A history of neglect

Recently, news broke of a new publisher that seeks to disrupt publishing by using AI to publish 8,000 books alone in 2025. The article swept publishing. Editors, agents, publicists, marketers and salespeople, all up in arms about how this would bring about the end of the industry, how it is awful and capitalistic and absolutely disgusting of this company to make money off people’s creations without paying them. What about the authors, we demanded to know, whose works have been fed into large language models to spit out these books? When do they get their cut—even if they want to be involved, which is unlikely for most?

I have to confess to feeling frustrated when I saw publishing employees in the UK rage against this startup on social media. Though I know they were coming at this with good intentions, I found myself wondering: well, how much do you truly mean this? How far are you willing to go to fight for authors’ rights and revenues?

Only two weeks ago, HarperCollins announced that it was going to allow some of its titles to be used to train AI models. They would only pick non-fiction titles and ask the authors for their permission first. But, of course, there was no mention of money. We understand that authors will be paid, but we don’t know if that’s a flat fee across all authors, or if authors will be paid in line with the success of their books. We also don’t know how much money HarperCollins stands to make from this deal. This, from the same company that, in April of this year, said that it would be using an AI company to create audiobooks for foreign titles. There was also the announcement, one month ago, of a Dutch publishing company, owned by Simon & Schuster, that will be using AI to trial English translations of their books. I’m sure that these companies are not the first, nor will they be the last. This technology is here to stay.

But then, the problem isn’t necessarily AI, but the publishing industry’s lack of courage and conviction in getting the best deal for authors when it comes to new industry developments. Just two weeks ago, Amazon UK announced that it was going to fold in one audiobook a month as part of its Amazon Music offering. This, of course, is in response to Spotify’s offering of 15 hours of audiobook listening, as part of its paid subscription. We all remember the uproar from agents in defence of their authors when this was announced, just over two years ago. How will we know, they demanded, how many people are listening; how royalties will work; whether an author will be paid if someone listens to an hour of their audiobook or only if they listen to the whole thing; when will reports be issued; and so on. 

The problem isn’t necessarily AI, but the publishing industry’s lack of courage and conviction in getting the best deal for authors when it comes to new industry developments.

Yet, I don’t think answers to those questions were ever clearly laid out. As far as I can see, agents have simply accepted that audiobooks are now available as part of a Spotify subscription. Just two weeks ago, Spotify announced that Bloomsbury had signed a deal to add its audiobooks to Spotify’s library. Two weeks before that, Spotify said that it was expanding its audiobooks offering to four new countries: France, Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. Business is going strong, the industry is happy to participate... and we still don’t really know what the net gain or cost for authors has been.

The history of publishing in the modern day is littered with acceptances like this. Take, for example, the very first year of the pandemic. Publishers went from offering very little of their prized books in Amazon’s Kindle Monthly Deal, where the price of an e-book drops to 99p for a month, to panicking that bookshops were closed and offering everything en masse. From my own experience, I saw the Kindle Monthly Deal increased from around 30 pages every month to over 100. Four years on, the trend has continued. It’s no longer rare to see a bestselling, prize-winning book have its e-book price reduced to 99p within months of being on the shelves. 

Or think of the Kindle Unlimited subscription, which allows readers to read as much as they want for a fixed price a month, with low-quality books flooding the market using Amazon’s own self-publishing system, engineered precisely to get as much money out of that monthly pot as they can? 

Or what about the huge discounts that Amazon and the supermarkets have pushed onto publishers, that publishers have accepted, because they care only about the bottom line? Better, of course, to have the next David Walliams or Harlan Coben or Lisa Jewell on the shelves, or any number of bestselling authors who probably don’t need the extra exposure, than to fight the discounts for the sake of their other authors.

Or, or, or. These are not the only examples.

Simply put, the recent AI deals are just another nail in the coffin of authors’ rights to be paid for their work. Only last week did we hear that applications for hardships grants from the Royal Literary Fund have gone up by 400%. To those of us who work in publishing, to publishers and agents specifically, it is not enough to simply go onto Twitter and denounce vociferously. So here’s my challenge: What will we do to actually stop this, collectively? Or do we simply continue to do business as usual, too scared to rock the boat, until AI authors are the only ones that can afford to produce our books?