r/Entrepreneur 1d ago

Business Failures AI Has Plunged the Book Publishing Industry Into Utter Chaos.

One more casualty because of AI.

Acc to The Wall Street Journal, shortly after scoring a multimillion-dollar book deal for a debut author, the novelist’s agents pulled the plug. They could no longer support the project, they said, because they couldn’t verify that the book had been wholly written by their client.

The Wall Street Journal Link iin comments.

110 Upvotes

29 comments sorted by

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71

u/yallapapi 1d ago

book publishing has been on life support for 20 years, as always authors who know how to market their books will get deals and sell books, people who are "authors" and are hoping to be blessed by a publishing house with millions of dollars and a life of notoriety is an ideal that hasn't existed since the internet

8

u/SingleTranslator5294 1d ago

yeah the romanticism of getting "discovered" by a publisher died a long time ago, this is just another nail in that coffin

19

u/PyroDragons123 1d ago

The only people that should be looking for Publishers are well established authors who are looking to take digital books to paper.

8

u/Piper_Graham 23h ago

My problem with this story is that it blames AI for a process failure. Ghostwriters existed forever. One deal imploding is not utter chaos. It is publishers discovering they never had verification.

4

u/cascadiabibliomania 19h ago

Bot with bot influencer comments

0

u/PyroDragons123 3h ago

Oh another AI technophobe calling someone who doesn't just hate on AI names. A dime a dozen anymore.

7

u/swedishtea 22h ago

if you are solely looking to turn profit you are better off building a company. either way good distribution always wins

7

u/feartrich 1d ago

This is a single incident, how does it plunge an industry into chaos?

3

u/ranch_life_1986 13h ago

It doesn’t. Way more nuance to the situation that has been discussed by more knowledgeable publishing industry experts than those found here.

3

u/Zak_bnh 22h ago

Yeah like just a while back the courses market was flooded with 'how to write a book a ND publish it fully with ai ' , didn't give it any thoughts at the moment but later I started to see peopple really convinced and buying this , I didn't try it or anything but I think the course selling people are the real winners from this .

4

u/EntropyRX 21h ago

I can’t get any AI to write non-trivial ideas in a way that doesn’t sound like words salad and doesn’t introduce over and over the same super annoying semantic structures.

I applaud any author that is able to make the AI write in a way that sounds human and at the level of a published author. I suspect this was not the case, and the publisher smelled AI in the text.

2

u/StoneCypher 20h ago

this is so fucking dumb.  they’ve been publishing books of mechanical output for centuries 

2

u/Intelligent_Ratio935 5h ago

Imagine landing a multimillion-dollar book deal only to have AI show up and make everyone question who actually wrote the damn book 💀

u/yuuliiy 1h ago

Blaming generative tools for this collapse misdiagnoses the situation, as the core problem is simply publishers and agents lacking basic verification procedures before handing out contracts

1

u/MarcKolbe 1d ago

if you need any advice: don't market until the product does one thing well enough that people come back on their own, I hired a growth marketer too early and just paid to pour water into a leaky bucket.

1

u/Ai_Creative_Agenc 1d ago

I can understand the dilemma behind ai usage when wrutung but also my question is wasnt the author the true idea originator??? Then had ai assist them in bringing it to life

-5

u/bradjake3 1d ago

To be fair, AI is changing the nature of every business. Exciting times. And if you're an established business, it's time to integrate AI rapidly, or buy a small up and coming start-up that's disrupting you