The Ecology of Fiction Publication, part one. Publishers vs. Kindle

I have frequently written on this blog about my non-fiction publications. But I have also written a huge amount of fiction. My fiction would be very hard to sell to commercial publishers, because I have so much religion in them. Commercial publishers think no one would want to read a novel about God and the meaning of life. Nobody, that is, except people like you who are reading this blog. You can learn a lot about the Bible by reading my novels. Commercial fiction publishers don’t like books that teach people things, especially about the Bible.

I am no amateur in fiction writing. I have been writing fiction for decades, often rewriting the same story or novel over and over until I get it as good as it can be. In the process, I have removed whole chunks of text that I originally thought were really good but which I admitted would not advance the plot and might, however well written, cause the reader to give up.

But I have almost no fiction publications—just in a couple of minor literary journals that no longer exist. I have earned a grand total of $25, which I sent to a writer and environmentalist who, unlike me, had no steady employment. So the question arose, decades ago, how should I publish my fiction?

The days of submitting manuscripts “over the transom” ended decades ago. Now, to approach an editor of even a small press, you have to be represented by an agent. When I started writing fiction, agents were actual people, and they sent me personal responses. But now, the prospective fiction writer seldom gets any response whatsoever, and if so, it is a form letter. I now have the suspicion, in the modern age of artificial intelligence, that agents almost never read submissions, because they already know what they are going to send to publishers: the works written by their friends, themselves under a different name, or by an AI program they have installed. They claim to be looking for new talent, but I simply do not believe it. In fact, agents may actually themselves be artificial intelligences. They may have their photos on the agency website, but they may not be actual people. An agency can leave the entire process—choosing which manuscripts, if any, to represent, and then sending them to editors—to artificial intelligence. I have encountered a grand total of about five agents out of hundreds who have given personal responses that indicate that they are human. An AI bot can write fiction that is as marketable as that written by most human authors. I guess what I am saying is that getting a fiction agent for a commercial publisher is practically impossible. I have been told this by many authors—you know, the ones that spend their time and money going to writers’ conferences.

For many years, an attractive alternative has been to self-publish on Amazon. Gone are the days of vanity presses, where the author pays for a few hundred copies of the book to be printed, and then the author has to figure out what to do with them. These are the days of Amazon, in two ways:

First, no commercial publisher can afford to do “print-on-demand,” because there has to be a minimum print run of at least a thousand books each day to justify the costs of printing. But Amazon can do it, because they sell so many books. It does not have to be a thousand copies of the same book. Print-on-demand is one of the Amazon options. If just one person wants your book, they can get it.

Second, e-books cost very little to produce. A Kindle book can be produced and sent to customers with very little cost, except for maintaining the servers. Once again, if just one person wants your e-book, they can get it.

Kindle publishing is rather clumsy. If it is just text, as in most novels, it works fine. But I have never seen a really satisfactory illustration in a Kindle book. It usually ends up really small and illegible.

The advantages of Kindle books are astonishing. The software, at least now, is relatively simple. You provide a cover illustration (just the front cover), a document with the whole book in it, financial information, the jacket blurb (which will show up on the Amazon site), etc. You can do it all yourself. If you mess something up, you will get an email telling you what to fix. The best part might be that the author gets to keep 70 percent of the money. In contrast, a commercial publisher offers 10 percent, which must be split with an agent. This would mean an author gets 8 percent. A hundred books (@$5.00) generates $500, of which the author gets to keep $350. From a commercial publisher, you would get $40.

Now, for the ecology of book publishing. It is like a tree or bush disseminating its seeds. There are lots of ways of doing this. A tree could produce a few, large seeds, inside of fruits that animals want to eat; or a lot of small seeds, that blow away in the wind. Wild plant species use both options, just like a writer could use the agent/publisher option or the Amazon option. There is, in the world of publishing just as in seed dispersal, no single correct way of doing it. I spent decades on the agent/publisher route, and am now ready to try the Kindle route. My first Kindle novel just came out today.

What you don’t want to do is to publish online and then ignore all publicity. Fruits and seeds dispersed by animals put a lot of expenditure into publicity—that is, into attracting animals to disperse them. Publicity—that’s what the next essays are about.

Return of Slavery?

In this essay, I continue a thought from the previous essay. In O Holy Night, Adolphe Adam said “the slave is our brother,” and looked forward to a glorious dawn in which slavery would vanish. I explained that slavery came to an end in the United States not because God performed a miracle but because America fought a war against itself to eradicate it.

But even if America had not fought the Civil War, slavery would have come to an end. It was economically unfeasible. It was a system of dehumanization and oppression that was maintained by force, not by profit. Clearly a system in which free people produced market goods would have been superior to a slave economy. It was pride, not profit, that kept Southern land owners defiant against the calls for emancipation. Eventually, the world economy would have preferred cotton from non-slave sources over slave cotton, and the South would have collapsed. We do not have slavery today mainly because it is not profitable. We like to think we have lofty religious and ethical reasons to not have slaves, but it is the unprofitability of slavery that has given us the freedom to think lofty thoughts.

Slavery was profitable for millennia because empires fought other empires and made all their captives into slaves.

But what if slavery should ever become profitable again? We like to think this is impossible. And as artificial intelligence and robots become better and better and better at doing almost everything, it would seem impossible that there would ever again be human slaves. Robots have no legal rights, and we could just make a large number of robot slaves to do the dangerous, dirty, and repetitive tasks that no human would do unless enslaved. Robots are also cheaper, since they need no salaries, vacations, or health care. Or even bathroom breaks.

I have been reading a 2022 novel The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler about a future world (not far in the future) in which robots do the dangerous and dirty work more cheaply than humans would, in general. But robots are complex machines that are now, and will be far into the future, expensive to make and to maintain. For some dirty jobs, robot maintenance would be very expensive. Nayler’s example is deep sea fishing, in which fish blood and guts create thick layers of slime on ships. It would be expensive to keep the robot circuitry and mechanisms clean under such conditions. Human slaves, however, can work ankle-deep in slime, all day every day, and all they need is a little cheap food. Most of the expenses of a human work force are those that were considered unnecessary for plantation slaves.

So on the fishing trawler in the novel, human slaves (kidnapped from Asian countries then brainwashed) gut the fish that machines have harvested. But even brainwashed humans can imagine freedom. The human slaves are watched over by brainwashed human soldiers who beat them. The whole trawler is controlled by an artificial intelligence, kept clean inside its hatch, that issues the orders.

It was not economically viable for any wealthy nation to patrol the high seas and stop AI trawlers from kidnapping men from poor nations, so no serious effort was mounted to stop this practice.

In the nineteenth century, it was not a “glorious dawn” of religious inspiration that brought slavery to an end, but because slavery was not profitable. In the twenty-first century, slavery might become profitable again. And if it were profitable, no force on Earth could keep slavery from returning.

The End of Creativity

Aldous Huxley wrote a short novel in which he saw a pickup truck speeding out of a Hollywood movie studio, overloaded with unsolicited screenplay manuscripts. The truck veered, and one of the manuscripts fell off. This didn’t really happen, of course. But, almost a hundred years ago, one of history’s great writers complained about how people in power (in this case, movie producers, but this would also include editors and literary agents) would barely if ever look at what they derisively called their “slush pile” of submissions.

Today, little has changed. The term “slush pile” is still standard. I have written a lot, and published very little, fiction. One of my stories ended up in a magazine that was printed and spiral bound at a copy shop. You cannot submit fiction directly to an editor; and very few literary agents, I suspect, even look at the submissions they receive. Out of hundreds of agents to whom I have submitted samples, only about three have responded personally. The others, I suspect, just have unpaid assistants write rejections or, if the submission is online, the software automatically sends out a rejection. I suspect that few of my submissions have even been looked at.

I could say all kinds of bad things about fiction agents. But the purpose of this essay is to defend just one aspect of their refusal to look at submissions. And that is, AI software can write fiction and submit it. How is an agent to know whether a real person wrote the novel? A robot can click on the “I am not a robot” button, I assume.

And they can write them really, really fast. Amazon self-publishing recently had to set a limit on the number of submissions a single source, such as an email, can make: three per hour. One can easily see that an AI program could write ten times that many novels, and keep doing it all night without coffee and without amphetamines. A single computer could write more novels than the whole world’s collection of novels before, say, 1990.

By definition, these novels are formulaic. They follow formulas. That’s what computers do. The resulting novels are very unlikely to have any deep thoughts, and the plot lines will almost certainly be lame. No agent or editor would call them good. By slightly altering the parameters, the AI programmer can produce a great number of very different novels, all bad.

But that doesn’t matter. Most readers cannot tell the difference between good fiction and bad. Maybe a hundred years ago a reader could distinguish them. And today, some readers still can. This probably includes you, intelligent reader. But people who can tell good novels from bad are not as big of a market as those who just want something to distract them. A publisher can pay almost nothing for an AI generated manuscript, and sell a lot of copies. Each such title would be immensely profitable. If good writers complained that a certain major publisher sold books that a computer may have written, a lot of readers would just tell us to stop griping and get with the modern world.

An important reason for this is that, during the twentieth century, the rules of good literature were jettisoned. Plots no longer had to make any sense, especially if they included dream sequences. Fantasy literature is particularly vulnerable to having plots that make no sense; the writer could just change the laws of nature when he or she wanted to. There needs to be no character development or beautiful description. Certainly no meaning-of-life stuff. Poetry is even worse, which is why most poets only read poems by other poets whom they know. Real human writers turned fiction into something that a computer would eventually be able to write. That time has come.

I have spent many hours sending things to fiction agents. Each one has a slightly different set of rules, and they will not read any submission that does not follow these rules. Should you include a summary, or not? A sample of the writing, or not, and if so how much? I’m not sure that it matters, because the submission will almost certainly not be read. Some agents include a list of rules, the last of which is always, I will look at the submission if it looks like something I would like. I doubt that, in the contentment of retirement, I will ever do this again. And the main reason is that neither agents nor publishers could possibly find a good, human novel in the mass of fake AI manuscripts

I have been moderately successful at publishing nonfiction in those subjects about which I am an expert, even if not the top expert in the world: botany, evolution, ecology, scientific thinking. Check out my books at stanleyrice.com. A computer could write nonfiction, but it would quickly get recognized as fake, because of the unlimited number of errors it would contain. Publishers might even have legal liability if readers followed stupid advice from a random manuscript. For nonfiction, agents and editors want not just a good book but evidence of expertise. This doesn’t prevent fake nonfiction from being published. There are whole “scientific” journals that will publish anything even if it makes no sense at all and since the “journals” are online it costs almost nothing to publish them. Professors have lost their jobs from claiming fake papers as their publications. But it is harder to write fake nonfiction than fake fiction.

Writers in the movie industry have gone on strike over AI taking over their jobs. Most moviegoers would not know the difference between a human writer and a computer. But the stakes are higher, since in a movie you have immense production costs aside from the writing. If moviegoers recognized a movie as “a real stinker,” the producer would quickly be out of business. Maybe.

So my plan is to stop submitting any fiction or poetry. Each submission would go into a pile of mostly computer-generated submissions, potentially numbering in the billions of billions. A needle in a haystack, or a snowflake in hell, would stand a better chance. I will have them printed up for future generations of my family. Someday, in an underground vault, they might get found. And my poems, too. Sorry, Randy, I know you are a good poet but who else can know it? I notice that neither one of us lives off of our fiction or poetry income.

A similar thing is happening in music. A good composer can still outdo a computer. Even when a Huawei program finished Schubert’s unfinished symphony, it required a little human help from composer Lucas Cantor. I listened to it. It simply did not sound like Schubert. But it was competently written and scored. Computers can provide all kinds of sounds that no musical instrument can produce, but composers still need to tell the computers what to do.

But maybe not for long. During much of the twentieth century, composers on university faculties prided themselves on writing music that was distinctly unpleasant to listen to. Their philosophy seemed to be that you are not supposed to actually enjoy music; it is supposed to be a psychological experience, and if you do not connect with the composer’s music, there is something wrong with you. This was the dominant philosophy during the years I took music courses at the university. I heard from two music graduate students about this. I was considering sitting in on a composer’s forum. A graduate student asked me, Do you use notes? I said of course I used notes. Then don’t bother with the forum, she said. Another graduate student told me that the “new music” of the twentieth century created only one emotion in her: terror.

Within a couple of decades, this approach to music was starting to die away. Perhaps they did not know it, but these out-of-touch-with-musical-pleasure composers were sowing the seeds of their own destruction. If a computer could write music that is just as good as the self-proclaimed leaders of musical innovation, then someday they will.

A lot of careers are being replaced by AI. Even some physicians I have consulted stopped to look up my symptoms on WebMD. I got lots of different diagnoses. Some of them would have been funny had they not been intended as serious.

Robots have been making cars for decades.

And now they are writing novels. These days, poor Aldous Huxley would have been left mouldering in the dust.