What Is Happening to Publishing? | Hacker News Reader

What Is Happening to Publishing?

resobscura.substack.com

83 pointsbenbreen55 comments

For the past 5-6 years I've been writing a book in my spare time. The outline of it is how reason emerges in past societies from the needs of social complexity, how it's lessons get converted into rules and rituals, which in turn remove any competitive advantage of aquiring reason, ending it to setup a new cycle. And in the meanwhile LLMs became the ultimate heuristic of humanity.

I've gotten it 60-70% ready, and I really don't know if it'll have an audience in a post-AI world. I never meant to strike big with it, but I'm now wondering if thousands of hours of research and writing can amount to more than a novelty gift I'd give to friends.

Why wouldn’t people read it? The problem is not writing - the problem is finding an audience. Yes, AI means there are more poor works competing. But if it’s actually good writing, you will find an audience if you market the book. Pay an editor. Publish to kindle. Pay for marketing. Get people to sign up for an email list.

> Why wouldn’t people read it? The problem is not writing - the problem is finding an audience.

And that's precisely the issue here. For a while, the internet allowed you to find an audience, just like that. Start a blog / podcast / YT channel, keep going, get enough attention. You could then approach a traditional publisher and tell them "hey, I'm kind of a big deal", or you could self-publish and rely on the word-of-mouth from your followers.

Now, how would that work? If you have a blog, AI answers will summarize it without attribution and not send anyone your way. Even the "references" cited in AI answers often point to AI-slop blogs, not the original source. The articles we discuss on HN are often AI-written too. So yeah, it's about reaching the audience, but you're now competing with machines that produce an endless stream of human-like text, good enough for most consumers, practically for free.

Word of mouth is not marketing. The way you find the audience is by marketing. Paying to get in front of people. Targeting people who read similar books. Getting people who already have audiences to review your book or interview you.

A book won’t sell itself.

Which addresses your second point: machines can produce an endless stream of human-like text, but they have exactly the same problem as human generated text: finding an audience.

How are these endless streams of human-like text finding an audience? Most of the time they are not.

And as soon as you scratch beneath the surface there is no one to interview. No one to turn up at literary festivals. No one to write opinion pieces or blog pieces for book-interested audiences. As I said: writing isn’t the problem. Finding the audience is the problem.

What distinguishes a book that is read by no one from a book that is read by a bunch of people? It’s definitely not the writing. There are great books out there that never find an audience because no one ever went out there to find an audience for those books.

The low budget marketing channels that worked in the past are harder in this post-LLM world. SEO seems to have changed a lot, email marketing now involves trying to escape the Promotions tab, organic social media marketing is much harder too (I suspect the large social networks want you to buy ads, not get organic reach as a person/business promoting a product or service). Marketing something like a self published book online has changed dramatically.

> The problem is not writing - the problem is finding an audience.

You are literally responding to

> I really don't know if it'll have an audience

the problem is finding an audience with reading comprehension

You're telling me.

Indeed! It appears the person you are responding to skipped over a bunch of stuff and so missed my response which was “you need to market your book, not just write it”.

Sure, I've been a start-up founder before, I know the trap of "if you build it, they will come". It's just that AI is evolving so fast that book do seem like the market for vinyl (as the article said).

No amount of marketing can help you out is your entire market is shrinking daily. Shriking markets are also not won by quality. The more competition, the more marketing then becomes the main thing, and you also need to alter the book in the process so that it fits the bite-sized pills you can push on most channels, or worse change it so much for the audience until it becomes something else entirely.

Yes. And my response was “market your book”.

And the part you didn't understand is that all the marketing in the world won't matter if the audience barely - or doesn't - exist.

Ok! Thanks for educating me.

I really hope you don't give up. I've built and shipped systems with 80000 to 90,000 lines of code, only to see most of the companies that bought them go out of business. But there was still immense value in the act of delivering them. By putting our creations out into the world, we connect with each other.

The act of writing and building is, in itself, humanity's grand narrative for trying to understand the world. The journey itself is inherently valuable. Isn't the ability to organize our thoughts, pass them down to the next generation, and continue that narrative exactly what makes us uniquely human?

Even if only a few people around you end up reading it, those few could be deeply inspired to go on and build an even greater world. Please don't stop. I'm rooting for you.

For what it’s worth, that sounds like a very interesting premise. N=1, but you have a potential reader here!

I’m also a writer and publish my works every week. Also working towards a book. My take? I don’t care. Still doing it for myself. God could come down in a chariot made of golden carrots and I wouldn’t change my mind.

> God could come down in a chariot made of golden carrots

With imagery like this, I’d love to read your other work! Link?

I appreciate the kind words.

You can find a link to my newsletter over at https://yelluw.com

Do subscribe if you like it. It’s free and will stay free.

I would like to read it!

Please publish it!

Your comment makes me wonder what the historical ratio was between books and readers. I know that books were in very short supply a thousand years ago, but readers were also very short in supply. I wonder if things are worse in the tiktok era or the pre-printing press era.

Mass literacy was the result of printing presses, not the cause.

It's a bad short story. Whether it was generated at the hands of humans or a computer isn't really relevant. Speaking in riddles is cheap now, so authors better learn how to surprise the reader in simpler, more readable words. It seems to be something that LLMs are quite bad at.

Yeah, I found this extremely unpleasant to read. I wouldn't have pegged it as LLM-assisted, but I would have pegged the author as pretentious and bad at coming up with compelling analogies.

I liked the playfulness of:

  Mixed metaphors which sound nice at first glance, but slip away from meaning like an echo chasing itself off a cliff.

  Similes that catch in your mind like river trouts tangled in the roots of a redwood tree.

Also mentions some interesting AI tells, for AI generated stories.

It can be "playful" once or twice, especially if the text is playing with how nonsensical the metaphor is. By the twentieth time something is as tired as a willow tree on a Tuesday in May, as persnickety as an ant with a fever, or as rambunctious as a horny lobster, it's just nonsensical bad writing.

Metaphors are generally used to transfer the qualia of one experience into another. When the referent has no qualia, that is, you've never in your life experienced "river trouts tangled in the roots of a redwood tree", it's a failure of a metaphor. You can quibble about how special this or that metaphor is, which I've already given an example of with the "playing with how nonsensical the metaphor is", but when all the metaphors are broken that way, all the time, the writer is not "breaking the rules because they've transcended them" or anything like that, the writer is breaking them in the bad way that the rules were put there to stop and the writer should consider taking a Writing 101 course.

Though anyone taking a Writing 101 course should be aware that as near as I can tell, completing such a course is prima facie proof that they are overqualified for the vast majority of modern writing jobs.

https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/778041178124926976/hy...

The haiku observation is an interesting one:

"Likewise, he discovered that the contrast of two seeming opposites was a common feature in haiku. Ginsberg used this technique in his poetry, putting together two starkly dissimilar images: something weak with something strong, an artifact of high culture with an artifact of low culture, something holy with something unholy."

I think some of these broken metaphors could be turned into some sort of haiku-like poem, especially if we ignore the requirement to reference a season somehow, though it would still take some sort of additional work to add something to tie them together more thoroughly than the metaphor does, some third component a poet uses to glue the two bits together in some interesting way.

    tree roots sheltering
    river trout find safety but
    growth is treacherous

Eh. I'm not a poet. And I still just chucked the "Redwood" part. But maybe you can see how I also added a bit of a concept in there to tie it together. But then, of course, it's no longer a metaphor, it's a poem. It's not referencing an experience we've all had and transferring that on to something else, I'm creating a new experience. Very different.

Author here - just wanted to clarify in case there is any confusion that those two (intentionally bad/weird) figures of speech about the echo and the trouts in the redwood roots were human written, by me! I wrote them as parody of an AI trying to do "literary" writing. The actual (probable) AI written excerpts are below that part.

I was thinking about the immortal Twin Peaks line "there's a FISH... in the PERCOLATOR" when I wrote the trout one.

And for what it's worth, in the great-great-grandparent of this post, I wrote them by hand too.

I've certainly seen enough instances that I know it's pretty realistic.

And as much as there are still people on HN who insist that AI text can't be detected algorithmically, it's worth noting that the original story is marked 100% AI by Pangram. So it's not just this person seeing things.

AI detectors are notoriously unreliable. They constantly flag stuff I wrote as AI while letting actual AI-generated stuff pass when I've tested them.

They used to be. They are not. Try Pangram, you'll be surprised.

I actually really don't like the the "slip away from meaning phrase" at all. I do like "echo chasing itself off a cliff" though.

Saying "Metaphors..., slip away from meaning" instead of "Metaphors..., from which meaning slips away"

I dunno, it jumped out at me immediately.

I recently built and delivered an AI-driven novel-writing program. The architecture involved chaining the Claude, GPT, and Gemini APIs together so they could cross-critique and iteratively revise the text, while systematically saving key plot points and lore chapter-by-chapter. (Serialized 'web novels' published on a per-chapter basis are a massive industry here in Korea). AI has already heavily infiltrated the fiction space in Korea, and it looks like the exact same trend is hitting the US.

Personally, I find it incredibly easy to spot AI-generated text in Korean, but catching it in English is much harder for me. That being said, they still have very distinct, overused patterns. You constantly see words like 'ultimately' or 'structural,' and they rely heavily on highly formulaic 'X is Y' sentence structures.

I actually think there's going to be a big industry there, and right now, it's just mass-producing slop to exploit not-very-discerning publishing channels, but eventually an AI pipeline that can churn out mediocre, but extremely personalized one-off novels and stories on demand will be a real business.

If I can figure out a way to securely manage the AI API keys, this actually sounds like a viable business idea. However, I’ll need to think it through, as I don't have experience running a live web service—my background has strictly been in custom software delivery.

I initially built and delivered this system for a specific publisher to accommodate the Korean market's standard, which requires hitting a certain character count for a text to be recognized as a single chapter. I'm not entirely sure how to pivot this into a standalone SaaS yet, so I'll need to give it some more thought.

Thank you for the advice

Will it be? I used to think that was an obvious opportunity in short-form video content, but Sora kinda flopped. I'm increasingly sympathetic to the idea that people consume content as a form of indirect community-building, and if that's the case there may genuinely not be much demand for a one-off novel that they'll love but nobody else will ever read.

I actually think Sora did okay, but I suspect that a lot of people were just making videos for themselves and not sharing them and that didn't match their business model and was very expensive.

On the point of the impermeancy of digital media, I will say that actual traditional podcasts with distributed by rss can and are downloaded by design which means just like with books, a publisher can only destroy their own copies not listener copies. Also even if we pretend that YouTube podcasts can’t be deleted, most of the major ones also publish traditional podcast feeds too.

> “The issue is not just that authors are submitting AI-written prose, but that judges are using language models to assess that prose.”

Desktop publishing and websites altered the landscape of publishing.

Podcasts and YouTube altered the landscape of broadcasting.

Power relationships, capabilities, distribution, access—-Naturally there are new outcomes. The major players and their orgs designed to churn out content people will pay for are themselves undermined by one-hit wonders, runaway successes, viral outbreaks of cultural content on platforms they do not control.

A new equilibrium will establish itself. Smart and clever people will see opportunities, have opportunities and make great things which will be evaluated in new ways we can’t yet predict.

But if you have a job in publishing or broadcasting and just bought a house, started a family, well, I’m sorry. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

I wondering about other thing - I'm assuming that publishers are now using LLM's en-masse to "proofread", do initial evaluation, do editorial work etc.

So if an author abstained from using LLM in the writing process - isn't then new, original, not yet on the market book ending up in the LLM training data corpus even before it hits the market?

>I'm assuming that publishers are now using LLM's en-masse to "proofread", do initial evaluation, do editorial work etc.

I think there is going to be a large market in all domains for providers who can convince people that they don't use LLMs.

Loses some credibility with this footnote; https://resobscura.substack.com/p/what-is-happening-to-publi...

> I suspect the hum obsession has something to do with LLMs “awareness” that their “physical selves” exist in data centers.

That's possible, right? LLMs probably do know that they are in data centres and that data centres hum. If asked to write a story they may also have internalized that writers write best from their personal experience. All of that's in the training data....

LLM’s don’t ‘know’ anything in the conventual meaning of the word.

There is a folk phenomenon, called The Hum

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-13752688

https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/xlsdk5/til_t...

so my guess is that LLMs see The Hum in their training data, and then put the word "hum" in their output. Since humans occupy varied, small media bubbles, many haven't encountered text talking about The Hum at all. The LLM's use of the word "hum" then stands out as excessive and a tell. And a mysterious one!

If I liked reading fiction, I wouldn't care if it was AI generated or AI-assisted, as long as there were good reviews or an indication that it's good to read. Otherwise I'd probably never find it as I wouldn't sift through AI's duds until I find a story I like.

I don't care for fiction but I like music. If I like a track, I would still like it if it was AI generated. I would love it, in fact. That would mean I likely wouldn't have to wait a long time before the artists release a new track.

If it sucks, if it's obvious slop, etc. - I'll notice or someone would tell me via reviews or thumbs down or something like that.

Earlier today there was a comment somewhere about the possibility of modern art happening by chance - that it would be fake, have no human process behind and so on. Personally, I don't care about the process behind it. I care about the art. Maybe that makes it "entertainment" for me, not "art", but it's just 2 words for the same thing. I wouldn't care if a dish was made by a Star Trek replicator or by someone's grandma who had worked all her life to perfect it.

Other people want other things, I get it, but I don't really care. I'm not afraid I'll get stuck in some weird local maximum of AI-generated music (or fiction or food), just as I haven't got stuck listening to the radio - I can search and find various types of music.

Hard disagree. ESPECIALLY with music and fiction. It cheapens it, makes it feel hollow and is a disappointing letdown. It’s like finding out Santa Claus isn’t real. A big part of fiction and music is the act of human creation meant for other humans. It’s a form of communication and connection.

I think I get where you’re coming from if you’re thinking of fiction or music as just like pure baseless entertainment. But that’s like talking about food and meaning Soylent or a handful of sugar cubes in place of a home cooked meal or pastry-chef crafted dessert.

I get what you're saying and am not trying to argue with it, just presenting more of my viewpoint below.

I was the kid whose parents never lied to about Santa. It felt so weird trying to explain he's imaginary to other kids at the playground. I still liked the whole charade around Christmas. Not the Christian stuff (it was never instilled in me) but the tree with the lights, the guy dressed up as Santa and the presents. I knew what it was and I couldn't care less. When I was painted as a turtle or whatever at the theme park, I knew I wasn't a real turtle. It was quite a bit of fun nonetheless.

I've looked up some of the artists I like. Some have a somewhat interesting story, others have a political agenda and so on, but for most of them I don't even know if they're a one band name or a group, whether they're an Australian woman or a Serbian brother duo - I just don't care.

If there was a tasty and nutritionally complete Soylent or human chow that was ethically sourced, I'd gobble it up. It doesn't have to be "a handful of sugar cubes", though, with all that it implies. It could resemble a home cooked meal. But a perfect meal where every bean is exactly the same size, the same texture, the same amount of soft on the inside, crispy on the outside. Made in a factory by AI, synthesized from rock, for all I care.

Sure, we used to value artists and give them money. Now we don't. We used to value lots of work that's been automated away now. It's life. I'd still love a world with UBI where everyone can pursue whatever they want, where scarcity of the necessities doesn't exit. That would be even more fair to me as right now most people who want to be artists or chefs or athletes... aren't. They end up teaching or working at the same burrito shop for hours every day just to make ends meet. If we structure our society correctly, the fact that art is largely made by AI wouldn't have any negative financial consequences on anyone. At worst, no one will look at your art. But right not chances are you (not you per se) aren't even an artist but a graphics designer for a soulless company or a chef for the same cookie-cutter pizzeria. So in a post-scarcity society maybe no one will care about your art but you'll be able to make art for yourself, for art's sake. If you're doing it for recognition or money, is it really "art"?

> we used to value artists and give them money. Now we don't.

this is wildly self-centered to claim as a general truth

It's just a trend I've noticed due to more piracy, ad-supported content, AI-generated art, free content and/or publishers taking bigger cuts. Obviously people still pay artists and will continue to do so but I don't see a future where artists make nearly as much as they did before. That's OK if we don't treat art as a commodity, if we have UBI or something similar and if we can access enough free art.

So do you listen to lots of AI-generated music? There's plenty of it nowadays (you can even create your own with just a prompt).

The worst thing about this is not really that somebody might have had AI help writing a story, but that an editor thought they could get any kind of useful information from asking an AI whether the story was written by AI. If there's any hope of editors staying ahead of this phenomenon, they will need to educate themselves a lot better about how it actually works.

Those similes seem pretty lousy, so I think there might be deeper problems with the award than written with AI if that is what is winning.

Publishers loose money on most books and most advances they pay authors, and are simply gambling for the big hits.

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