Artificial Intelligence and indie Publishing

It's been a while since I sat down to do one of these. But there have been a few things going on in the publishing world that I feel the need to opine about. Today's topic is everybody's favorite oppressive overlord, Amazon. The truth is, that is a bit harsh. The fact is Amazon has done a lot to make the world of independent book publishing more accessible. But the relationship between authors and Amazon has always been a bit complicated. 

More books are purchased on Amazon than from any other seller on the planet, and it's not particularly close. When you look at E-Book sales (where the majority of indie authors make the bulk of their sales), the gap is even wider. Why is that? Well, we could spend all day dissecting the reasons. More people use Amazon now for the convenience of having items delivered quickly, right to their homes. For some people, they may not have a plethora of physical shopping locations nearby. For most new book releases, I have to travel over 50 miles if I wish to buy them from a physical retailer.

With so many people doing their shopping (including for books) on Amazon, it's become a necessity for authors to sell strongly on the platform. An author selling well overall while performing poorly on Amazon has become increasingly rare. And it makes sense. Amazon has invested more into its selling algorithms than any other retailer. They can predict items you might wish to buy based on your shopping history at a level that borders on creepy. 

So, one option many independent authors have turned to in recent years is Kindle Unlimited. To put it simply, readers pay a monthly membership and have access to Kindle Unlimited vast library of E-Books. Think of it as Netflix for books. However, there is one key caveat here for authors. To have your books listed in Kindle Unlimited, authors must make Amazon the exclusive seller of that E-Book. Since my books are currently available on Kindle Unlimited, I am unable to sell E-Books on Barnes & Noble or any other online seller. 

How are authors paid if their books are being read for free? They are paid from a fund that is funded by the monthly subscription fees collected by Kindle Unlimited members. Instead of being paid a flat royalty, which happens when somebody buys a book outright, authors are paid for every page read by a Kindle Unlimited reader (for the first readthrough only; no additional royalties are paid for multiple reads). How much is an author paid per page? This changes monthly based on the number of subscribers and authors enrolled in the Kindle Unlimited platform. For the month of July 2023, the royalty paid per page read was $0.003989 (all amounts given in USD). This is noteworthy for being the lowest per-page royalty the program has ever paid out. This is despite the fact that monthly fund for such payments in the same month was sitting at an all-time high 49.5 million dollars. 

Let's use one of my books as an example. If a reader were to read The Path of the Rawl Wielder from beginning to end at July's royalty rate, I would be paid about $1.32. While this is undoubtedly less than the flat royalty I make from purchases ($2.04), I have always been happy to reach readers who may exclusively read books off of Kindle Unlimited. My readership has grown significantly since enrolling in the program in February of this year. With that said, let's take a look at a few historical numbers and see how Kindle Unlimited's current royalties stack up to past years. I will use The Path of the Rawl Wielder as my example for all numbers below, and assuming a full readthrough.
Royalty Rate As Of:
July 2023 - $1.32
January 2023 - $1.40
July 2022 - $1.42
November 2021 - $1.57
July 2020 - $1.41
May 2017 - $1.51

What can we learn from these numbers? An author with an average of 1,000 full reads would make about $80.00 less in July than they would in January, but that isn't where my main concern lies. As I said earlier, the Kindle Unlimited fund is at an all-time high and nearly 2 million dollars higher than in January 2023. How can the per-page royalty drop so significantly in such a short time, especially when the total money available is increasing? 

Well, it's time to address the elephant in the room...Artificial Intelligence. Unless you live under a rock, you have likely heard references to AI in recent months. I hear them regularly in my day job, communications about using AI to "leverage and expand our business." Sounds great on the surface until you realize the second an AI can do your job, you won't be getting paid to do it anymore. And now, AI is being used to publish books at an alarming rate. 

While AI-generated books aren't exactly new (I found a Medium article explaining how to create them from 2021), the number of people utilizing this technology has exploded over the past year. But how good can an AI book be? They aren't real competition, are they? That's complicated. The vast majority of AI-generated content is indeed vastly inferior to any piece of work that a human has put a reasonable amount of time and effort into creating. We read books for a variety of reasons, but all of these reasons are uniquely human. Some people read for a sense of adventure, others out of a desire to feel certain emotions. An AI that has never dreamed of adventure or felt emotion cannot create these feelings in the same way a human can. 

So, how does AI actually write books? I'm no AI expert, so this overview will be very high-level. However, AI can only create content with a point of reference. This point of reference is often other books from the same genre. Thousands of books authors worked hard to create are plugged into an AI (often without being paid for) and used to generate a new, unrecognizable story from the sum of the thousands of parts. Is this ethical? You will have to form your own opinion, but I'm sure you can take a guess at what I think.

​Let me share a few examples of the more egregious uses of AI that have been seen in recent months. The first comes from Jane Friedman, an author with a large following. Jane took to the platform formerly known as Twitter to reveal an issue she was having. Somebody had published several AI-generated books under her name and published them on Amazon. Any reader searching for Jane Friedman's books would potentially see results including these poorly-written works. If they purchased these, Jane would not receive a penny of the royalties. Still, she would have to live with any negative consequences that stemmed from them, most notably, poor reviews under her name, potentially discouraging future readers. Upon reaching out to Amazon, Jane received no assistance. The books remained listed under her name until she took to social media, and the backlash from her many followers finally prompted Amazon to remove the books. 

Chris Fox recently went through a similar experience. In his case, somebody had uploaded AI-generated coloring books under his name. This would obviously be quite confusing to anyone searching for his sci-fi or fantasy works! In his case, the books were removed after several days. But this leads me to a question. How can anybody upload anything they wish to Amazon using any name they choose? I have an official Amazon account I use for uploading my works; how can anybody publish work under my name without access to this account? What steps are Amazon taking to prevent these types of incidents in the future? To be clear, I don't think they should permit AI-generated books to be sold on their platform at all. But if they refuse to clamp down on that, there should at least be mechanisms in place to prevent this form of identity theft and swift processes in place for authors who fall victim to it. We shouldn't be in a situation where an author's ability to remove false work depends on how many Twitter followers they have. 

​What are your thoughts? Do AI-generated books belong on Amazon? What steps should be taken to prevent human authors from dealing with false work being published under their name? I have another blog in the works on the overall state of independent publishing right now, so stay tuned!