The weirdest thing has happened on my site over the past few months: the bots have come to be a little bit obsessed with it. Traffic is way, way, way up…but I know they’re bots, because almost none of the views are repeat views. It has to be AI agent scraping for data, right? Has to be. But why here? Today, they went hog wild. Over 1,000 views. What are they looking for? What did they find??? We’ll never know.
A debate is raging at the moment over in the indie author community. A digital distributor has decided to start charging for new account signups ($20 one-time) and an annual fee for those accounts that earn less than $100 in royalties ($12/year). Their reasoning: AI.
The digital book world is struggling with how to deal with a deluge of AI-generated content. It’s passing the already-published filters, clearly, which isn’t a surprise. While everything AI does is derivative—just look at how much they’re currently scraping my blog—it does have the rather remarkable feature of, usually, being rearranged enough to look unique. So, that means anyone willing to pay for ChatGPT or Claude can write entire books in a matter of hours. Maybe even minutes, I don’t know. Probably hours. A book a day? If you’re being stingy with the material, which I guarantee many aren’t. Slap that shit up on Amazon or some other aggregate distributor and whamo-slamo you can start suckering people into buying that piece of shit you haven’t even read. AI’s even got you covered on the cover.
So, yeah. People are doing this by the thousands. Hundreds of books a week from some of them. And to get past the “you can only upload this many books a week or day” restrictions that was the first step to try and stave this shit off, the spammers are opening multiple accounts.
Of course these books don’t make hardly any money each—there’s no marketing going on here; spammers don’t want to PAY for anything—but that doesn’t matter if you can publish books in the hundreds or thousands. Even if they earned a dollar each, you just made a thousand dollars. Enticing.
Destructive.
It could ruin everything. Nobody wants to read spam. If this is allowed to take over, indie publishing could cease to be viable. It’s not hyperbole. If the quality of a product goes down enough, its customers will abandon it. So, it’s an existential crisis.
So…make it not profitable to publish that many books that make hardly anything on their own. And make it cost-prohibitive to open all those accounts. It’s the first stab at a solution for this problem that I think might actually work. You can’t get-rich-quick if you’re spending more than you’re making.
So, yeah. I’m for the fee. The debate rages over how it punishes the lowest earners the most, that its a corporate cash grab, or that it’s the just beginning of more and more and more fees…but I’m not buying it. All those arguments fail to address the fact that 1) these fees are incredibly reasonable, and 2) this might be the only way to stop the avalanche of AI shit that’s already coming down off the mountain. If these fees end up turning into a corporate greed-fest, sign me up for the pitchforks. But they’re not right now, so that rhetoric is literally a logical fallacy called the “slippery slope.”
$12 a year is an incredibly low price to pay to fight back against spam.
/endofline
—tonight’s artwork is from Shigeru Komatsuzaki