New Age for Writers

It’s awful what’s happening in the publishing world in this new age. Unfortunately, since the birth of Al, the publishing market has become flooded with 🤖 bots knuckling down to try to outdo us, human writers. 😢The bots have caused the Clarkesworld Magazine editor to stopped accepting submissions while dealing with the growing problem of sorting out bots’ submissions from human ones. To read the article click on this link. Clarkesworld isn’t the only publishing company with the problem. The small press are in the same situation of trying to sort out the genuine submission from the bots. 

As a writer of short stories, I’ve seen a steady increase in places I can submit my work. There has been a marked increase in payments for the short story recently. It’s been nice to know our work has some value even though the amount paid is small. It makes you wonder whether the increase in payments is the driving force behind the bot’s interest in writing.

Image by kiquebg from Pixabay

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more so that we may fear less.

Marie Curie

Do writers have a cause to worry with this sudden flood of submissions from bots?

I’m surprised to learn that bots have so much free time that they wish to take up creative writing. If we look at the bigger picture, maybe we can find some answers to this growing interest by our bot brothers and sisters (plus 70 other lifeforms)

Let’s put the joking aside and look at the serious problem created by bot writers. Is it a case of human nature? You know, one of the seven deadly sins. Good old fashion greed driving them to compete with us human writers?

Most are aware that writing a novel or creating a prize-winning short story takes time. It takes plenty of energy, dedication, and imagination plus a bucketload of blood, sweat and tears. It can take months of editing, rewrites, more editing and more rewrites until you’ve finished. Then there are the rounds of submitting and resubmitting after many rejections. It can drive you crazy, bitter and angry to the point where you want to give up.
Writing a book isn’t for the faint-hearted. Once you’ve completed your first novel, found a publisher and had your book published. It’s time to start planning the next book, so the hard work starts again with new characters and ideas. (Time to forget about the glamorous book launches, TV appearances and fat checks they won’t appear yet.)
So would you, if someone offered you a way to cut a few corners and churn out a best-selling novel with a click of a key, would you take it?

For the last twenty years, I have been honing my writing skills. It involved reading many ‘how-to books, studying the publishing market, and submitting and suffering rejections. I found it time-consuming and frustrating but rewarding, too. No large sums of money yet, but I’ve made some supportive friends along the way. Winning writing competitions and having short stories accepted helped build my confidence. Yes, it’s been a long haul and I would love to have reached this point while I was still young. The trouble with cutting corners means I would’ve missed out on learning the things for myself. Experience brings wisdom. Having a bot doing everything for you means you will never grow as an author. The bot’s ideas are not your ideas. Your ideas come from your human experiences which allows you to add life to your characters. While honing your writing skills, you develop your style of writing, which becomes your trade mark.

No bot will write just like you or come up with the ideas you would create. No matter what genre, if you wrote the novel without the aid of a bot, it would be uniquely yours. Like all humans, we are one of a kind, which means someone can teach you the basic skills needed to write a novel, but once you begin the process, the characters take over, and the magic begins. Writing novels is so much more than just about making money. If the readers don’t enjoy your bot-written book, they won’t buy the next one.

Best sellers don’t happen overnight. Yes, all authors would love to make a bucketload of money with their first novel, but it rarely happens. A publisher needs more than just one book from you to make their investment worth it. Normally, the first one sells well because friends and family are supportive. Your second book might not do as well. To really start making any money from your writing, you need to produce about ten books before you have a bestseller, or at least a book that catches the imagination of your readers, if you have a following. Of course, if you’re using a bot to write your books, you need to create a bucketload of lies to answer all the questions from readers during any talks you might give while building your writing career.

I guess it’s down to how honest you want to be, especially with your writing.

Thank you for dropping by and reading my blog post.

Have a great weekend.