| > Over this period, the number of books with observed sales in a quarter grew 19.2-fold, while quarterly revenue grew only 8.9-fold. That's very interesting, and not as dramatic a dilution as I'd expected over the period (2023 - 26), or even close to as dramatic an increase in overall number of titles (achieving a sale) as I expected. This sample is limited to what the study's authors have defined as "self-published genre fiction", which isn't representative of the market as a whole, and has very different economics compared to, for example, fiction titles published by "Big 5" publishers. Whether the sales of non-self-published books are potentially being diluted is an interesting question, because it will tell us slightly more about where those AI sales might be coming from. I'd like to know unit and revenue numbers for non-self-published titles for the same period, in the same Amazon categories - on the off-chance anyone here has BookScan access and that's something you can pull. Overall, though, this seems like a relatively optimistic result. If the economics don't work in the longer-term - the dilution effect ends up not being worth the token cost & labour, unless you can "hit" relatively reliably - we'll end up with less slop, put out by slop-auteurs running book farms, which I think is a fine outcome. This is not without precedent by any stretch - the only meaningfully new part of that would be the writing mechanism. It strikes me as a possible eventual equilibrium that's both realistic and makes logical sense. Putting aside the AI-fiction panic, and "the novel is dead" hyperbolics (which is something that's been said about as long as novels have existed), it probably will settle around a % of low-budget genre fiction being slop - as it always has been. It feels a little patronising to suggest readers looking for anything more "serious" will be seduced and have their sales diluted by mass-produced LLM outputs. Readers deserve more credit than that, I hope. But it looks, to me, really hard to read anything directionally on that at all, especially without equivalent numbers on titles from actual publishers. |