2024 In Publishing: The Year Indies and AI Revolutionize the Industry
Happy New Year, dear friends! We hope you had some well-deserved break. Without further ado, we will dive straight in to our forecasts for the year ahead.
Our goal for the past two years has been to revolutionize publishing through AI, as we see incredible opportunities for more diverse and inclusive storytelling to be shared by authors worldwide. The opportunity and the call-to-action is to help build a less Europe- and US-centric, less English-driven, more global and diverse publishing ecosystem. A world of stories that are language-agnostic while being more culturally diverse and inclusive than we have ever seen!
With that in mind, our first thesis for the year 2024 is that creators leveraging AI will disrupt traditional publishing more than ebooks and social media did in the past 25 years. We’re standing at the brink of a revolution where AI and human creativity merge to redefine how stories are told and shared.
Part of our goal with today’s newsletter is to dive deeper into how we can be pioneers instead of followers of this revolution. We know, from our decade plus of experience as creatives and technologists, that there is a wall right now between the stories that talented authors want to share and their ability to reach and engage audiences.
We believe change is coming through AI-human collaboration across the storytelling process in many ways:
Brainstorming and discussing initial ideas and inspirations for short-form and long-form content
Help with drafting beats, scenes or full stories
Editing drafts
Formatting and publishing on various digital and physical marketplaces
Going multimedia: AI-narrated audiobooks and illustrated books are already out there, but we see growing potential for other formats like comic books/graphic novels/cinematic “excerpts” with short AI videos
Going multilingual: this will be a highly customized process depending on native and target languages
And, last but definitely not least, marketing and sales.
AI is ready to transform the overall dynamics and economics of publishing. It slashes the costs of editing, design and advertising while smartly optimizing campaigns. For indie authors who have typically faced a dizzying array of tasks, AI brings order, speed and efficiency.
Putting the “AI Art” Debate To Rest
Oceans of ink have already been spilled on how AI technology threatens the livelihood of writers. On the contrary, we think it elevates the value of masterful storytelling, character development and style. Further, we would dispute the very notion that there is such a thing as true “AI art”. Whatever the output (image, text audio), there is always a human behind the screen and keyboard developing prompts and refining outputs into a final product. The AI is a key part of the process, sure, but so is the camera when we take a photograph. This does not make photography into “camera art”. The same applies to AI.
To be clear, we absolutely agree with artists (and have said so from the early days of this discussion) that the unauthorized use of copyright materials to train AI models should be stopped! The companies building AI models and tools must compensate creatives.
But attempting to dismiss an entire new generation of creatives using prompts to generate images, videos, music or text strikes us as pointless Ludditism (i.e. the desire to “break the machine”). Painters could not achieve turning back the clock when cameras came about, and we do not see this happening for AI. We believe the choice is really an individual one that creators will ask themselves each time: do I want to use the specific tool (without ripping off copyrighted work!) or not? Ultimately, it will be the audience to judge which creative outputs deserve commercial success.
As an example, Paolo has been working on the world-building encyclopedia for his high fantasy trilogy. With Midjourney, he created “ancient” fictional art from the cave times of that speculative world to help him craft a more comprehensive backstory for the events of the books.
(Fantasy cave painting created with MidJourney)
How could such an application (among many others) “deprive” modern artists of work? Cave painters may still exist, but they would definitely be rare and unable to claim any kind of “protection” given their art style is tens of thousands of years old. Ultimately, raw ideas and styles are not copyrightable, and they should not be.
Building the Future
Turning back to publishers and authors, we believe those open to AI-integrated workflow will see the benefits far outweighing reservations. As with any transition, there are growing pains. Those include policy battles around copyright and royalties, along with the predictable backlash from publishers and authors too invested in old business models. But we believe AI can unlock a creative renaissance in the industry.
When digitized information became widespread in the early 2000s, some worried books would lose their relevance. Yet e-books now coexist with print and audiobooks as formats that broaden access and readership for an increasingly global audience. Sadly, large chunks of the world are still cutoff from publishing infrastructure due to lack of investment or simple limitations of human capabilities, such as the ability to translate more than a few titles a year across languages given the length and cost of the process. AI will help level up all of those markets, helping to transform ideas into books worth writing, publishing, reading, listening, and interacting with in entirely new ways, all across the world.
To zoom out for just a second, wars, environmental destruction, and capitalist exploitation are very much global issues, and it is only with more bridges among people and cultures that we will solve them. The cultural bridges built through storytelling are not “nice-to-haves”, they are crucial to our collective futures.
What Is Missing?
As discussed last week, there are many tools already supporting authors in the early creative stages (1 and 2 from the list above). However, beyond that, there are no solutions to help in the crucial step of “author platform” building. There are many social media platforms and websites where authors can invest time and money to build their platform, but, from our extensive direct experience, the returns on investment for those platforms so far is just terrible. Combined with the sweat and tears necessary just to finish something like the draft of a full-length novel, we know all too well the feeling of defeat is always imminent for us writers!
That is why we think it’s time to change our own narrative, to rewrite the endings for our publishing efforts through innovation.