Let's put "Writing in the Age of AI" in perspective

Putting "Writing in the Age of AI" in historical and practical perspective

There’s a great conference coming up soon, March 22–24, called the California Creative Writing Conference. Usually held in Marina Del Rey, it will be an online conference this year. Its theme: “Writing in the Age of AI.”

It’s an appropriate theme, as the “Age of AI” has certainly dawned on authors and the publishing industry in general. But to fully appreciate its significance, it helps to put it in context with the other eras of writing from the perspective of a person who wants to write and publish a book, possibly even make a living doing so.

At the recent Future of Publishing Mastermind (February 26–29 in New Orleans), Russell Nohelty outlined the history of publishing through the lens of a single question: who actually had the opportunity to make a living as an author, or even publish a single book of their own?¹

The timeline looks like this:

1. The Age of Aristocratic Patronage: from the invention of long-form fiction all the way to World War 1, 800BC(ish) to 1914:

For most of human history, to write and publish a book of your own, you had to be independently wealthy or landed gentry. Or both. To be an exception to this limitation, you needed to have a patron who supported you full-time and paid all your publishing expenses, a patron who was—you guessed it—significantly wealthy or an aristocratic landowner. You also needed to be a member of the dominant culture and/or educated class of your country of residence.

It was a long thousand years for aspiring authors.

2. The Age of Accessible Traditional Publishing: from the end of World War 2, 1945, to 1997:

Anyone who was a member of the dominant culture and/or educated class could become an author during this era, and possibly make a career of it, but you had to live in one of seven publishing-centric cities of the world. Moving to one of those cities was Step One toward your author career. Good luck getting your manuscript into the right slush pile, seen by an editor, and chosen for publication. Good luck negotiating a publishing contract that gave you more than a pittance of royalties or left you with any of your intellectual property rights intact. Unless, of course, you happened to be one of the rare celebrity bestselling authors in your city, or —as usual—an independently wealthy scion of society. Traditional publishing was by far the most common option for an aspiring author.

To “succeed” as a traditionally-published author and join literary society required breaking into the publishing community somehow. A brilliant manuscript, submitted “over the transom” by an unknown author, becoming a bestseller, and launching a comfortably lucrative writing career— this was an urban legend common enough to inspire generations of eager submissions to the traditional publishers large and small who ran the book world during this era. But to have any real hope of seeing your manuscript in print, you needed to know the right people.

The most helpful thing about internships, fellowships, residencies, conferences, and even literary degree programs was the social networks they opened up for an aspiring author. Most of these events and programs were found in those six or seven great cities, and living there gave an aspiring author the advantage of knowing all the pubs, clubs, or bars favored by the literati. The venerable art of buying drinks for literary agents and editors at a nearby bar after the events of the day was surprisingly effective during this entire era. The practice continues today.²

Self-publishing without independent wealth or social class³ became possible, but it required serious entrepreneurial skills, significant investment, persistence, and a great deal of luck.⁴ It made you an outcast from literary society, but it was within reach of anyone in the middle class with a maverick streak.

3. The Age of Chaos: the emergence of the Internet and the founding of XLibris and AuthorHouse, 1997 to 2007:

Now, anyone who owned a decent computer, and had access to electricity and the internet, could be a published author!

This was a huge improvement in opportunity for aspiring authors, but it was also a time of utter chaos.

Just because desktop publishing was possible didn’t mean it was easy. You could create and print lovely newsletters, flyers, and résumés in your own home, but to print a book, you still needed access to a publishing company...

“Upstart self-publishing print-on-demand businesses like Xlibris and AuthorHouse (both founded in 1997) and iUniverse (founded in 1999) weren’t in the business of selling books; instead, they sold publishing, offering authors an easy way to get a book (technically) into print.” —PublishersWeekly

Self-publishing “houses” like Xlibris quickly became known as "subsidy publishers” (or “vanity publishers”) because the author—or the author’s wealthy patron—had to subsidize the professional-quality editing, production, marketing, and distribution of their books. This was so expensive, it was a step back into the 19th Century in many ways… and their author-clients were often disappointed with the “professional” results.

But it wasn’t the only self-publishing game in town. Low-quality self-published print-on-demand (POD) books became available by the year 2000, through BookSurge, which soon became Createspace. The quality of Createspace’s printing and binding improved quickly, but wide distribution of those books was difficult or impossible, and advertising them was costly.

Still, centuries of pent-up creative enthusiasm seized upon both Createspace and subsidy publishers to blast a curious book-buying public with a firehose of unedited poorly-crafted crap,⁵ so much of it that it hit traditional publishers hard. They laid off most of their editorial staff and cut costs in many other ways, some wise and overdue, some horribly short-sighted. (Discarding cumulative centuries of editorial skill and wisdom was unwise, but they were panicking. They didn’t realize that editorial strength and depth would be their best competitive advantage over vast hordes of callow—often puerile—self-publishing authors.)

So at the same time that the first great surge of self-publishing gave traditional publishers a horrible crisis, it also gave self-published books a horrible reputation, while failing to deliver on its “easy riches” hype.

4. The Golden Age of the “Desert Author”: Amazon’s mastery of POD self-publishing, its vast, efficient, and inexpensive marketing & distribution network, and the public emergence of Facebook (all around 2007) to 2017:

The real “book surge” hit when the high-quality on-demand bookprinting of Createspace was successfully mated with Amazon’s unmatched sales, marketing, and distribution capacity, plus the marketing and community-building tools of Facebook and its competitors. This triumvirate came together around 2006 and 2007.

It led to a perfect storm of success for the indie author who could accurately spot hot trends and quickly write to meet that market demand, then pace the release of their books to take advantage of Amazon’s promotional algorithms— an author who would test as a “Desert” in the Author Ecosystem quiz. The ingredients for this perfect storm weren’t simply Amazon+Createspace+Facebook:

1. The previous ten years had taught serious independent (self-publising) authors to value professional editing, formatting, and cover design; in these areas, they were already playing in the same league as the big traditional publishers.

2. Many brilliant editors canned by traditional publishers reinvented themselves as independent contractors serving the big companies (which had to re-hire good editorial talent but not add to their payrolls) as well as the serious indie authors.

3. The internet and personal computers had vastly improved, in both hardware and software. This made the next ingredient possible:

4. Facebook provided an ideal arena for discovery, marketing, and fanbase-building, which competitors⁶ imitated and tweaked in creative ways that opened innumerable audience niches for self-published authors willing to pursue them, right as this decade began (around 2007).

5. Readers had gotten savvy and wouldn’t tolerate quick-release crap anymore, so vast hordes of get-rich-quick writers had turned to other schemes.

6. Also, reader loyalty had shifted from genre alone (without noticing author names or publishers) to recognized authors in their favorite genres (still mostly without noticing publisher names!)

7. During this time, the “20BooksTo50K” strategy served “Desert-skilled” indie authors well. It was, I believe, the premier “authorpreneur” conference in the world, hosting events in many different countries.⁷

For a beautiful decade, financial success as an author was hard work but also clearly understood and achievable for almost everyone willing to learn “Desert” skills (or hire people with those skills) and do the work.

Regardless of their author ecosystem, many people became successful authors —or at least published the one or two books they wanted to publish— during this time. According to Bowker⁸, there was a 263% surge of ISBN assignations between 2013 and 2017, meaning the number of books published in 2017 was almost triple the number published in 2013.⁹

5. The Age of Transition: a fog of profusion and confusion, 2017 to 2023:

2018 looked at all that growth and said, “Hold my beer.”

The number of new self-published titles grew an additional 40% in a single year from 2017’s already-record high. Possibly because of this sudden arrival of so many new books¹⁰ —among other reasons— the 20BooksTo50K strategy began to crumble like a sugar cube at the bottom of a cup of tea, becoming a loose aggregation of ideas, alternatives, and edge cases. It was no longer a clear and reliable business model, even for Desert authors.¹¹

How many of the 2017 tsunami of books were published by first-time authors entering the market, and how many by long-time 20Books adherents finally hitting their rapid-release stride? Could the 20Books strategy’s success have sown the seeds of its own downfall via market saturation?

Like fog rising from the Thames and clouding London with uncertainty, authors all knew things were shifting. We could point to evidence of change here and there all around us, but it wasn’t clear where things were headed. No clear strategy for publishing success emerged during this time, though several ideas vied for attention.¹² Kevin Anderson describes this recent period vividly in this interview.

Some insightful people recognized what was at hand,¹³ but now, as of February 2024, the fog has been dispelled. It’s still early days in this new era of publishing, and we might only have a decade or so to take advantage of it before another asteroid hits the publishing world.

But clarity has finally arrived.

6. The Golden Age of Self-Publishing: Direct Sales, AI Tools, Subscriber Tools —All The Tools!

Back to “Writing in the Age of AI.” The fog of transformation that began around 2017 and billowed well into 2023 was soon lit by a single, increasingly bright light: a new application of artificial intelligence in the form of LLMs, specifically ChatGPT. For a few of those foggy years, from 2020 to 2023, it wasn’t clear whether the glare of the approaching AI was the daylight of hope at the end of our tunnel or the glare of an approaching freight engine hauling a long train of destruction —for the publishing industry at least, and maybe all the rest of human civilization too.

None of the hype proved true. No LLM will ever enable a gold-digger to win the Booker Prize, much less “make writers obsolete.” Both the positive and negative hype proved to be just that: hyperbole.

The reality is that AI is now playing, and will continue to play, a significant role in nearly every creative endeavor, especially publishing. Instead of a plague or panacea, a better analogy is a set of power tools.

We now have a variety of AI-powered authoring, editing, marketing, and publishing tools. If wisely and ethically used, they can open a new “golden age” of publishing, connecting authors with their readers more closely (and more profitably) than ever.

The new “winning skillset” in publishing for the next era will include AI tools.

Of course, these power tools can be used clumsily and ineffectively to flood the market with crappy or at best disappointingly mediocre short stories and books— and that is happening at an order of magnitude greater than the “firehose of crap” the publishing industry (and readers!) experienced in the Age of Chaos, 25 years ago.¹⁴ But the misuse of these tools, like the misuse of Createspace in the Age of Chaos, doesn’t disqualify them as legitimate tools. Nor are they magic: it requires training and practice to master them.

There are three classes of AI tools, which I’ll explore in more detail later:

• Acceleration: This gets the most public attention, and might be the only kind of AI tools most writers have heard of. ChatGPT and other LLM bots don’t need to be used to write stories “for” you, you can also use them in creative ways to get past writers block, quickly organize your own ideas, quickly draft your own work, quickly develop titles, subtitles, and ad copies —to quickly do a whole lot of things that are otherwise laborious, freeing you up to do what you love to do: write. (And write faster!) The possibilities are intriguing, but even as you master the tools, you might use them only in certain ways or only for specific tasks, and that’s fine. This part is about craftsmanship. Choose your own adventure, here.

• Automation: This probably offers the greatest value for experienced authors. Zapier and other automation and script bots can work together with other AI tools (like ChatGPT) and thousands of other platforms to automate all kinds of platform-sustaining, advertising, and social media tasks. Unless you’ve been a Hypercard or Zapier fan for years already, you have no idea how many things can be automated, and in ways that magnify and amplify your author voice instead of imitating or replacing it. The possibilities are mind-blowing. This part is about marketing funnels, flywheels, discoverability, community-building, advertising, bookkeeping, tax prep and filing… AI tools are here to free you, not enslave you.

• Collaboration: This is a nascent but already powerful class of AI tools that usually work in the background once you set them up. They might incorporate a little chatbot action and some automation, but mostly they enable real-time collaboration with colleagues and independent contractors. Your learning curve here involves the apps and platforms that are powered by neural networks and true AI (not just LLMs, which are neither quite as “artificial” nor as “intelligent” as they may seem). The communication-and-collaboration “just works” without any need for you to understand the AI components. You may already be using these tools without realizing they rely on AI. They make outsourcing, crowdsourcing, and co-authoring so much easier and more reliable, you might be tempted to try it at last.

There are at least four distinct approaches to using any of these classes of AI tools, which I’ll also describe in a follow-up post. But AI tools are just one of the three that are ushering in a new Golden Age of Publishing (whether self- or traditional- or hybrid-publishing).

The new “winning strategy” in publishing for the next era will be Direct Sales.

Not in exclusion to other strategies but in concert with them. As with the 20BooksTo50K strategy, the principles and perspectives are the most important part, not the various classic examples of an effective and lucrative direct-sales strategy. Unlike the old 20Books strategy, direct sales specifies certain kinds of tools as well as skills you’ll need to learn. But a direct sales strategy is inherently much more flexible than the 20Books strategy: for one thing, it’s not a “strategy” as much as it is an “opportunity” that can be pursued with an infinite variety of strategies.

The 20Books approach strongly favored Deserts, went against the grain of Forests and Aquatics, and burned out Tundras, if its approach was strictly followed. But any kind of author can pursue direct sales no matter what author ecosystem you are, while … since 2017, so many exceptions and edge cases have been added that the 20BooksTo50K Facebook groups have broadened to general marketing advice now.

The new “winning strategy” in marketing for the next era looks like Subscriptions/Memberships.

This one is already more visible than direct sales. From Adobe Creative Cloud to YouTube, everything involves a monthly or annual subscription now: from software, to streaming, to newsletters/blogging. Substack (heyo!) and Ream are the most popular subscription article-and-story publishing platforms, Patreon is the “Kleenex” of subscription membership platforms, and Kickstarter is the flagship product-launch subscription platform.

Yes, Kickstarter is basically a subscription platform. You don’t notice it at first, but once you’ve backed a creator’s project, any future projects that creator launches, you get those updates too… not just in the app or on the site, but by email too, if you allowed email updates or email notifications (which I do, to keep my own record of all the updates from the projects I backed). It means fewer emails in between campaigns, which is often a relief, but it also means you hear about each new campaign before, during, and after your favorite creator runs it. Just as if you had subscribed to that creator’s mailing list… from the user perspective, it’s one of my favorite subscription platforms, letting me follow a dozen different creators without getting emails from every one of them every week— only when the next cool thing is almost ready to launch!

Email fatigue is a challenge for both consumers and creators, readers and authors. But the best subscription platforms allow readers to tailor the topics and frequency of emails they receive from each author, and savvy authors will take advantage of those tools to allow subscribers that kind of control— and then see which options appeal to which readers, so that we maximize their happiness and minimize churn.

These are just a couple of ideas that spring from the powerful new realities of subscription tools. We must learn about them, then choose and master the tools that will serve us (and our readers) best.

We have our “Golden Age” work cut out for us!

I’ll post more on each of these soon, in particular a helpful roadmap of direct sales concepts, with lots of links to helpful experts and sites. I am learning all of this right along with you.

Speaking of subscriptions: Subscribe to mine so you won’t miss it!

And register for the California Creative Writing Conference to learn more about all these things! Steph Pajonas, Art Holcomb, and Lisa Cron are our keynote speakers, and two out of three of them (Steph and Art) are experts in the effective and ethical use of AI for writing and publishing. Lisa Cron is an expert in human, not artificial, intelligence, and will keep us grounded and help us hone our human voices in this Age of AI.

Also, I don’t want to become a Gatekeeper, go straight to these sources:

…then we can discuss them happily in the comments and Notes! I still hope my overviews of their work will be helpful, even after you read/watch all the things. ;-)

1. Oral storytelling is a completely different history with vastly more freedom. Anyone with the knack for telling a joke or a clever story could find an appreciative audience. One might even earn a bit if one could recite the local history and genealogy, or sing a ballad, etc. Aspiring storytellers were welcome to practice their passion as long as they didn’t make enemies of powerful people. Naturally, powerful people were a favorite target for poets and bards, who got away with “telling truth to power” (or at least mocking the powerful) often enough to maintain this universal human tradition of spoken story, chant, and song. Its cultural prominence was only recently eclipsed by readable text— we can argue about when exactly that happened! For more, check out Matthew Battles, who explains how printed texts emerged (very slowly!) from that oral tradition.

2. Also known as BarCon, an informal “conference” immediately following the actual conference (or convention, symposium, or whatever).

3. Unless one wanted to publish political screeds, manifestos, that sort of thing, in which case you might find politically motivated financial backing; this was the Cold War era, after all. But it amounted to becoming a nonprofit independent press. You couldn’t write anything you wanted, so was it really “self-publishing”?

4. For examples, see Publishers Weekly, “Just Do It (Yourself): A History of Self-Publishing”

5. Which Christopher Pierznik describes vividly here!

6. LibraryThing (founded August 2005), Shelfari (founded October 2006), Goodreads (founded December 2006), Babelio (founded January 2007); those were the big ones.

7. Disagree? Tell me which was more influential, and why, in a comment!

8. To actively protect your copyrighted work, you need a International Standard Book Number (ISBN), and for each nation or region there is just one internationally recognized authority to issue them. For the USA, it’s Bowker.

9. https://perspectivesonreading.com/book-wars-the-rise-of-self-publishing/

10. How many were published by first-time authors entering the market, and how many by 20Books adherents finally hitting their rapid-release stride? Could the 20Books strategy’s success have sown the seeds of its own downfall via market saturation?

11. It did make 20Books conferences more helpful for non-Desert author ecosystems, as exceptions to the “rules” multiplied! Any effective strategy or tactic was welcomed, and you adopted and adapted whatever seemed to fit you best. It was an excellent segue into Author Nation (though there is no official relationship between 20BooksTo50K and Author Nation)

12. Like whether to publish on Kindle Unlimited (…but nowhere else! More correctly, it’s “Kindle StrictlyLimited”) vs. wide (as many publishing platforms as possible); episodic digital releases (like Kindle Vella or Wattpad) vs. occasional short runs of massive glorious hardcovers (Kickstarter); give away lots of free copies vs. never give away free copies; etc. And direct sales too; that’s been promoted off and on for a long time, going back to the 1970s at least.

13. The first voices I heard talking about this shift, in the order I remember hearing them talk about it:

Russell Nohelty

, Joanna Penn, Hal Croasmun,

Monica Leonelle

,

Steph Pajonas

, Elizabeth Ann West, Kevin McLaughlin, J. Thorn…

14. Literary magazines had to shut down submissions completely and come up with new ways to protect themselves from the short-story equivalent of DDOS attacks; traditional publishers long ago stopped taking un-agented submissions (the exceptions prove the rule!) but now literary agents will need to protect themselves from tsunamis of AI-generated queries… Expect the writers’ conference to become an even more important arena for agents to seek out bonafide authors to feed the traditional publishers!