On this episode of the Self-Publishing News Podcast, Dan Holloway reports on a BBC Maestro course using AI to recreate Agatha Christie, a Nordic platform’s AI book-recommendation chatbot, and a BookBub survey showing nearly half of authors now use AI. He also covers renewed tension over library eBook lending after Penguin Random House pulled comics from a school platform.
Listen to the Podcast: AI Recreates Agatha Christie
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About the Host
Dan Holloway is a novelist, poet, and spoken word artist. He is the MC of the performance arts show The New Libertines, He competed at the National Poetry Slam final at the Royal Albert Hall. His latest collection, The Transparency of Sutures, is available on Kindle.
Read the Transcripts
Dan Holloway: Hello and welcome to another week's Self-Publishing News.
If there are any thriller writers out there, have you ever thought how fabulous it would be if you could ask questions of the queen of the genre herself? Certainly, the person who has done more than anyone else to inspire me and to point me in the way of tips and tricks to craft the perfect whodunit. Of course, Agatha Christie.
Now, it seems you are going to be able to do just that.
AI Resurrects Agatha Christie
Dan Holloway: Thanks to the BBC Maestro series, which is a series of masterclasses, which is going to be resurrecting Agatha using AI.
Obviously, resurrecting dead people to do things is not something that is new. It has never not been controversial. Many of you of my age and some of you who are even younger than me will remember Carrie Fisher being resurrected for, I think it was the prequels to the original Star Wars films, using computer technology. That, of course, caused a huge amount of hoo-hah.
This has so far had a fairly muted reaction, and one of the reasons for that is that Agatha's estate seems to be quite happy with this. What they're doing is they're getting an actor to play the role of Agatha in this BBC Maestro Masterclass, and they are then using AI to make her look like Agatha, but they are only using words that are from the original writings, letters, diaries, published advice of Agatha Christie herself.
So, it's possibly less controversial than it might otherwise be, but nonetheless, this is what AI is up to now. It is now bringing you a resurrected Agatha Christie to teach you all about how to write thrillers. There we go.
AI Recommending Books in Nordic Streaming Services
Dan Holloway: There are various other uses of AI in the news this week.
For example, Nextory, which is one of the Nordic streaming services that we haven't heard so much about recently. We've heard quite a lot about Spotify, StoryTel, and BookBeat.
Nextory is another of that stable of highly successful Nordic streaming services. They're going to be using an AI curatorial chatbot, is probably the best way to describe it.
So, a lot of services use AI to enhance their algorithms, to give people better recommendations, but this is actually seeking to have a directly quizzable chatbot so people can ask it questions like, what should I read next based on my reading history?
Or, I don't know, I like Agatha Christie and PD James, what should I read next? That kind of thing.
It is aiming to be able to tell from a person's reading history and any information they want to share with them, what it is that is most likely to suit them next. Obviously, to keep them hooked into the platform, but also the aim seems to be to help with discoverability of titles which might not otherwise surface, but might be a really good fit for those readers.
The press release rather interestingly, points to work which shows that, in particular amongst new adult readers, so 18 to 29-year-old Swedish readers, more than a quarter of them struggle to engage with reading because they say they don't have the right way of finding out what they should be reading next, and they are seeking to use AI to solve that problem.
A last story for this week on AI is a survey.
BookBub's AI Survey Insights Shows More Authors Using AI
Dan Holloway: So, BookBub, obviously known to many of us as the most successful place to go if you want to get your books in front of readers, not through their adverts, but through the proper BookBub paid promotions that get you in the newsletter, recommended to readers. It is not as effective as it used to be by anecdote, but is still far and away the most effective form of advertising.
They have surveyed authors who use them. It's a largely self-publishing cohort, so 69% of the 1,279, I think it was, authors responded to their survey. 69% of them were self-publishers and a further 25% were hybrid.
It asked them, how do you use AI in your writing? And basically, 45% of responders said they currently used it. 48% said they were planning never to use it, and the remaining tiny amount said, we're not using it now, but we might at some time in the future.
So, there are some really interesting results in the survey or nuances.
When it comes to why people aren't using AI, the most common reason given is ethics.
So, that's probably changed, it feels to me, in the last year or so.
A while ago when AI was first doing its thing, lots of people were saying, oh, that's all very well, but it's no good at, fill in the blanks yet, or it will never be good at, fill in the blanks.
That is less and less the case as people have realized that actually, whatever the thing that you used to fill in the blanks is, AI is going to get to be really good at it at some point. It's probably even there already. So, now that is much less a reason why people aren't using it.
Much more of a reason is to do simply with ethics.
The second most popular reason for people not using AI is, it says here, I enjoy doing the work myself. So, I'm not quite clear what that work is. There are bits of the work of self-publishing I love. There are bits, proofreading, for example, that I hate.
Wrangling documents into an appropriate format, especially if there are tables and figures involved, that is something I hate with an absolute vengeance.
But interestingly, one of the things that doesn't really get that many people saying, I don't use AI because. So, only around a fifth of respondents said they don't use AI because they already hire other people to do the work that AI would otherwise do.
So obviously, for an industry, all parts of which are equally reliant on humans doing human stuff, it feels like this is probably a theme that we've seen before or I've talked about before, that it's not clear how many of the overall authors do some kind of editorial work that they hire out or that they contract out to whoever.
So, it might be that everyone who hires out their editorial work, their cover design, refuses to use AI. I'm not necessarily sure that's the case. So, I've talked about solidarity within the industry before. It feels like it's something we don't necessarily see as much of as I would expect, is how I will put it.
The uses to which people put AI, interestingly, research is far and away the most popular.
When it comes to actually using it for creating material, lots of people, so nearly three quarters of people use it to do their marketing copy. So, what they would consider the boring stuff.
But really interestingly, more than half use it actually to do their writing, and that's more than use it to do their cover art or their narration.
Some really interesting and slightly unexpected, in some senses, findings there.
That leaves us time for one last story, some nostalgia.
Publishers vs. Libraries: The eBook Lending Debate Resurfaces
Dan Holloway: You may remember, five years ago, the story that I used to come back to every week was the beef between publishers and libraries over eBook lending.
Publishers thought that libraries were, as they put it, cannibalizing their sales by lending out eBooks too much and not getting any money back to the publishers.
So, publishers started finding new models for charging for eBooks, like metered usage or shortening the terms of licenses and making libraries renew their license every six months.
That sort of went quiet and now it's come back to the fore, and it's come back to the fore since Penguin Random House took over a comics publisher called Boom, and that has brought the issue back to the fore because Penguin Random House, has a no unlimited subscription rule.
So, it won't deal with any services that offer unlimited subscription because they want to make sure they're getting paid for all the instances of people reading that occur.
Comics Plus, which is part of the library pass system that feeds out eBooks to educational establishments, provides an unlimited subscription model to educational establishments who subscribe.
One of the reasons it is more in demand in education than elsewhere is, what they do is they find otherwise undiscovered material that might be useful for a curriculum.
So, you might well get people who are studying Jane Austen, they're studying Jane Austen in, I don't know, the start of January. They start the new year with a bit of Jane Austen. What Comics Plus will do is it will find some interesting comic takes. So, I don't whether it's a comic version of Pride and Prejudice with Zombies, or if there is such a thing. That kind of thing, and they will recommend it to schools; if you're studying Jane Austen, you might want to study this as well.
It gets things in front of readers that wouldn't otherwise get in front of readers. But because it's to do with curriculum, obviously there are going to be lots of people reading it all at once and not in series, but in parallel.
So, that means that really the way to use it is an unlimited subscription.
Penguin Random House said, we don't do it. So, the two have gone their separate ways and you can now not get Boom comics through Comics Plus, and this has reignited the debate about how libraries distribute eBooks.
It feels like it's a slightly peripheral kind of debate at the moment. Maybe not necessarily relevant to many of us as indies, but it is nonetheless opening a debate, which I feel is not going to close for any time soon.
So, I will leave you with that and look forward very much to speaking to you again at the same time next week, happy self-publishing.
