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

By Steven Womack

---

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: Some Random Reflections On The Reality of This Crazy Writing Life

By Steven Womack

---

A couple of weeks ago, I did a Zoom panel for the Middle Tennessee chapter of Sisters in Crime called Indie Pubbing Mistakes And How To Avoid Them. Chapter President Beth (Jaden) Terrell moderated the panel, and Lisa Wysocky, Jenna Bennett and I had a very lively and engaging exploration of how to survive this crazy business. As I was prepping for the panel (an hour or so before we were scheduled to go on), I came across a couple of statistics that left me kind of gobsmacked.

For some reason or other, I started pondering how many books were published around the world every year. I wondered if it were even possible to find an answer to that question. More importantly, did I even want to know how many books were published every year? I feared that the number might be even more daunting than I expected.

So I cranked up my local internet search engine and wound up going down a rabbit hole that I haven’t managed to pull myself out of yet…

The first step was UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. I don’t know much about UNESCO and have no connection personally to the organization beyond dim childhood memories of collecting money for them at Halloween back in elementary school (oh wait, that might have been UNICEF). One of UNESCO’s missions is to compile statistics and information on the number of books published because it’s an important index of how world literacy is progressing and our level of education, which is directly related to the standard of living.

According to their best estimates, 2.2 million books were published around the world last year.

Let’s all take a moment to get our heads around this.

Two-point-two million published books a year means that, on average, 6,027 books are published every day, seven-days-a-week, around the clock.

So if that doesn’t make your head spin, let me add their disclaimer: this doesn’t include self/independently published books. While I can’t imagine there’s a completely accurate way of determining how many indies are released every year, UNESCO estimates that adding these to the mix raises the number to nearly four million books a year.

That takes us up to nearly 11,000 books a day.

I don’t know what else to say beyond Holy Crap…

* * *

Continuing on down this rabbit hole, I turned to one of the best Substack writers I’ve found in the past couple of years. . . Elle Griffin. Elle, based in Salt Lake City, writes The Elysian, a newsletter that examines the world and the future through the eyes of an essayist and fiction writer trying to stay centered in the shifting sands of publishing, culture, and life. Her stuff is top-notch, and I highly recommend tracking her down and subscribing (her March 2021 essay No One Will Read Your Book, is essential reading).

In April 2024, Elle wrote an exhaustive and fascinating essay on the publishing business—called No one buys books—set against the backdrop of Penguin Random House’s attempt to acquire Simon & Schuster. The merging of these two publishing houses—who between them make up nearly half of the entire market share of American publishing—would have meant the Big 5 would now be the Big 4 (along with Harper Collins, Macmillan, and Hachette Livre).

The Department of Justice brought an antitrust case against the proposed acquisition and a judge ultimately ruled that the 2.2-billion-dollar merger would indeed create a monopoly, thereby putting the kibosh on the deal.

This was no real big surprise, but what was an eye-opening surprise was the testimony of all the experts called at the trial. It was like in the middle of all the flashing lights, booming sound effects, flame jets, sound and fury, somebody pulled aside the curtain to reveal the shriveled up little mean-spirited man who was pulling all the strings. The truth about the publishing industry was stripped naked and exposed for all to see in its hideous ugliness.

And while what I’m putting in front of you now may seem negative and pessimistic in nature, I’ve always believed that in almost any of life’s endeavors, most of the time it’s better to know what you’re up against. And as Matty Walker said in Larry Kasdan’s great Body Heat, knowledge is power.

So some essential, if ugly, truths:

One expert called to testify in the PRH anti-trust lawsuit collected data on some 58,000 titles. Ninety percent of those titles sold less than 2,000 copies. Fifty percent sold less than a dozen.

Gulp…

The contemporary traditional publishing business model is more like a Silicon Valley venture capitalist’s model than the old myth of a small family firm publishing books they love. In this model, you throw a bunch of money at a bunch of projects and hope that a few of them manage to survive, and even fewer become unicorn breakouts. The ones that do become breakouts get even more money thrown at them. The very top successes get a truckload of money thrown at them. At this level, one consultant reported, this means about 2 percent of the published titles.

Celebrity authors—whether they’re real authors, athletes, movie stars, politicians, or just famous for being famous (Kardashians, anyone?)—get a big hunk of all advance money (and therefore, support) from traditional publishers. Franchise authors—the ones who show up on best-seller lists time after time after time—also get a huge share of the pie. Even then, celebrity authors don’t always sell. Fame doesn’t guarantee a best seller: just ask Andrew Cuomo, Billie Eilish, and Piers Morgan—well-known celebrities whose books flopped like freshly landed catfish.

In evidence provided during the trial, Penguin Random House produced an infographic that revealed for every 100 books they publish, 35 are profitable. Profitable might mean a huge success with truckloads of money coming in or it might mean $.01 over breakeven. As few as 2 of those 100 books account for the lion’s share of profitability.

A traditional publishing house’s backlist, however, is a constant revenue stream of profit. Backlist means all the books the house has ever published that are still in print. Classics—from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to more recent contemporary books like Stephen King’s Carrie—are money machines that houses can count on. Popular children’s books can hang around forever as a new generation of young parents reads the books they loved as a child to their own children. Elle Griffin noted in her essay that Penguin Random House’s edition of Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar has been on Publisher Weekly’s bestseller list every week for the past 19 years.

But to get on that backlist, you’ve first got to succeed on the frontlist. 

So with all the discouraging news and mountain-high obstacles, what’s one to do?

For the past year-and-a-half, I’ve been writing monthly columns for Killer Nashville Magazine on independent publishing. If you take nothing else away from this, then understand that indie pubbing (and as I’ve yelled over and over again at the top of my lungs, don’t call it self-publishing) is not just a phenomenon or a ripple in the history of publishing. It’s nothing short of a movement, even a revolution. Publishing houses (and for that matter, literary agents) who acted as gatekeepers in times past are through; they just don’t know it yet.

Run the numbers I cited earlier. If 2.2 million books are published around the world by traditional houses, then you add in indie pubbed books and the number approaches four million, that means that nearly half the books published in the world are indie pubbed. We’re about to cross a Rubicon here if, in fact, it hasn’t already been crossed. In some genres—romance, for instance—it has already been crossed. The mass market Romance paperback is gone, dethroned by the eBook.

This is not, by any means, to suggest that indie pubbing is a panacea, or the answer to all our problems as writers. I turned to indie pubbing because I had projects or out-of-print trad pubbed books that no house would take. When you work that hard on something, you shouldn’t leave it lying in a desk drawer to yellow with age. So I stared indie pubbing and only afterward learned that I liked having control of titles, cover, editorial, etc. And I liked not having to wait years to see book come into print. But it’s an enormous amount of work and I’m still not making anywhere near the money I once hoped to make as a writer of commercial fiction.

So if one of the Big Five (or for that matter, a smaller house) came to me and offered me a sweet deal to publish a book of mine, would I take it?

Hell, yes.

That’s it for this month’s This Crazy Writing Life. Thanks for hanging in there with me.