David Van Dyke Stewart is waxing pessimistic about the state of indie publishing. In his view, indie publishing is so threatened by AI slop and genre slop that it is no longer worth doing anymore.
He announces in the video below that he intends to “step away” from indie publishing. He’s even flirting with the idea of unpublishing some of his existing novels, because he does not want to be associated with some of the ridiculous excesses that we now see in indie publishing.
A part of me fully sympathizes. As I’ve written previously, I can hardly stand to enter indie writing groups on Facebook anymore. 90% of the authors participating in such spaces are now writing shifter romances, reverse harem—and similarly ridiculous books adorned with man chests. Then there are the dogs and cats solving mysteries, the witch cozies, etc. It is possible for one to feel ridiculous by association.
As for AI…yes, that is a problem of an entirely different magnitude.
And yet…I remain optimistic, if not in the short run, then at least in the long run.
Why? Because I’ve seen this movie before. I remember almost twenty years ago, how everyone was predicting that the entire internet would be taken down—not by AI, but by content farms.
For those of you who don’t remember (or who are a little fuzzy on the history), content farms were junk sites that were hastily written to maximize clicks in Google search results, and thereby maximize AdSense income. For a few years they represented a real threat to the integrity of the internet.
But the content farms eventually went the way of the pterodactyl. Google changed its algorithm. Search engine users became more discriminating, and learned to recognize query results that led to content farms. The economic incentive for the content farms went away.
That’s what I expect to happen with AI slop (and—to some degree—genre slop). How long can it remain profitable to turn out template-driven trashy romance novels, for instance? Even for the voracious porn/romance readership?
And once you throw AI into the mix, the race to the unprofitable bottom is inevitable. I look for the genre slop writers, and the AI slop producers, to eventually be driven out by their own excesses.
One irony here is that AI slop and genre slop have a mutually destructive, symbiotic relationship. Template-driven, repetitive genre novels are the easiest to produce with various AI programs.
What does concern me is that before it all goes away, it will completely undermine the Kindle Unlimited ecosystem. This is a real threat in the short- to mid-term.
But I don’t look for AI and genre slop to take down indie publishing as an industry. As long as the internet has existed, there have been both outright scammers and individuals who seek to maximize profit by turning out low-effort, repetitive content. That problem is not going to go away. One bag of tricks will simply be replaced by another.
The rest of us will soldier on. As for David Van Dyke Stewart, I hope that he soldiers on, too. I haven’t read any of his novels; but I have watched some of his YouTube content. He strikes me as a thoughtful fellow.
-ET
**View THE MAZE at Amazon**
