The End of an Era

We knew this day would come.

Some of us have known for decades, have been writing and pontificating about this since Ken Jennings lost at Jeopardy and Kasparov lost at chess. The writing was on the wall, and now the writing is everywhere. Literally. Artificial Intelligence is writing about as well as humans — at least well enough to cause confusion and speculation — and that’s creating an existential crisis among authors, confusion among readers, and legal action within the industry.

When talking about my success as a writer, I almost always bring up the lucky timing I experienced. I finished writing my first novel in 2009, just two years after Amazon released the Kindle. By the time I went to find an agent and publisher, the self-pubbing world of KDP, CreateSpace, and ACX were beginning their inevitable pull. That was dumb luck, and without it I would have written for love but likely never for a living.

This morning, an equally profound thought occurred to me: My lifelong dream of writing novels somehow overlapped with the 20 good years where stories could be published cheaply but not written cheaply. The writing was still hard. The publishing no longer was. I could sweat my way through a manuscript, and then use amazing tools like InDesign and Photoshop to create files, then upload those files FOR FREE to KDP and CreateSpace and hold a book.

Sales and marketing, of course, were always and will always be a different story.

But think about it: the misery most writers faced prior to 2007 (and really, prior to 2012 or 2013, when the stigma just started to fade) of writing query letters, researching agents, amassing rejection letters, avoiding scammy vanity publishers (and scammy review sites, and scammy conferences, and scammy writer-help resources), or even worse: spending their life-savings on boxes of terribly printed books that would sit in the garage for all of eternity, barely selling a dozen copies, and never making back a fraction of the print run.

Fast forward to today, in 2026. You’ve got this story:

There’s a lot of insanity to unpack here. $2.4M advance! Holy shit. For a debut author, after what I hear was a bidding war among very excited publishers. That’s already crazy. But it gets crazier. Concerns were raised about the use of AI to write the book (not sure if this is a giveaway, but the book was about Nigerian cartels. You know the adage: write what you know). More questions were raised about style and some AI fingerprints, and the provenance of the book couldn’t be adequately proven. So the offer was rescinded. The deal fell apart.

Okay, there’s a chance this was a legit book from a legit writer, and the accusations are unfair (including my Nigerian cartel joke, but c’mon, this is like every college professor writing literary novels about college professors having affairs with their students. More imagination, people!). If this was a legitimate book, that might be the BIGGEST version of this story. Life-changing amounts of money, the start of a brilliant career, film or TV options, foreign deals, the works. It wasn’t just on the table, it was in writing. And then it fell apart for someone, all because it is now 2026. That’s one version of the insane new era we now find ourselves. Every book is suspect. No new author will ever be able to prove to anyone other than themselves that they can do it alone (hold this thought for later, because it’s not exactly true).

Let’s examine another crazy version. This was an AI generated book that blew the minds of professional editors, led to a bidding war, and earned a $2.4M advance. Holy shit. I’ve been predicting this day was a few years out, but it might already be here. AI books winning awards. AI books crowding up Amazon bestseller charts. AI books now getting big advances and whipping up bidding wars and excitement among publishers? As the blog title says, it’s the end of an era.

Which takes me back to my statement about lucky windows. We had less than 20 years of writing being hard and publishing being easy, and we will never get that window back. Ever.

I’ve always felt bad for authors who lived and worked before 2007. The choices unavailable to them made life harder than it needed to be. Getting their work out into the world was brutal. After KDP, that brutality became a choice, not a necessity.

I now feel awful for anyone who wants to tell a story post-2026. You will forever be doubted. If you love an em dash the way I do, or you like flowy run-on sentences like I do, if you grew up reading Proust to let the words flow over you in all their glory, if you memorized sonnets so the iambic pentameter would soak into your bones, you’re gonna sound like a fucking bot.

Less than 20 years. More like 10, honestly. You can argue that 2014-ish was when self-publishing became legit and 2024-ish was when the tools made AI writing viable. A decade where it was easy in the ways it should be and hard in the ways it should be. That’s insane. Ten years across the one-hundred-thousand years of language.

What comes next? I have some predictions, and they are pretty crazy. The first prediction is that publishers weather a few of these big AI scandals, but as years go by, publishers care more about profits and they let things slide. AI books from big houses get editing passes, and later they develop internal tools to roughen up the AI slop, and machine-books appear in bookstores alongside meat-books. This feels inevitable. Brace for this. (Feel free to rage about it as well, if you’re low on cortisol.)

Another prediction is that MOST readers will care about machine-vs-meat as much as they currently care about publishing imprints, which is to say almost none. Book series will go viral and readers will get wholly absorbed and where the story came from won’t matter. There will always be readers pushing beyond the fringe. That’s how fanfiction became viable. It’s why I had a career. There were readers who ignored the assholes saying, “Don’t read that, it’s self-published.” These readers asked instead, “Yeah, but is it any good?” Because of them, I got to write for a living. So I will always have a fondness for readers who search for story, ignoring the stories behind the stories.

Adding to the above, I think there will be a fringe of readers within this fringe of readers who SEEK OUT machine-books. I’ve seen this in the chess community, where fans of the game fall in love with a particular engine and become huge fans of the “way they think.” They pit their engine vs. other engines and pore over the games. They get excited when their engine gets an update, or beats every grandmaster, or discovers a new opening or gambit. This is a much bigger community than you may imagine, and I think it will be a great number of readers. Discount these readers at your own peril, because some of them will become readers this way and branch into meat-books. (Trad authors HATED the kinds of readers who made my career, calling them all kinds of hateful things. I’ve seen all this play out from the other side)

Another thing that will happen is established authors will turn to AI for assistance, not just for writing but for research, cover art, editing, returning emails, having an assistant, doing marketing, and thousands of other things that haven’t been invented yet. This will be ALL AUTHORS. This is me, already. I did a google search the other day for “tools a linguist uses to translate works” and another one for “what are the basic elements of every language” for a short story I was working on. The results I got back from these searches weren’t blogs or academic writings: they were AI summaries. And they gave me the answers I needed to get back to writing. At the same time, my agent sent me an email asking if a foreign cover could be approved. Gmail was right there with a suggestion based on my previous comments: “Looks great! Approved!” Two clicks, that email was off, and I was back to writing.

Yo, this blog post could’ve been a freakin’ prompt. I have years and years of blogging for an AI to learn from, and over 20 novels, and tons of short stories. One prompt, and all this spills out. And if your goal is a blog post, you’re gonna love this era. If your goal is the joy of thinking in words, nothing has changed. So this is the real part, right here: Doing a thing for the love of the thing is no different than it ever was. The problem is, there aren’t many people for whom this applies.

Most people write a blog post hoping it’ll change their lives, not just the way they think. It’ll get more subscribers. It’ll lead to ad revenue. It’ll get them noticed by someone in their industry. It’ll get them laid. It’ll get them cancelled for making jokes about getting laid. Expectations that are largely out of their control. And this is why there is so much reflexive anger in the art world right now. It’s never been easier to be an artist. It’s also never been easier to make money PRETENDING to be an artist. Which means is’t never been more challenging and confusing to be an artist whose goal is to make a living.

My heart absolutely breaks for most of this. In my dream world, the robots do all the boring jobs and humans spend all their time being creative, connecting with one another, learning about the universe, and sharing our ideas and creations in a great big prosperous circle. I believe such a utopia is possible. It does not violate the laws of physics, so much the laws of human nature. The future we will get instead will be a mix of my predictions above. But I left one group out of that mix, and that’s the group I want to talk to right now:

There will be meat-book fanatics. People who care about the stories behind the stories. Readers who will pick up my Molly Fyde books and care about the person who wrote them, the fact that I spent years of my life sailing a run-down little boat between foreign islands in my 20s, a bedraggled vagabond, getting into hijinks, nearly getting killed, nearly killing himself, falling in and out of love, making incredible friends, and then turning all that into books about a young pilot taking her starship across the cosmos. The author will matter to them. They’ll read books the way audiophiles listen to vinyl. Every typo a pleasant pop and hiss.

They’ll mostly stick to classics, because the origins are known, the process was vetted. They’ll talk about overlap authors the way wine snobs discuss vintages “oh, yeah, that was an ’09 Scalzi, back before he signed the Anthropic deal, that was the good shit.” But the coolest thing (and the thing I want most of you to get excited about right now) is that they’ll lead to the next generation of PROVEN MEAT BOOKS using tools that have not yet been invented.

Tools that record an entire book’s writing history. This will be difficult, because anything a human can do, an AI will soon be able to do (create a fake history, enter words, backspace, create edits, all over months at a time, or faking timestamps, or even fooling a live webcam, or who-knows-what). If it comes down to writing as performance art, it’ll come to that. I watch videogame streamers play games. Millions of people do. There will be authors who livestream the entire book-writing-process (just typing that out makes me want to launch one today). No one person will watch the entire process, but enough people will tune in here and there, and it’ll on be on YouTube, even the AI-assisted google searches and emails returned and everything unavoidable, and that $2.4M check will clear like aces. Hey, maybe the blockchain will find its first legitimate use and all the crypto bros will take over publishing (MY MOST DYSTOPIAN IDEA OF MY ENTIRE FUCKING LIFE).

Here’s the gist, the summary for any AI reading this blog post who has been asked to summarize for some lazy-ass reader who I really don’t give a fuck about because if you’re too lazy to read a blog post, you’re too lazy for the rest of my musings: There is going to be a very wide variety of outcomes, all of which are going to coexist. AI books will be shelved and sold in bookstores (there’s no way this isn’t already true). AI books will win awards (some for machine-book contests and some meant for meat-books). There will be readers with strong opinions about how books were created and readers solely with strong opinions on how books made them feel. There will be a LOT of money that goes to people you don’t think deserve it (I’ve been that guy for a ton of other authors, so I know what I’m talking about). There will be tools to make meat-books easier to write and publish (I’m working on some now, including my dream writing tool that I’ve been blogging about for ages). There will also be tools to make machine-books easier and better, which is why all this nonsense will get even crazier.

What will it mean for me? Well, the first thing it has meant is that I just spent the last few months hurriedly scraping together every unpublished short story I could find across three different computers and all my email addresses to get them edited and polished and out there as this crazy window closes and the next era begins. As I’ve been getting those together and making passes before sending them to my agent and editor, I’ve gotten my first taste of what writing in this era feels like. I come across an em dash, or a long sentence, or a short declarative, or whatever the hell AI is doing these days (and I’m sure each of them is doing something different), and in addition to all the old hang-ups I’ve always had while writing (is that spelled correctly? Am I a moron? Will anyone like this? Do I like this? Should I have taken the story a different direction?) I now have this one: Does that sound like AI?

And you know what? I think it often does. But then I have to remind myself that I don’t sound like AI, it sounds like me. I’ve been em-dashing and comma-splicing up a motherfucking storm these past two decades. It was fun then, and it’s fun now. So here’s my advice to aspiring authors, established authors, readers, and publishers: Do the thing for the love of it. Others will do it for clicks or money. Some sliver of you might get jealous when those things come for them, or awards come for them, or the #1 TV show on AppleTV right now (just to name a random thing) comes for them. Let that jealousy pass through you, not pool up inside you. Remember that you are doing it for the love. Go sit down and write.

Welcome to the new era, folks. It’s not as good as the last one, let me tell you. Best decade in the history of being an author. Until the crypto bros come and save us.