At the moment, all of my books are available as an ebook and can be downloaded from Amazon. At some point in the future, I would like to make them available elsewhere, and also as a paperback. Ebooks are said to be popular, but I have found it difficult to gain traction on Amazon.
Amazon does offer the plus of being the biggest bookseller in the world. The minus is that your book is on the same platform as millions of others, easily lost, and never found. And despite the contemporary popularity, and curse of doom-scrolling, no one is going to scroll down hundreds, or even thousands, of pages to find your book.
I have concluded that on Amazon, most authors are invisible.
Increasingly, that is because of AI.
Reports suggest that most books being published today are AI. And not just on Amazon. Even worse, I suspect that most of them fall into the ‘AI slop’ category. It is also widely believed that most of these books come from writers who self-publish, with the hope of cashing in.
No one should be surprised about this.
You only need to check the endless number of YouTube videos giving instruction on how to create your own books using AI. I have to laugh when I see someone claiming to have written over a hundred books using AI and how successful a strategy it has been. No, if AI wrote the book, you are not a writer. You might qualify as an editor, but you are not a writer.
But I’m not a Luddite when it comes to writers using AI. As an assistant, it can help with research, structure, and ideas. I ask AI questions that would take me weeks or months to find all the answers I want. And some I may never find an answer to. As a writer, you still need to check, but AI is useful in speeding up the whole process.
At my age, it does help speed the entire process up. I don’t have the time to be writing just one book every couple of years, only to then see it disappear on Amazon, surrounded by one-hour-produced “slop”.
But there is something about AI that we all have no choice but to accept. It is not going away. It reminds me of nuclear weapons, in that once invented, you can’t disinvent them. There will always be bad actors around the world who will ignore any attempt to eliminate something they want, and can exploit for financial gain or power.
The best we can do is control it, and that presents its own difficulties. Those in the creative world do need to be better protected from it. Copyright on original work still means something; otherwise, it becomes a free-for-all.
I think that publishers like Amazon should separate human-written work from AI written books. Of course, that would be difficult to do, as some would still try to bypass any checking system. But who knows, maybe AI-written work would be popular, and find its own audience? There are many on YouTube who are quite happy watching videos that are totally AI produced. Actually, YouTube should separate them as well.
At least separation would give people a choice, whether it is reading or watching content.
For now, content creators will have to live with the slop that AI produces and all the extra space that it takes up on platforms like Amazon. I expect that AI purges will continue, but genuine content creators, especially in the world of self-publishing, will still struggle to be seen and read.
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