That romance author in the New York Times

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The big news writers and editors in my network have been talking about is the New York Times piece on a romance author who uses generative AI to write two hundred books a year and earns six figures.

I think this discussion flared up because it touched on many people’s fears and anger, not about how gen AI is used per se, but about how it might affect authors’ livelihoods.

In her newsletter, the publishing consultant Jane Friedman pointed out that “the article offers evidence the market is being flooded with AI-generated material that earns money and causes market harm to human authors.”

However, it’s not clear exactly how successful the romance author discussed in the NYT actually is. They sell courses on how to leverage AI to publish romance books, and selling courses can operate as classic hustle culture: a way of making quick money selling an inferior product to people who don’t have enough information to make the right call, as discussed in this great rebuttal.

The difficulties this marketing flooding creates is important for all writers to recognize, but I believe it creates extra difficulties for indie authors.

That’s because they are competing on discoverability with AI-produced books that look very similar to human-written books superficially. With traditional publishing, there is a certain amount of vetting that guarantees at least a few editors and agent have read through a novel before it is sold.

All this makes the situation for fiction indie authors particularly tricky, especially alongside the less favorable terms Amazon KDP has offered authors in recent years. Quite a contrast to the golden years (for indie publishing) of the early 2020s.

This makes me sad, as while I dislike certain aspects of the self-publishing industry (such as the promotion of rapid release), it’s also a great space for authors taking risks that traditional publishers won’t take, which has resulted in greater diversity of books. Queer speculative fiction, for example, is super popular in the self-publishing space.

In fact, it’s fair to argue that this romance author’s actions are not novel, but are part of a long history of unbridled commercialism to the detriment of quality in the self-publishing space, along the same lines as initiatives like 20 Books to 50K.

How is this affecting your sales as an author? I’m curious to learn how things have been going for you over the past year or two. Let me know in the comments.

In this discussion, I’ve also noticed a tendency toward what I’d elsewhere call “purity politics” – with AI-positive commentators and authors using AI in any way in their process as “tainted”. I wonder if similar discussions were happening around authors using tools like Grammarly ten or fifteen years ago.

Personally, I wouldn’t dream of using gen AI tools in my fiction writing or client (editing work), but I don’t think a purity approach is the right one. For this reason, I particularly liked Tiffany Yates-Martin’s framing of AI use on her blog.

Her point is that her creative work as an editor (and author) is more about the process than the product.

“That’s how I learn and deepen and master my own craft, and my singular, authentic experience and perspective, I think, is the unique value I can offer to authors. So while it might be far more expedient to go to AI and have it generate a course curriculum or outline an article or book or even compose any part of those creative projects, that feels like it’s undermining the purpose and reward of them for me—and the value of them to others.”

This is a good way of looking at writing too. Creative writing is, at least for me, about the journey of discovery, of learning how to master specific craft points, combined with the satisfaction of seeing my progress. That’s more important than a book sitting on a shelf in bookstores. And this is a mindset (combined with intrinsic enjoyment of writing) that sets you up for the long haul, for being persistent.

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