The Crisis in Publishing

It’s all about trust, innit?

And layers of trust/mistrust.

Agents don’t trust that authors aren’t using AI for their query letters, and hence potentially their manuscripts as well.

Agents also don’t trust that editors aren’t feeding submissions into AI engines for appraisal (thereby giving the AI tool provider access to the author’s copyright-protected and confidential work).

Editors don’t trust that agents and authors aren’t trying to send them AI-assisted/-generated works.

Readers don’t trust that editors are properly weeding out AI slop, or even that they are making a serious effort to. Chucking the occasional scapegoat on the pyre doesn’t actually cleanse a whole society’s sins, and we are already seeing evidence round these parts of a whispering campaign to convince all and sundry that ‘Actually, we all use a bit of AI, don’t we? Does it really matter? Grab yourself another vibegeisty horromantasy, kick back by the pool and chill, guys!’.

Every layer adds more mistrust and uncertainty.

So the only reliable way for readers to source their books is via as direct a relationship as possible, making it easier to build trust, and to familiarise themselves with a writer’s distinctive voice and sensibility.

In other words, via platforms like this, or authors’ personal websites or blogs. Or via small indie presses – the smaller, the better, as EF Schumacher reminded us – that themselves foster and can properly maintain that relationship of trust with both authors and customers, because of their small scale.

And ideally, one would probably combine both the direct author-reader and the indirect but proximal author-indie-reader structure.

Any thoughts?