by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Way back in November, 2009, I wrote a piece for TKZ about the ebook/self-pub explosion, and what it portended for the future of the publishing biz. That month it felt like there was an eruption of chatter about the pace of developments following the intro of the Kindle (Nov. 2007) and the self-publishing platform it provided. At this time there were several previously unpublished writers making nice bucks pubbing their fiction for 99¢ (e.g., Amanda Hocking); also trad pubbed authors diving fully into indie (e.g., Joe Konrath, Barry Eisler).

Agents were in a dither, present and potential clients would go rogue. “Don’t do it,” they warned. “You’ll kill your career!”

And there was a controversial move by a big publisher, who started a fee-based self-pub service (better known as vanity publishing), which carried their logo on it. You can read about that controversy here. Other major publishers soon followed.

Looking back, the brouhaha over Kindle and self-publishing had the same feel as the AI cataclysm happening now. I thought it might be instructive to review what I wrote back then, and reflect on what’s happening now. Here are clips, followed by my comments:

First, the very pace of change in our world is now such that major developments happen almost as fast as chair throwing incidents on Jerry Springer. 

Okay, Boomer. Jerry Springer?

Talk about pace! The Kindle Wild West days seem almost serene compared to today’s AI pandemonium. Each week seems to bring another “advance” that we may—or scarily, may not—control.

And humans naturally feel anxious about change until we can catch up and figure out what’s going on. But we always seem to feel a few steps behind these days.

That was true then, it’s truer now—on-steroids. Back then it was about the future of publishing. Now it’s about the future of the human race. Just the other morning I read about Anthropic’s Mythos, which has its tentacles reaching into biology. “[T]hat means AI may soon grant people extremely dangerous powers: to synthesize viruses, generate novel neurotoxins or assemble omnicidal ‘mirror life.’ Such dangers are the dark side of AI’s wonderful promise to democratize intelligence. It is even conceivable that an AI could give a misanthropic loner the power to end humanity.”

Anxiety, anyone?

How fast are things moving? Already there’s talk that the Kindle is on the way out. Authors and publishers are even now embedding links to websites and YouTube for added content in digital novels, links which can be accessed on, say, an iPhone but not a Kindle. There’s even a name for such digi-novels: Vooks.

Well, Vooks did not take off, nor did “added digital” content. Readers, it seems, prefer to get caught up in a story without pausing to find or endure added “stuff.”

Which leads to the technological changes that seem poised to alter the paradigms we’ve lived with for centuries, such as books on paper being paid for by readers.

Yes, many prognosticators opined that physical books were on the way out. It made some sense at the time. I’m still blown away that I have the complete works of Dickens on my Kindle, and can read Martin Chuzzlewit on my phone.

But print has proved resilient. Indeed, I wrote back then:

I’ve pointedly spoken to several twenty-something readers over the past few weeks, and was gobsmacked when none of them liked eReaders. They were paper people! Astonishing.

My two predictions from November of 2009:

1. People are still going to want good stories to read.

What I meant was that a self-publishing author has to be good, not just prolific. This is being tested now, big time, as AI makes it possible for an author to churn out dozens of “novels” a year, of mediocre quality. I still optimistically hold that quality writing from a human being is the best way to find a loyal readership.

2. They’re not going to pay as much money to get them.

This was the major concern of Big Pub at the time, that a “tsunami” of inexpensive ebooks would erode their biggest slice of the publishing pie—hardcover editions. Well, hardcovers still sell (if they are by “brand names.”) Trade paper (with its more attractive price point) sells more.

Yet voracious readers, like any consumer, will seek out the best deals for their habit. Good indie authors selling their work for $2.99 – $5.99 (the current “sweet spot”) have a big market out there.

I concluded that fiction writers will always be around, because the world needs us. Maybe now more than ever.

Still true.

Want to make any prediction about the future of reading, publishing, or humanity? The floor is yours!