Mini Rant: AI is ruining publishing. (Patreon)

It's been a bit of a rough past two months for me, as many of you know. First, my books were banned from Amazon. Then, after weeks of publishing to Smashwords and Draft2Digital, I was banned from those sites as well. I came to learn that all three sites (Amazon, Smashwords, and D2D) have recently implemented AI content reviewers, which go through entire manuscripts to search for content that violates policy... so loads of authors, like myself, have been suddenly banned, mostly because of out-of-context 'violations'. On Smashwords, there was apparently a 'flashback' scene in a ten year old story I wrote, and while it didn't say there were underaged characters in it, it was apparently 'insinuated'. Likewise on Amazon, it seems (as far as I can tell) that the AI detected nudity on one of my covers and deemed it 'pornographic'. There wasn't nudity, but a skin-coloured garment... it doesn't matter though because they won't entertain my appeal. Yet another case of AI making a mistake but taking no accountability.

As some of you know, I never wanted to use AI. I have never used it for writing (Chat GPT, etc), but I did use it to make covers for about eighteen months. I will admit that I got a bit carried away with using it, though I would like to explain why--and I would like to explain why I no longer will use it in any capacity.

Part of the reason I was terminated from Amazon (according to the vague email I got in termination) was from 'multiple past violations'. Now, I never actually did have any violations that I know of--except for five instances where models complained to Amazon and claimed that I did not have the rights to use their images. The first three times this happened, I went through the trouble of digging out the stock photo licenses and provided them to Amazon, and proving that I did indeed own the rights, which was time-consuming. The next two times it happened, I just didn't feel like dealing with it, so I just changed the cover images. This was a mistake--I know now--because I'm guessing Amazon counted those two instances as copyright violations, and so this 'pornographic cover detected' instance was the third strike that took me out...

So switching to AI covers seemed like the best solution at the time, because the AI image websites were very clear that the generator keeps all rights. My sale went up within days of switching to AI covers, and so I got a bit carried away, thinking that's what people wanted: more of the super-sexy AI models. That's when I started making NSFW pics for Patreon, and that brought many of you here (so I'm sorry to those of you who still want that content now, as I won't be producing more of that for reasons I'm going to explain further into this post).

Around this time, Chat GPT started being able to produce fiction. I heard about authors making entire novels in an afternoon using it. Then, within a couple of months, Amazon's payout-per-page started dropping drastically, because the market was being flooded with content. Some authors were releasing 3-5 books each week. Still now, there are tens of thousands of AI-generated books being published each week to Amazon, and there's nothing Amazon can do about it, because it doesn't go against their guidelines, and it never will because there's no way of 'proving' what's made with AI and what isn't, even if it seems obvious.

So now, the pay-per-page payout is less than half of what it was eighteen months ago, making it even harder to survive as a self-published author.

My solution to this was to start including images in my books. An image, to Amazon, was worth 250 words, so by generating 30 images in each book, I was essentially doubling my page count and making up the loss in page reads. This also brought in many new readers who preferred illustrated books.

I never liked AI, but it was hard not to be happy about how it was improving my sales...

Other authors in the trans-romance realm have, for the past decade, imitated me. If you've been around long enough here, you've probably seen this yourself. I'm not bragging about it, but it's been that way for a long, long time. So after a few months of incorporating AI imagery into my workflow, the other authors started doing the same. Now, most of them are doing it.

But they're taking it a step further than me, which I have to admit, breaks my heart a little bit.

I received a few messages over the past two weeks informing me that a certain author has been using AI to write her books. I was sent screenshots of the prose, and it's sadly pretty obvious that it's true. I'm a bit stunned that someone who has been doing this almost as long as me, with a very large fan base, would do this. I'm not going to name names.

This comes just a few weeks after another author I'm close with admitted to me in a private chat that they've been using AI to write the entirety of their books for many months now, and they've supposedly worked out their 'prompts' to create content that is perfectly passable as genuinely written content.

When my Amazon books were banned because of an AI reviewer, my AI-rose-tinted glasses were shattered and I no longer wanted anything to do with it. So you've probably noticed my book covers are no longer AI models. I've gone back to using stock models, and I'm just going to take the risk of coming across some angry model who regrets signing the consent form; I'm saving copies of each photo license to an easy to access drive in case I need to refer to them quickly.

Sadly, sales are down... way down. My sales are lower than they've been since 2013, back when I had a full-time job and was doing this as a little fun side hobby. I guess people prefer the AI girls.

I'm insanely grateful to have this Patreon page. I'm super grateful to have fans here supporting me; if this page didn't exist, I would possibly be homeless right now? My Patreon income is currently my only income while I try to get things established on Google Play, and helping Nicole C get established on Amazon... Combined, Google Play and Amazon are currently only good for about $25/day.

And because of the AI-driven market saturation, I probably won't ever be able to get back to where I was. Before, I had almost 10,000 Amazon subscribers after over ten years of consistent publishing. Now, when I put out a new book, it falls out of the top 100 in trans romance within a day or two. I have books that have made less than $40.

I won't turn to tools like Chat GPT to try to release more books, or to make my books longer so they make more page-read money. I just won't do it. So, sadly, for the first time since 2014, I've gone out and gotten a job (actually an apprenticeship that will be a job in a few months). I'm officially going to be doing publishing part-time: weekends and evenings.

I'm grateful that I got to do this full-time for a whole decade. Because of AI, I don't see the possibility to ever return to doing this full-time again.