Most of my income for 2024 came from ghostwriting memoirs for the niche-famous—people significant enough to have a Wikipedia page, but unless you’re into the thing they do, you’ve never heard of them. These books have relatively few but devoted buyers, subjects humble enough to care that those readers aren’t disappointed by a half-assed book, and a publisher that claimed to share that goal.
Earlier this month, that publisher called an all-hands and showed us a demo of “AI”‘s amazing ability to process raw data into disorganized, beige prose devoid of personality that, whatever its flaws, is intelligible. More importantly, it’s generated in the blink of an eye. Most importantly, it’s cheap. It’s just bad business to pay a writer 5 figures for months of work when they can pay a “copy editor” $300 to clean up bot vomit with a 1-week turnaround.
I’ve been associated with a lot of shit over the years because I need money to live and the shit wouldn’t have my name on it, but I also have a history of quitting jobs that demote me to cleaning up someone (or something) else’s shit, which is a more difficult job than doing it correctly myself and yet pays peanuts.
I was the first to accept the offer to leave without penalty for ditching current contracts.
The subject of that no-longer-my-problem contract called me in a panic upon receiving the “Great News!” that his life is now in the nonexistent hands of a robo extruder. Because he’s not famous famous, he lacks the clout to demand concierge ghostwriting services. I told him he could (a) hope for the best and hug his advance for comfort when the result shames his ancestors or (b) pursue the notion that replacing the real human ghostwriter he’s been working with with a word-slurry machine is a breach of contract on the publisher’s part and have a lawyer unpack how that affects his money and obligations. If he wants me to finish the job I started, he’ll have to hire me on his own dime and either find another publisher or self-pub.
(My prediction is “hope for the best and hug his advance” because solidarity ends where mild inconvenience begins.)
Less income but steadier work came from Soulless Corporate IP.
Early in the “AI” craze, SCIP’s C-suite was confident they could replace us pesky writers, and to be perfectly honest, they had the ideal circumstances for implementing this plan: a huge inventory of their own material that follows a formula and forbids random “creative” surprises that might jeopardize the property.
They gave their high-tech masterpiece to a focus group of 10-year-olds, who mercilessly ridiculed it. (“Did a toilet write this?” was the most insightful literary criticism I’ve ever seen.) You see, even given ideal, easy-mode circumstances, the Word Extruder 3000 can’t tell even a bad story. It can’t do context. It can use a recurring character’s name and physical description, but it can’t make them behave in character. It can’t follow continuity, throwing in dead characters and putting other characters in 2 places at once. Rather than describing a setting from a child character’s point of view, it regurgitates encyclopedia-like notes from the series bible. But because the C-suite neither knows nor cares about the property that makes the money they do care about, they couldn’t tell the difference between nonsense and writing that has enthusiastic and loyal fans.
They backed off the plan, temporarily, but they remain addicted to promises that the “next generation” will miraculously correct these shortcomings so they can stop wasting money paying people. I’m sure “These brats will age out of the target audience, and current 5-year-olds will be accustomed to slop by the time they become the target, so we’ll be able to get away with a shitty product soon” is a thing that has been said behind closed doors.
That job obviously isn’t secure long-term.
What about self-publishing?
A cold, hard fact of indie publishing is “Your frontlist sells your backlist.” If you don’t have new releases, no one buys your old releases. I had a hundred-ish sales in the summer when someone surfaced a 20-year-old historical romance as an obscure gem, but otherwise half a dozen sales the rest of the year. Not surprising, not unfair, and not significantly beneficial to my finances.
This is the third year running I was confident I would have KotSQ (now ToCS) published before the end of it. The book is challenging, but not insurmountably so. The larger problem is I have to keep shoving it aside to put out fires and scrabble for pennies, and when I go back to it, I have changed for the worse. It’s like trying to finish a book started by a more optimistic writer. I can neither match her voice nor rewrite the whole thing in my current voice before I get dragged away again and scream myself into yet another new voice.
I don’t have a strong drive to write Grave Oversight 2, but it has several advantages.
- Getting into ghosts, murder cults, and accelerated societal decay will be a breeze.
- That series is already a failure, so there is no pressure on it to be a flotation device.
- I haven’t been trying to shepherd it through completion and failing it for years.
- It’s a mere 80,000 words.
Sure, the only plot points I know are the beginning and end, but outlining is the easy part!
Maybe that will also be a no-go. But maybe—look, optimism!—demonstrating an ability to progress in any way will psychologically cleanse me so I can eventually go back to KotSQ (now ToCS) without the interference of guilt and despair.
If not, oh well. I’ve known for a while I’m running out the clock on my publishing career. If I can drag it out to 2026, it’ll be a nice round 30 years from serendipitous beginning to inglorious end.