms. Ballard has vehemently denied in interviews and statements that she had anything to do with this. She maintains that the editor used AI to change some of her text without her knowledge.

But this begs the question of why a professional author wouldn’t go over the editorial revisions and catch the AI changes. Most writers that I’ve ever known, myself included, go absolutely medieval over a manuscript that’s been touched by an editor. Sharyn McCrumb once told me she was so put out over a copyeditor’s changes to her manuscript that she had two rubber stamps made. The first read Stet. The second read Stet, damnit!

The other issue that pops up here is why didn’t Hachette catch the AI problem before the Times pointed it out. Publishing industry guru Jane Friedman speculated that perhaps publishers need to start taking advantage of tools like Pangram, which are designed to detect AI. Maybe trad publishers are just behind the learning curve on AI.

But, Friedman pointed out, the real issue is that AI has now evolved to the stage where it’s going to get harder and harder to detect it. As she wrote: “I hope (finally?) that this is a wake-up call for publishing professionals. This is just the tip of the iceberg.”

Jane Friedman is spot on with this one. AI isn’t going anywhere; in fact, it’s going to get a little bit better each day. I read a blog post by a very famous and important writer (no need to name names here) who raged against AI, saying it was the devil incarnate and he’d never have anything to do with, never touch it.

I think that’s short-sighted. For one thing, if you don’t know anything about AI and refuse to even look at it, then you won’t notice it when it sneaks into your life. If you consider AI the enemy (and I don’t, by the way), then the first rule of war is know your enemy.

To circle back around to James Blatch, he wrote recently that he’d had a conversation with a senior Amazon executive, who told him that Amazon would never introduce an AI checker. As soon as you created one, AI would find ways to get around it. The technology moves too quickly on both sides of the equation.

I don’t have an answer to this one. I’ve noodled around with AI and found it to be an incredibly useful tool. I’ve done everything from generating marketing copy with AI just to see what it looks like, to screening stocks for options opportunities, and planning travel itineraries. AI’s like any other tool; it can be used for useful, worthwhile purposes or it can be used to cause great harm.

The one thing I would never do is use AI to generate copy that I then put my name on.

Bottom line: this is the price we pay for, as the old curse says, living in interesting times.

Next month, I’ll have some news on a project I mentioned in a previous column.

Until then, as always, thanks for playing along.

This Crazy Writing Life: When Publishing Throws You A Curve Ball—Again—And The Scammers Circle Above

By Steven Womack

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We plan; God laughs.

In last month’s episode of This Crazy Writing Life, I told you the long, epic saga of a novel that my writing partner, Wayne McDaniel, and I wrote nearly a decade ago; a book called Pearson Place. The novel is based on/inspired by a true-life fact: Pearson Place is real.

Located in Queens, it’s a four-story warehouse that takes up an entire city block. This massive warehouse in the middle of one of Queens’s most industrial areas is the repository of every piece of evidence collected in every investigation of every crime by the New York City Police Department going back decades.

The stuff in there gobsmacks the imagination. Every illegal drug ever synthesized or grown; every weapon you could ever imagine using in a crime, ranging from the most modern high-tech anti-tank weapons to medieval maces and lances… Stolen electronics, illegal pornography. High profile crimes like evidence from the Central Park Jogger case. If it’s evidence associated with a crime, it wound up in Pearson Place.

In 1992, Donald Trump’s then-girlfriend Marla Maples’s publicist stole over two hundred pairs of Marla’s very expensive heels and had sex with them. He was charged with theft, found guilty, and his conviction overturned in 1994. He was retried and found guilty again in 1999. Needless to say, Marla—by then Mrs. Donald Trump—didn’t wanted the abused shoes back and they’re still in an evidence locker at Pearson Place. Wayne’s seen them and described them as icky.

Or as Wayne referred to them in the manuscript to Pearson Place: Mrs. Trump’s Humped Pumps…

Anyway, Pearson Place is the story of a single mother who’s an NYPD cop with a special needs toddler. She’s broke, desperate, looking for any way to make an extra buck. She takes on extra shifts guarding Pearson Place. Then she discovers she’s terminally ill. Even more desperate now to leave a legacy for her kid, she decides to pull off the heist of the century by ripping off the NYPD warehouse she’s supposed to be guarding.

Chaos ensues…

Last month, I described how after years of passes, rejections, and radio silence in response to our queries, we found an editor at an established prestigious house who loved the book and wanted to buy it. Everything’s done by committee, though, and there was one holdout on the acquisition team. She tried everything, including having Wayne and me do a rewrite, before finally giving up.

This took just over a year to resolve itself.

Frustrated beyond belief, Wayne and I decided to serialize the novel on Substack. We broke the manuscript up into digestible hunks, created a Substack account, and were writing supplemental material to go with it.

Then, out of nowhere (as happens so often in publishing), I got an email from a very successful writer and close friend whom I’ve known for decades, literally since she published her first novel in 1987. She read my column, said the book sounded interesting. Were we sure we wanted to go the Substack route?

It may be the only route left, I answered.

Let me talk to my editor, she said. Maybe she’ll take a look at it.

A couple of days later, an email from my friend’s editor landed in my inbox. She would love to read Pearson Place. Send it on.

So the Substack project is, for the time being, on hold.  I’ve been in this business too long to be anything but cautiously hopeful. But this book’s going to see the light of day, one way or another, even if—as Major Kong said in Dr. Strangelove—it harelips everybody on Bear Creek.

There are two publishing life lessons to be taken away here: 1) in publishing, you never know when the next curve ball’s gonna come at you, and sometimes it’s a good curveball; and 2) more than anything else, publishing is a people business.

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Speaking of people, there’s some real bad guys out there these days. Take Sherry J. Valentine, for instance. She sent me the following email on January 27th:

Hi Steven,

Blood Plot is deliciously dangerous, the kind of thriller that blurs the line between ambition and obsession until the distinction disappears entirely.

The premise alone is irresistible: a critically praised novelist no one reads decides to give audiences exactly what they crave, only to discover that authenticity has a terrifying cost. Watching Michael Schiftmann cross from observation into participation, and then into addiction, creates a chilling psychological descent that feels both satirical and deeply unsettling. It’s smart, twisted, and disturbingly plausible.

At Book and Banter Book Club, our readers are drawn to suspense that interrogates creativity, morality, and fame, stories that ask uncomfortable questions about what success demands and how far someone might go to achieve it. Blood Plot is exactly the kind of novel that sparks intense discussion, ethical debate, and “just one more chapter” nights.

We’d love to feature Blood Plot as an upcoming spotlight read, purchasing copies for our members and centering a full month of conversation around its themes and characters. A spotlight feature includes:

• A dedicated month-long focus, exploring Michael’s transformation, the cost of ambition, and the novel’s sharp commentary on the publishing world
• Organic reader buzz, with reactions, quotes, and insights shared across our club discussions and social spaces
• Author discovery, introducing readers to your broader body of work and award-winning career

Book and Banter exists to turn bold thrillers into shared experiences, stories readers don’t just finish, but dissect, debate, and recommend.

If you’re open to collaborating, we’d love to talk about bringing Blood Plot to our readers and giving it the thoughtful spotlight it deserves.

Warm regards,
Book and Banter Book Club

Now what, you might ask, is so objectionable about such a flattering email and an offer to help promote a book that, God knows, could use every little bit of help it can get?

Well, friends, let me tell you…

It’s a scam, a complete AI-generated con designed to lure unsuspecting, desperate-for-attention writers (which includes all of us) into a scheme to separate us from as much cash as possible. Once you’ve been around a while and have found enough of these missives in your inbox (I get them several times a week), you begin to develop your very own Spidey sense. The flattering text about my novel is clearly AI-generated. No one really writes like that, even if they’re real and really do love your stuff. There’s something about it that’s too slick, like a TV preacher or something.

And the emails are always from some generic mass-market server. In Ms. Valentine’s case, the incoming came from a Gmail box.

To make this even slicker and more insidious, there actually is an organization of readers and book clubs that share and discuss their favorite reads. Only it’s not the Book and Banter Book Club; it’s the Books and Banter Book Club.

Pretty clever, huh? Almost got that one past me.

A couple of Google searches revealed all this. Plus, I searched for Sherry J. Valentine and while there are lots of Sherry J. Valentines out there, not one of them had any association with the fake Book and Banter Book Club or the real Books and Banter Book Club. There’s also no mention of her on the real book club’s website.

So what’s the takeaway here? As I mentioned in the very first episode of This Crazy Writing Life nearly two years ago, writers have been prey for centuries. In our desperate longing for validation, affirmation, and the inevitable fame and fortune we all deserve, we’re often blind to those whose motives may not be as noble as ours. From the Famous Writers School of the Sixties and Seventies to the contemporary companies who will “publish” your novel and distribute it for a mere thirty-five grand, writers are seen by many as sheep to be sheared.

How do we protect ourselves? As Matty Walker said in Larry Kasdan’s magnificent Body Heat: Knowledge is power. Read the trades, scour the websites, especially SFWA’s fabulous website Writer Beware. It highlights specific scammers and con artists, exposing them by name.

And always remember the adage that’s as true in life as well as publishing: if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. A little dose of cynicism never hurt anybody.

That’s enough for now. As always, thanks for playing along. See you next month.

Oh, and Ms. Valentine? Just for S&Gs, I answered her email.

So far, crickets…

Getting Started In Indie Pubbing (or Good God, what have I gotten myself into?)

By Steven Womack

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Maybe you’ve written your first novel (or second or tenth, whatever) and you’ve taken three years to query every agent on the planet and haven’t gotten even a nibble.

Or maybe you’ve been in this business a couple of decades and published two dozen novels, all of them with modest midlist advances and now out-of-print and not making you a penny. And you’re getting older, and all those years writing novels were years you weren’t piling money into a 401(k) or a company pension, and now you’re scared as hell you’re going to be eating cat food in your dotage.

Or maybe you’ve had some success, made some pretty good money from time to time, but you feel like you’ve been thoroughly abused and taken advantage of by publishers (don’t laugh; it happens). And you’re tired of arguing with editors and having covers you hate shoved down your throat, not to mention the complete lack of marketing, promotion and support (unless you’re a best-seller, in which case you don’t need it).

 So you listen to a few podcasts and read a few blogs and there all these stories of writers taking control of their careers, writing what they want, with covers they love, and succeeding beyond their wildest dreams. You’ve heard of this guy Mark Dawson, who sells a huge, sprawling extensive bunch of courses under his “Self Publishing Formula” brand. And you’ve heard about that fellow in northern Wisconsin who blogged that he made a hundred grand in three weeks selling his self-pubbed titles on Kindle.

And you hit the “Yeah, I’ll take your cookies” button on a few websites you visited and now your Inbox is flooded with emails every day offering to sell you courses on how to be a successful self-publisher or even offering to do it all for you—for a price.

It’s too much. Overload, fuses blown…

Time to take a deep breath and relax.

Like everything in life that’s overwhelming (and the older you get, the more of life that encompasses), sometimes it works to stop staring slack-jawed at the big picture and just break off a little chunk of it and see if you can handle that.

So if you’re trying to build a career as a writer, what’s the best chunk to start with?

The first step goes without saying: you’ve got to write a good book. I won’t spend much time discussing that, but remember—without a story that works, characters that are compelling, writing that leaves you wanting to turn to the next page even if it’s past your bedtime, everything else in the process is for naught.

So given that you’ve done everything you can to meet that first requirement, what next?

You also have to realized that writing, editing, marketing, book design, cover design—all the components of the process—are completely separate skill sets. Just because you’ve written a book doesn’t mean you can edit it or design a good cover for it. Indie pubbing your own work means, first of all, making a series of choices as to which skill sets you’re willing to learn and which ones your going to pay someone else to do.

So one consideration becomes: how much money do I have to put into this?

If money’s not an issue (is that even possible???), then you can write your book and pay somebody else to complete the process. There are perfectly legitimate companies out there who will do a good job for you (BookBaby being one of the more prominent), but plenty of others who are just blatant rip-offs. Do your due diligence.

Say, though, you don’t have unlimited resources and your biggest asset is the sweat equity you’re willing to put into this. Each person’s professional and life experience is different. For instance, I spent a decade working in publishing art departments, mainly as a typesetter and running an in-house art department. I’ve either actually typeset or supervised the typesetting of hundreds of books, so I’m pretty comfortable with interior book design and formatting.

Would I touch a book cover, though? Not a chance. I wouldn’t know good graphic design if it ran up behind me and bit me on the keister. A good cover designer is worth every penny you pay them, and more.

Editing? In my life, I’ve written literally millions of words. Do I trust myself to edit them? Hell, no. In the last Music City Murders novel I published, my biggest single expense was paying an editor to make sure the manuscript was in the best shape possible. I’m even glad someone’s going to be looking over this column before you see it.

That’s enough for now. I hope this has given you something to think about as you ponder your own indie pubbing journey. Next month, we’ll do a deeper dive into the steps of this process. Stay tuned…