The "I have an idea, can you write it for me?" People are Making a Comeback, and I Despise Them Even More Now.

In 2005, I went to work at Watermark Books and Cafe. In the world of independent bookstores, Watermark is an outlier because it runs a consignment program. Self-published writers, and writers whose publishers don’t offer industry standard sales terms to wholesalers and retailers, are able to get copies of their books on Watermark’s shelves under a 90-day contract, with a 60/40 split on copies sold. The terms mirror the minimum terms most independent bookstores expect from wholesalers and publishers. Watermark’s expectations, at least while I was the inventory manager, were that the store needed a minimum 40% discount off the cover price, and 90 days to pay for or return the books for credit on another order.

Indie writers who understood the business, and who were able to get their books from their publishers at a 50% or better discount, didn’t have a problem with the terms of Watermark’s consignment program. The best consignment writers were ones who also had marketing plans and made sure their readers knew the books could be purchased at Watermark. If the copies sold, even modestly, Watermark was happy to take more copies under a new 90-day contract. The super-sellers, those who were selling out repeatedly, could place more than 5 copies at a time on the shelves because the demand was there. Aside from knowing who their audience was and having a marketing plan, the super sellers also tended to be regular customers long before they published a book. Super-sellers were rare.

A lot of indie bookstores simply don’t do consignment programs. Taking books on consignment is too much of a risk, and it’s too much of a hassle to deal with the books and the contracts, and, worst of all, some of the entitled, self-important “authors” (sometimes that word “author” makes me cringe). The worst of the consignment crowd were always those who did not understand how independent bookstores do business, nor how a legitimate publisher does business. So, these writers didn’t have a marketing plan, couldn’t get their own books at a discount, and were, quite honestly, fucking delusional about the quality and appeal of their . . . material.

A lot of the consignment authors who fell into this annoying category were people who’d never been in the store before, and they never came into the store while their material was on the shelves. They might be seen again if they came to pick up their unsold books, but most of the time they preferred to pay us to ship their books back to them. Some simply abandoned their books, despite repeated phone calls and emails reminding them that their contract had expired and the books had been pulled from the shelves. Back in my day at the store, we had a small set of shelves in the basement offices that were given over to storing unclaimed consignment books. About once a year, we’d purge the shelves after one final attempt to contact the author. I’d like to say we were able to donate the books, but honestly, no one would take them, so we trashed them.

The worst of the worst consignment crowd were always the ones who got angry and yelled at us over the phone or showed up to yell at us in the store all because their book failed to become a bestseller.

As a bookseller, and later as the inventory manager, I regularly had to deal with these consignment critters (that fits better) who would sign a contract, drop off their books, disappear for 90 days, and then, after a phone call from us, lash out, angry that we hadn’t sold their book. They seemed to assume that each of us were required to read every single book on the store’s shelves and that we were incompetent and malicious for not reading their book specifically. In their minds, if we’d read it like they believed we were supposed to, then we would have been begging for more copies.

It was almost funny to see how they reacted when I would tell them there were New York Times bestsellers that we sold the shit out of and not one of us had read the damn thing, nor wanted to. Most of us, secretly, even despised certain bestselling writers (this was especially true for rightwing political books). Most books sell without any effort at all from booksellers because the authors, and their publishers, do their jobs. They know who their audience is, and they have a platform and a plan of attack to reach that audience. Of course, they also have a publicist who gets the book into reviewer’s hands and schedules a book tour.

When we pushed back and asked what they, as the author and publisher of their own work, were doing to promote their book, we learned they didn’t have a marketing plan, hadn’t give a thought about who their audience was beyond the lazy and delusional “anyone who likes to read,” and they hadn’t told anyone that their book was available at Watermark. Furthermore, when someone on staff had, out of morbid, masochistic curiosity, read a few pages, they generally discovered that it was laughably bad and, to make matters worse, these people hadn’t bothered to proofread or edit with any kind of professionalism. Maybe they’d shown it to a family member who was, so they claimed, “good with grammar,” which probably meant it was someone who had a single linguistic pet-peeve they liked to tell everyone about but otherwise couldn’t conjugate the verb “run” correctly. The books were shoddy, poorly written, unprofessional, and childish. Yet they expected the world to somehow miraculously find their book and clutch it to their chests like a divine gift.

Those people are why I generally recoil from and roll my eyes at the “indie author” label. Most people hear that term and think it’s a writer who is plucky, determined, and entrepreneurial. I think of those assholes yelling at me and my fellow booksellers for ruining their plans to be the next J.K. Rowling or Stephenie Meyer. For every serious, independent, self-published author who fully understands what it means to act as their own publisher, there are thousands, of people who, like those consignment critters we had to endure, think their work will levitate above the fray simply by appearing in the universe with no other effort on their part. They’ve never seen the time and effort, or money, that gets invested in writing and publishing a book. So, for them, publishing a book seems like an effortless, easy way to make money.

After all, aren’t all authors rich and famous?

That being said, I do honestly, respect those independent writers who put in the time, effort, and forethought to publish their own work with care and professionalism. By learning both the craft of writing and the business of publishing, and by investing in things like professional editing and book design, they show me they consider what they’re doing to be more than a hobby. They’re also showing me they’re not consumed by some delusional fantasy that the world is just waiting for their unfiltered, unedited, raw “brilliance,” which “the man” (i.e. traditional publishing models) is trying to keep down. Even if I never read the books published by these diligent, professional independent writers, I respect the effort they’ve put forth to reach their respective audiences. I’m simply not part of the audience for whatever micro subliterary genre they work in, and I’m not going to dig through the internet looking for their work or buy it from Amazon.

Apparently, I’m also not the audience for whatever the Big Five publishers are calling “literary fiction” these days.

Looking back now, in light of certain developments, I might even offer a little, begrudging respect to those delusional unprofessional “indie authors” of my old bookstore days simply because, at some point, they did actually plant their asses in a chair and do the hard work of writing a story all on their own. I offer that shred of respect reluctantly because there was another batch of people I encountered in those days at Watermark who were worse and, right now, are apparently having a moment.

Back then, I don’t know why this group of people were drawn to Watermark. Maybe it was because Watermark Books also ran a small indie press for a time (Watermark Press published John O’Brien’s excellent Leaving Las Vegas in 1990), or maybe they were simply running around town stopping at all the bookstores and bothering the booksellers. Either way, these people would come in and ask if we could get them in touch with a writer, or if any of us were writers, because they had this idea for a novel they were sure would be a bestseller . . . they just needed someone to write it for them. “We’ll share the profits,” they’d all say.

One of us on staff would try to explain to them the basics of the publishing industry, especially the fact that writers-for-hire, ghostwriters, generally only work for an up-front and often sizable fee because the majority of books published never make a profit. Most don’t even break even. So, there would, literally, be no profits to share. Even if, by some chance, a ghostwritten book were to make a profit, it would never be the “quit your day job” kind of profit. Of course, at some point, we’d ask these idea people why they didn’t, simply, write the story themselves and keep all the dreamed of profits themselves. The answer was always I can’t write that good, or I don’t know how to write a novel, or I don’t have the time, or I don’t like to write, and so on. The excuses were endless.

It was hard to hide my disdain for those people. Writing is an art, and I’ve invested most of my life into learning how to do it well, and I still feel I’m not as good as I want to be (still fixing errors in this essay). Writing is not a hobby for me. A hobby is something done for fun, and although I enjoy having finished a manuscript, and I take joy in having it read and loved by someone I’ve never met and will most likely never meet, the process of pulling stories out of my body every single morning is not fun. It’s a compulsion, a need, a requirement, like breathing or eating. I have to do it simply to be able to tolerate and endure the rest of my life. It’s agonizing to devote years to a manuscript and then endure years of rejections, but that is the life of a writer, especially one who knows he’s not very good at self-promotion, but it’s the life I’ve chosen because I honestly can’t fathom being content doing anything else.

That’s not the case for those “I have an idea but want someone else to write it” people. They just want to make a buck, and maybe get famous for doing so, but their priorities in life are, obviously, pointed toward something other than sitting down to write.

Back then, these “idea people” made their one appearance in the store, were told the harsh news about the writing and publishing world, and then they’d vanish, never to be seen again. Sometimes, they’d vanish in a cloud of anger and “you’re missing out” indignity. I usually laughed as they stormed off because I knew they were simply too lazy, undisciplined, and ignorant to do the work themselves.

Now, lazy and undisciplined are two things you can’t be if you want to be a writer, especially a good one, self-published or otherwise. Hell, ignorance is kind of hit or miss because it is, inevitably, curable with a little research. Back then, the consignment cover letter recommended some educational books on writing and self-publishing. They never sold. The serious indie writers had already read them, the delusional indie authors didn’t think they needed to read them, and the idea people, it turns out, were not only delusional but too lazy to really read anything. Laziness and a lack of discipline are, or at least were, the great insurmountable barriers for those “I have an idea, you write it” people. Endlessly sitting at a desk writing and revising was beyond their capacity, and so their “great” idea remained just that, an idea. When they stormed off, I knew they were never going to be able to show me anything . . .

. . . and then generative artificial intelligence came along.

Unfortunately, in the twenty years since I worked in a bookstore, generative AI like ChatGPT has crawled out of some dystopian hole and, at least in some people’s view, revealed me to be an arrogant condescending asshole. Now those lazy, delusional, “I have an idea, you write it” people we had to politely deal with in the store have all the tools they need to finish the job of completely devaluing not only the art of literature, but the very role of the writers whose work is stolen and plagiarized by these large language models. Their ignorance of what it takes to be a writer is matched by their ignorance of the harm they and generative AI are doing. They think they have their gotcha moment in the dumbest way possible.

Most people reading this believe artists should be paid for their work, but there are those who see paying artists for their work as a nuisance and a barrier to endlessly growing profit. America, in general, doesn’t value art and artists. America values commodities and profit. America values reproducibility and familiarity. While art is messy, unique, personal, challenging, uncomfortable, and humane, commodified content is mass producible and fundamentally generic. And while artists are individual and irreplaceable, the content creators who generate all that commodified content are, more or less, interchangeable even while being varied, unique, and indispensable as human beings. Art is made by a person, often alone, while commodities are made in factories by people reduced to automatons using a formula, or by machines that are simply turned on, maintained, and shut off by a semi-trained operator who doesn’t even need to understand the entirety of the process.

Paying an artist who has spent years working on a single piece of art is, in this commodified world, inefficient and unprofitable, especially if a positive annual growth rate is expected. The publishing industry started the process of commodifying literature long before the arrival of generative AI. It started with mergers; bigger publishers buying up smaller publishers to acquire their backlists, which are used to build a steady, low-cost income stream. Those mergers lead to a narrowing of the literary aesthetic as more titles were filtered through a smaller number of editors. Then, with a small number of editors at the giant mega publishers, the analytic teams made up of the accountants and marketers began to recognize patterns in what sold well, and so they pushed editors to acquire more books like the ones that sold well so that revenues would be more stable and predictable. Eventually, a certain style became preferred not just at certain publishers but across the industry and within each carefully codified and policed subliterary genre. As market data and research began to drive more of the selection process, pushing aesthetics and meaningfulness further back, technology stepped in to bring publishers digital tracking and analytical tools like Bookscan, and now artificial intelligence. These tools are used to help an even smaller cadre of overworked, bottom line driven acquisitions editors evaluate and select the next dependably salable manuscript based solely on what sold in the past.

Now, AI isn’t just being used by overworked editors, nor is it only being used by those lazy, undisciplined poetasters plugging prompts into websites. AI is also being used in programs billed as “writing aids” like Grammarly, and ProWriting Aid, among others. Those tools claim to help people improve their writing but, in fact, those programs just flatten writing, and drive it to an acceptable average, all to make it more “readable” to more people.

Readable in this case means generic, less quirky, less individual, less personal. Those programs like Grammarly and ProWriting Aid operate by first dogmatizing the rules of English grammar and then by comparing your work to the average, the mean, the middle of the road of whatever model they’ve built to establish what “good looks like” within the program. Average writing is good for basic communication between people, but it doesn’t make for good art. Grammarly and ProWriting Aid are effective at bringing below average writers up to the mean, but they are shit for above average and exceptional writers because they drag excellent, individualized writing down to the dull, but functional average.

So, proofreading software is good for engineers writing to be understood by business system analysts, and by BSAs writing to be understood by VPs, and by VPs writing to be understood by CEOs, and by marketers writing to be understood by the general population of which over half can’t read above a sixth grade level. The companies that make all this AI want us to think it’s good for entertainment content, too. And CEOs and MBAs in the entertainment industry have bought into that idea. They want to control creative content like a commodity, which needs massive sales volume to make exponential profit growth happen. And average, the middle of the road, always sells better than exceptional because average is generic enough to be digestible by more people. Average content that isn’t offensively bad nor too challenging is ideal for sedating people who have been trained to embrace their role as economic automatons in need of occasional distractions from the drudgery of being a disposable, consumable part of a corporate machine.

If everything is a generic, undifferentiated commodity, then only two opposing things matter: volume or luxury. For volume to work, something has to be sold to as many people as possible while also being produced as cheaply, efficiently, and quickly as possible. Doing so reduces the overall quality and variety of the thing produced. Go take a look at the “wall art” section of the various home decor stores. That mass produced, anonymous “art” doesn’t have a voice or a point of view. It doesn’t have anything to say, and it doesn’t make a person stop and wonder. It’s just there to break up the flat, monochromatic expanse of a wall, any wall, anywhere.

For luxury to work, something has to be scarce or bespoke, which means that only a tiny set of producers will be able to live as artists and only as long as they please and flatter those with the money to spend on whatever it is the select few artisans produce. It’s an artist as servant model, with the artist serving only the egos of the wealthy.

For years now, the Big Five publishers, and the agents who feed them manuscripts, have been laying the groundwork for the volume based commodification of the literary world. They have been doing the ugly grunt work, accidentally mind you, of standardizing our concept of what “good literature” looks like based solely on what sells to the most people, and not what’s actually good art, not what is human. In a society driven solely by profit, where, if we don’t have money we can’t be fed, clothed, housed, educated, treated for illness, or engage in leisure, then any other concern, say for truth, beauty, self-expression, connection is only valuable if it can be made to enhance profit. This is why my day job has “self-actualization” as one of its guiding principles: they want the worker’s idea of self-worth tied to their success as workers, producers, profit generators and not human souls existing in this temporary body on this temporary world.

We have been trained to judge quality and value by what appeals to the lowest common denominator of any particular market demographic. Editors ought to know that by setting the parameters to satisfy mass appeal, they are setting the parameters by which artificial intelligence will select and evaluate manuscripts, which will then further reduce and genericize what is picked to be publish. They’ll be cleaning up the feed of content that will then be used to train the next generation of AI to assemble the next remix of whatever sold the year before. Originality will be killed.

And the best part for the extraction capitalists who would-be world kings, is that they can eventually remove the problematic and expensive human element that is the artist and possibly even the editor. Artists will be replaced with prompt writers. No more taking a chance on signing a flighty, neurotic genius and paying them a $50,000 advance and hoping to make enough back to break even. If Penguin Random House can pay some prompt monkey $80,000 a year ($1,538 a week) to assemble prompts provided to them by market research and then feed those prompts to AI that then remixes and plagiarizes all of the world’s literature, including its past remixes, into a thousand different iterations of a basic romance story, which then generates revenue, well, that’s a fucking bargain isn’t it? Penguin Random House might only need five prompt monkeys to turn out 10,000 or 100,000 “new” titles each year—each selling for—what?—the Amazon established $10 price point? $5? If Penguin Random House is the only publisher left standing, or is a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon, they’ll have the market cornered and if you want to read something in the few hours between drudge-shifts you’ll recycle what tiny fraction of your tiny paycheck back to the company for that generic fix.

Eventually the volume of derivative, remixed AI generated content will outnumber and outweigh the volume of human generated literary art ever created and, like an ouroboros, start feeding on its own tale. All the while, we humans will become more and more impoverished culturally, intellectually, and economically as we are reduced to simply maintaining the machine that extracts more and more abstract forms of imaginary wealth from our soulless existence.

Fuck that.

As a writer, I will continue to sit down at my desk every morning and write. I will continue to edit and proofread and revise without the help of AI proofreaders, and I will never use AI to generate text. I will make art that elevates the craft, that embraces the wild, divine, erratic, messy human spirit and tries, maybe quixotically, to reach beyond my abilities. I will seek out books written by other writers who do the same. I will seek out publishers who refuse to review, evaluate, or select manuscripts with AI help and instead publish books that somehow feel essential to them and to life.

It might be time to start sabotaging data centers.