Humazon

Two of my favorite authors growing up were Franklin W. Dixon and Carolyn Keene, authors of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books. I read everything I could get my hands on from both of them. It would be decades before I learned that neither author actually exists.

Both were the creation of Edward Stratemeyer, who owned Stratemeyer Syndicate, which sounds like a place that hires a lot of henchmen. What Stratemeyer recognized is that readers’ appetite did not match an author’s output. So he created a system, one of the very first content farms in publishing. And it was wildly successful.

James Patterson created something similar, leveraging the skills of unsung writers to feed a single brand. These publishing schemes have been long known and given a bit of side-eye by other authors and scrupulous readers, but publishers and bookstores have been absolutely delighted. Voracious readers are the bread-and-butter of this industry.

However … the efforts of the Stratemeyer’s and Patterson’s of the world still took real effort and real people. There were limits to how far they could take things. They bent the system, but nothing really broke. That is now changing. AI removes the friction from content farms, allowing publishers to crank out hundreds of books a day. Fractal Enigma is one of these publishers, and pretty soon there will be hundreds of these, each publishing thousands of books a week. I’m not kidding. Check out their author page. None of these people exist.

Now, if you read my blog post from last week, you’ll know that I have a very nuanced and generous view of all these developments. For decades I’ve been screaming a single mantra into the publishing void: Readers and Writers. These are the people who matter. Yes, they matter more than bookstores. They matter more than publishers. Or agents. Or editors. All these components are important, but if publishing ever got strange or whacky or you couldn’t make sense of what’s right and wrong, dial your attention back to the only two parties who truly matter: Readers and Writers.

And when I say these are the only two parties who matter, I mean that in a vacuum. I mean that solely as well. There’s nothing wrong with a writer who has no readers. Journalists, people who write and don’t publish, private poets — these people matter to me. There are also plenty of readers who rarely touch a living writer. You can read out-of-copyright fiction for the rest of your life, and not a penny goes to another soul, and we all celebrate the hell out of this. There’s something pure about writing for oneself or reading among the dead that doesn’t trouble us. Because we get that reading is a noble pursuit all on its own and so is writing.

Which is why — and I get that this upsets folks — I see nothing wrong with readers gobbling up AI-written books for the rest of their lives. It’s like reading Tolstoy (a real person, soul-to-soul, but zero money changing hands) or Carolyn Keene (not a real person, the soul sanded down to “standard practices,” but someone is getting paid). Snatching an AI book out of a reader’s hands reminds me of the folks who say audiobooks aren’t real reading, or comicbooks don’t count, or a manga isn’t a book. There are many different kinds of enemies to reading.

I also get writers leaning on or relying on AI to write a book. Writing is hard. I’m forever grateful that I wrote before this age and proved to myself that I could make it on my own. But I’ve been a big supporter of fan fiction for years, which relies on someone else doing all the world-building and character creation (it’s like playing with dolls instead of building them from scratch, and it’s an important onramp for lots of budding authors). I think AI might help some non-writers become writers. It might help lots of authors clean up their grammar (I’ve noticed Word has massively improved its proofreading tools, becoming a first great editor before handing off a manuscript to my human editor). Nothing angers me about either of the above scenarios.

But I have to say, I’m still a bit peeved at Edward Stratemeyer. I’ve never really forgiven the sneakiness of the whole thing. If someone had told me when I was a kid that these books were being written by people who got no credit, and who were constrained in their style and manner to conform to what was really a publishing machine, I would’ve picked up a different book. Because to me, authenticity makes for a better reading experience. Most of what I read is non-fiction. I love biographies. I like to immerse myself in things that really happened. A “based on actual events” film hits me different than pure fantasy. That’s just me! We don’t all need to be the same!

So here’s what I would love: A bookstore for humans by humans. A Humazon.com. Or even just a BookBub where the authors are fully vetted. If it was as easy as clicking into a bookstore where I knew I was going to have a human-only experience, I would do it in a heartbeat. I’d never look at the other store. I’m weird like that. If there was a Waldenbooks full of Pattersons and Stratemeyers, and a Humazon store full of 100% human books, I’d never go into the Waldenbooks again. Call me a hipster. Call me old-fashioned. I like what I like.

And I don’t think I’m alone. So here’s my challenge to the book industry: create it and we will come. Amazon — use your technical wizardry and create a 100% human badge to put on books, and watch us flock to your shelves. BookBub — create a list where you can guarantee AI wasn’t used in the writing. Yes, these are incredible challenges to figure out, but let’s start noodling. Because the demand, I think, will make this profitable.

I’ve got nothing against AI writing and readers who gobble the stuff up. Zero judgement here. I just have my own preference. I’d love to see a bookstore for people like me. Because we already have bookstores for everyone else.

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