Somewhere in the world, in the time it’s taken you to read this sentence, another book dropped onto Amazon’s shelves. Roughly 7,500 new ebooks are published every single day, which is nudging a quarter of a million every single month.
Worryingly, an increasing number of those books are being churned out by a machine. There are now scores of courses that teach people how to create a book in a weekend using AI, and those books are a problem for those of us who spend months, years even, doing it the hard way.
I would personally never read a book written by an AI, any more than I’d listen to an album of songs written and performed by AI. When I read, I need to feel a human connection on some level. I want to laugh, gasp, recoil, maybe even shed a tear at the end. In short, I want to feel the emotions that the author experienced themselves at some point, and injected into their writing.
I pray I’m not alone.
The challenge of being an indie author
If you had to guess which part of being an author is hardest, you’d probably guess writing the actual book, right?
It’s not.
The hard part isn’t writing. It isn’t the editing, the cover, the audiobook production, the marketing, or any of the dozen jobs an indie author funds out of their own pocket.
The hard part is being seen at all.
In a real bookshop, someone might spot your book because of the cover, tilt their head, and pull it from the shelf. One of a few dozen. Online, that shelf contains forty-odd million titles. Nobody outside of Amazon knows the true figure, since they stopped publishing it in 2018, but it’s fair to say it’s a fuck-ton of books.
I’ll be blunt about my own position because I really want my readers to understand the grim reality of being an author in 2026. I earn about the same amount of money today as I did in 2021. In that time, I’ve doubled the number of books available with my name on the cover. Twice the stock, same royalty cheque. I’m one of the lucky ones who can just about afford to do this full-time, and even from up here the view is sobering.
Then there’s my mate and fellow indie author, Adam Eccles. Adam writes exactly the sort of books I love: warm, time-travel comedy with a proper heart, banged out by a self-described tech-nerd hermit on the west coast of Ireland. He released a new novel a couple of months back (Cold Heart October – check it out). It’s garnered over a hundred reviews, all but a couple five stars. The readers who’ve found it adore it, but it’s selling nowhere near the numbers a book that good deserves. The quality is all there. The being-seen isn’t.
What does the future look like for indies?
You might be wondering why it matters if Amazon allows thousands of AI-created novels into its catalogue every week. If they’re shite, no one will read them. The reading isn’t the issue; it’s the fact that the so-called authors of those books are spending money to promote their slop on the two main advertising platforms we authors depend on: Amazon Ads and Facebook.
Both platforms work on an auction basis, so if you’re trying to promote a time-travel novel and a thousand other authors want their book to pop up whenever a reader conducts a search, we’re all bidding on the same keyword. More competition, higher click costs, and a significantly lower chance of breaking even with your adverts.
Consequently, indie authors stop advertising because they’re losing money. What little visibility they had disappears overnight. The book sales dwindle to almost nothing. And all the while, the Amazon algorithm sees clicks on the AI books and wrongly assumes they’re popular. One AI book alone is an irrelevance but hundreds of thousands of them is a problem. A real problem.
I’m not a pessimist, but I am a realist. When the sales dry up for the midlist indie author, the midlist indie author stops writing. They simply decide it isn’t worth another year of their life. No dramatic farewell; they just stop creating. The book you might have loved, the one that might have become your favourite, is never written, because the person who might have penned it just faded into another career.
I’m not fishing for sympathy, by the way. Nobody forced me into this career, and I’d rather do it than almost anything else. What you need to understand is that the consequences stretch far beyond my door. If things continue along this trajectory, we’ll enter a world with fewer indie authors, and those who remain will take fewer risks with their writing. As a result, you’ll find a diminishing supply of the quirky but brilliant books that don’t fit a tidy marketing category. Plus, a great deal more of whatever a machine can generate in a few days.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that there are an awful lot of indie authors already close to giving up. Some already have, and that makes me incredibly sad.
Where you come in
There is some light at the end of the tunnel, some hope, and it’s the reason I’m writing these words. You are the one who can truly make a difference. Not the algorithm. You.
If you’ve read an indie-authored book you loved this year, there are two things you can do that cost nothing but could make the difference between an indie author giving up or hanging in there.
- Leave a positive review on Amazon, even if it’s just one line. It’s the strongest signal another reader will ever see, and the greatest advantage we have over the AI-written books.
- If you’re still feeling generous after leaving that review, tell one person about the book. Maybe even tell everyone who follows you on social media. We all need visibility more than anything right now.
Also, remember that Amazon loves promoting books that are already bestsellers. The big-name authors and celebrities get more than their fair share of Amazon’s front page while the rest of us are relegated to pages eleven or twelve in the results. So, the next time you’re looking for a good book, please do browse beyond the first page. If you’re willing to do a bit of mining, there are plenty of gems to be discovered. I promise you.
And finally, I’d like you to consider one thing. Can you imagine a world where every novel, every story is produced by a small number of publishers who control the entire market or, worse still, shelves dominated by books written entirely with AI?
That might sound dramatic, but it’s not beyond the realm of possibility.
I don’t know about you, but as a reader, that thought fills me with dread. Let’s not allow it to happen.
As always, thank you for reading.
Keith x