Preface: Over a period of three years a while back, Phil Friedman and I collaborated on a series of about 30 discussion posts on a broad range of topics. We got quite a kick out of doing them, and a fair number of our respective followers clearly enjoyed reading them Then, I ended up having spinal surgery and dropped out of the world completely for about a year. During the remainder of the intervening time, I wrote some novellas and a bunch of short stories. For his part, Phil became really busy when he took over the management of a boat-building company. But when we stopped writing the series, we agreed that, someday, we’d do a redux. And recently, we asked ourselves, what better place and time to start again than here and now? —Jim
JIM: One of the things I have been noticing lately is a plethora, and by plethora I mean quite literally way too many ads and promotions for self-publishing.
One can only assume that there are quite literally millions of folks out there who are in the process of getting around to writing that first novel that’s gonna shake up the literary world. And so these ads pretty much acknowledge that that’s where you’re at and that they stand ready willing, and able to help you get there without all the rejection-laden process of finding a literary agent, re-writing your masterpiece to please that person, then finding a publisher and re-writing your masterpiece yet again, maybe even two or three times before they deign to publish it and take a pretty substantial cut for all the work they will be doing.
The New Publishing Model, as I see it, purports to do away with all that drudgery and let you self-publish your original crap, if you should so desire. Although they will also, (for a fee of course), read and give you a report on your book, edit your book for you, design your cover, write your cover notes, help you find a catchy title, set your book up for printing, push it out there through umpteen million media channels and even print and distribute it for you, (all for a nominal fee.)
The conventional route is what I call the sweat equity route, and costs you nothing but time and will actually make your book better.
The New Model Publishing route reduces your actual labour but costs you a fair bit of money to end up with a book that is maybe just a hair or two better than whatever you started out with.
The thing that bothers me about the New Model Publishing is the same thing that bothered me a few years ago about blogging. And it all comes down to the good old 80/20 rule. But in the case of longer fiction or even some non-fiction pieces it has been reduced to the 95/5 rule and I’m being generous.
In short, I believe this system is doing nothing more than flooding the market with crap and making the reading public work that much harder to find something decent to read. What are your thoughts, amigo?
PHIL: I know, Jimbo, that you’re currently back working on fiction ― short stories, novels, and screenplays. So, I think I see what’s troubling you, which I’ll get to in a minute or two. But first, let me say that I have never (well, at least, not since high school) held any aspirations to become a fiction writer. Perhaps, I did at one time, but I quickly learned that my right-side-biased brain was insufficiently creative and free-ranging to stand a chance at success.
Consequently, any answer I may give to your question is based wholly on my experience as a non-fiction freelance and staff writer and editor who has published over a period of some thirty years more than a thousand print magazine articles, not to mention hundreds of digital media and blog pieces across multiple social media channels. If it’s not enough for me to write well, then at least it’s enough for me to recognize good writing when I read it.
That said, I cannot help but feel your lament reflects the concern of any craftsman who has worked hard to develop and refine his skills, only to have some digital age-wise ass with an “app” to hawk tell us that anyone with $2.95 (more or less) and a smartphone or digital tablet can be a successful writer or [fill in the blank] these days. You’re outraged.
And I have to tell you I am with you on that because, when it comes to writing, I have yet to see any of the highly touted generative AI writing programs turn out copy that is other than at a level somewhat lower than a second-year high school yada, yada paper. Oh sure, generative AI can follow Hemingway’s dictum to use 5th-grade vocabulary only, but it doesn’t (and cannot) organize and structure a piece with logical and/or explanatory precision or bring an iota of insight to a situation.
The problem, however, does not lay with the purveyors of AI shortcuts or, by logical consequence, with those who advocate self-publishing. The problem resides with the reading public. It’s like a wine drinker who imbibes a glass of red table wine each day from a five-gallon jug. Over the period of a month, the wine in the jug deteriorates significantly, but the drinker fails to notice because each day it’s just a tiny bit worse. So, by the end of the month, he’s drinking pure crap, yet his taste buds can no longer tell the difference. If we don’t stop from time to time to drink what we know is good wine, we lose our discriminative tastes. And if we don’t stop from time to time to read a piece of good writing, we lose the ability to discriminate between good writing and garbage.
JIM: The availability of all these AI programs and the accompanying hype, I believe, has put the idea into a lot of people’s heads that they can actually pull off a novel, despite the fact that they have never even attempted to write anything like that before.
I’m not talking about the genuinely aspiring writers who are willing to the all the necessary homework required. I’m talking about the same people who will use AI to write a college essay. They are people who can barely string a complete thought together, and now they have this wonderful thing that will do all the grunt work for them.
You and I are both professional writers, and we know that there really are no shortcuts from A to B in our business. Yeah, it helps to have some natural talent, but the majority of it is grinding it out, making it make sense, and then going at it word by word to make sure it works.
The reality of this is underscored by the fact that there is a massive surge of people out there who are selling their editing skills because they know that there are a massive number of people who are using AI to cobble together a story, and they are marketing themselves pretty heavily right now.
As far as the reading public goes, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone say to me, ‘I read that book and it was crap’. This actually goes right to your point. Because they read the book. Probably knew it was crap from about the second page and yet read the whole thing. This is what happens to the average reader when the amount of crap in the marketplace increases, they find their standards being lowered and most of them don;t even realize it.
The sheer metric tonnage of crap out there has sunk the writing industry up to its neck in the garbage, (both fiction and non-fiction) written by people with shitty ideas, aided by technology that isn’t much brighter than they are, and helped out by ‘editors or online publishers who really only shine up the shit a bit.
The people who get hurt the most are the new real writers whose job of cutting through the incredible amount of crap out there just to be read really has to be both overwhelming and disheartening.
This is a big part of the reason I never went that route myself. I just write stories, publish them on my blog, and then send out links. Anyone who wants to read them can do it for free. If they think a story sucks, at least they haven’t wasted any money finding that out. If they like it, well, at least I know they have good taste in writing. 🙂
PHIL: Well, James, me boy, that just trips (or tips) it, doesn’t it? The ongoing argument that you and I have been having for several years now ― namely, why does one write and what makes somebody a writer.
If I’ve grown to understand you at all, I know you create written work product primarily as an end in itself. You’re like a visual artist who creates paintings and figures if someone buys one once in a while, that’s okay, but if not, well, that’s okay too. You’ve done your part by creating art, and you can sleep peacefully with that at night.
Me? I’m different. I’ve always shied away from thinking of myself as “a writer”. But instead, I think of myself as a boatbuilder (and a blue-collar social philosopher) with a particular range of things to say, based on my training and experience. And ― hopefully ― get paid for sharing it.
That doesn’t mean I never write on spec; what it means is that I consider it part and parcel of what I do, to seek to maximize my exposure and readership. It also doesn’t mean I don’t have a sense of pride in the craft of wordsmithing. For I do. Which is, by the way, why I resist turning over my writing to Chat GPT or any of its competitors. But when I write for reasons other than immediate gain, it is for the longer-term development of my audience. Consequently, what I think you and I have most in common is a respect for the process and work involved in writing. And what we both abhor is the post-millennial attitude that shortcuts to producing content are only the latest hack for getting it over on the system.
You know, maybe it’s all for the best. Those who employ generative Chat AI to do their writing for them are satisfied and call second-year HS trash their own, so I say they are welcome to do so. Oh sure, they’d probably do better to hire a serious ghostwriter, but most of them don’t want to pay enough to do so. And since they can’t tell the difference in the work product, they figure nobody else will. Well, maybe they’re right. Only time will tell. Punch me up on this subject in a year from now and we’ll see. Cheers
