“Disruption” may prove harder than they think
A new publisher has claimed it aims to “disrupt” the books industry by publishing 8,000 books in 2025 alone using artificial intelligence (AI). Spines, founded in 2021 but which published its first titles this year, is a startup technology business which—for a fee—is offering the use of AI to proofread, produce, publish and distribute books. The company charges up to $5,000 a book, but it can take just three weeks to go from a manuscript to a published title.
They aren’t a publisher. They’re a scammer, but bragging about it openly, which takes gall. They’re charging “up to” $5000 to produce a book for you using AI. Let’s pause for some quick arithmetic. $5000 x 8000 = $40,000,000, which is enough for the four smart guys pictured on this article to each take $10,000,000 and retire to some pleasant tropical paradise and spend the rest of their lives sipping fancy drinks with fruit on little sticks*. Minus expenses, but does anybody think the expenses will be at all high? I don’t. AI-produced manuscripts are basically free, AI-produced covers are basically free, three weeks to hold someone’s hand and murmur about bestseller status is free except for the time it takes and the cost in lost sleep as you agonize about how unethical you’re being.
Somehow I suspect these guys aren’t going to be losing a lot of sleep, though.
The Bookseller asked if any of the titles published by Spines have gone on to be bestsellers. Niv said: “Yes, we’ve had several successes.” A follow up e-mail supplied the names of seven titles published this year that Spines claim are bestsellers. When asked for sales volume information they said “that data is private and belongs to the author”. Of the six titles The Bookseller could find for sale on Amazon, one had more than 70 reader ratings, with the others ranging from seven to 22 ratings.
Spoiler: those aren’t bestsellers. I can’t even be bothered to roll my eyes. But I bet gullible, hopeful, “authors” who know nothing about books or publishing will be sucked in.
I have seen multiple articles where people are all hot and bothered by Spines’ plans to “disrupt the publishing industry.” I’ve seen this reaction on Twitter/X too. I simply don’t understand it.
Let’s try some math! Hey, Google, about how many books are published per year right now, counting self-published books? … Okay, looks like the guesses vary, but it also looks like reasonable estimates range from about 1.5 MILLION titles per year to 4 MILLION titles per year. Let’s pick the lower number, 1,500,000 books per year. It can be hard, grasping big numbers. How many IS that? Can we put that into terms that are easier to grasp?
It is 28,846 books PER WEEK.
It’s 4120 books PER DAY.
This is the LOWEST plausible estimate of the number of books published. The real number could plausibly be more like 11,000 books PER DAY.
Spines is planning to “disrupt publishing” by bringing out another 154 books per week. That is, they’re planning to add HALF A PERCENT to the total of the LOWEST reasonable estimate of books per year. This is supposed to be disruptive? Do they even know what “disruptive” means?
How do those sharp guys at Spines plan to get readers to notice the books they drop into the vast, vast ocean of self-published titles? Well, they don’t! They’re going to point at a few books they’ve brought out and say they’re bestsellers, but actual sales data is proprietary and just trust them, a book with SEVEN ratings is a bestseller.
If you google “publisher spines book titles” you can rapidly locate some titles of books “published” by Spines.
For example, and I’m just picking them randomly off the top of the list of titles,
Managing Vertigo Naturally. No sales rank. It’s never sold a copy.
SIP HAPPENS: A Crash Course for Gen Z & Millennials. That’s quite a fun title! Sales rank: 5,341,798.
The Art of Living: Wisdom from Proverbs: Remember the F.R.O.G. That’s a fairly awful title. Sales rank: 4,483,771.
The Thoughts and Feelings of a Lonely Wolf. Only available in paper!?! Sales rank: 9,804,911, and no wonder, since it’s not available as an ebook. ONLY A SCAMMER would EVER suggest publishing a paper edition and no ebook.
Let me just try a comparison title. What’s a book that’s been out since the dawn of time, is not at all well known, and is available only in paper? I’m trying to think of a book that is probably selling really badly, that’s the point. A real book, a quite good book, but something that we can be sure is selling almost no copies … how about …
Interior Life by Katherine Blake. I like this novel a lot and wrote a post about it a few years ago. It came out in 1990, it’s only available in paper, it’s not at all well known. What is its current sales rank? Its rank is 3,183,406. This is a book that’s been out for 34 years, a book that practically no one has ever heard of, a book that is not being promoted in any way, a book that has no digital edition, and THIS BOOK is more than a million places ahead of the best-ranked of those four books from Spines, all of which came out recently.
I just don’t understand why anyone is taking this seriously. I understand why gullible would-be “authors” are likely to get scammed. I agree that’s a shame, though when would-be authors are trying to generate books using AI, my sympathy is muted. But I simply don’t understand why anybody is concerned about the potential disruption something like this can possibly cause.
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* Yes, the “fruit! on little sticks!” came from Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance. Lots of great lines in that book.
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I agree, such books should not worry real writers. If a reader appreciates such things, he is unlikely to appreciate anything well written. But I never judge a book by copy sales. What makes or breaks a book selling can depend on many factors, and often has nothing to do with quality.