alt.hn

5/19/2026 at 8:23:44 PM

What Is Happening to Publishing?

 https://resobscura.substack.com/p/what-is-happening-to-publishing

by benbreen

5/21/2026 at 5:58:38 PM

For the past 5-6 years I've been writing a book in my spare time. The outline of it is how reason emerges in past societies from the needs of social complexity, how it's lessons get converted into rules and rituals, which in turn remove any competitive advantage of aquiring reason, ending it to setup a new cycle. And in the meanwhile LLMs became the ultimate heuristic of humanity.

I've gotten it 60-70% ready, and I really don't know if it'll have an audience in a post-AI world. I never meant to strike big with it, but I'm now wondering if thousands of hours of research and writing can amount to more than a novelty gift I'd give to friends.

by mihaic

5/21/2026 at 6:08:57 PM

I really hope you don't give up. I've built and shipped systems with 80000 to 90,000 lines of code, only to see most of the companies that bought them go out of business. But there was still immense value in the act of delivering them. By putting our creations out into the world, we connect with each other.

The act of writing and building is, in itself, humanity's grand narrative for trying to understand the world. The journey itself is inherently valuable. Isn't the ability to organize our thoughts, pass them down to the next generation, and continue that narrative exactly what makes us uniquely human?

Even if only a few people around you end up reading it, those few could be deeply inspired to go on and build an even greater world. Please don't stop. I'm rooting for you.

by jdw64

5/21/2026 at 7:14:37 PM

I’m also a writer and publish my works every week. Also working towards a book. My take? I don’t care. Still doing it for myself. God could come down in a chariot made of golden carrots and I wouldn’t change my mind.

by pryelluw

5/21/2026 at 8:27:30 PM

> God could come down in a chariot made of golden carrots

With imagery like this, I’d love to read your other work! Link?

by doitLP

5/21/2026 at 8:35:00 PM

I appreciate the kind words.

You can find a link to my newsletter over at https://yelluw.com

Do subscribe if you like it. It’s free and will stay free.

by pryelluw

5/21/2026 at 7:51:09 PM

Your comment makes me wonder what the historical ratio was between books and readers. I know that books were in very short supply a thousand years ago, but readers were also very short in supply. I wonder if things are worse in the tiktok era or the pre-printing press era.

by XargonEnder

5/21/2026 at 8:23:03 PM

Mass literacy was the result of printing presses, not the cause.

by WalterBright

5/21/2026 at 6:01:46 PM

Why wouldn’t people read it? The problem is not writing - the problem is finding an audience. Yes, AI means there are more poor works competing. But if it’s actually good writing, you will find an audience if you market the book. Pay an editor. Publish to kindle. Pay for marketing. Get people to sign up for an email list.

by saaaaaam

5/21/2026 at 8:30:04 PM

The idea that "marketing" is a simple, turnkey thing one can do to build an audience is incorrect. It's time-consuming and expensive, and most people lose money.

It's like saying "you can make money on Kalshi." Not false, but reductive.

I know plenty of authors, self-publishers and traditionally published, who've lost five and six figures marketing their own books. Whether this is worth doing is subjective, but for most people, it's not.

by mocpocalypse

5/21/2026 at 7:43:40 PM

> The problem is not writing - the problem is finding an audience.

You are literally responding to

> I really don't know if it'll have an audience

by ishouldstayaway

5/21/2026 at 8:03:58 PM

Yes. And my response was “market your book”.

by saaaaaam

5/21/2026 at 7:48:40 PM

the problem is finding an audience with reading comprehension

by red-iron-pine

5/21/2026 at 8:06:02 PM

Indeed! It appears the person you are responding to skipped over a bunch of stuff and so missed my response which was “you need to market your book, not just write it”.

by saaaaaam

5/21/2026 at 8:22:03 PM

Sure, I've been a start-up founder before, I know the trap of "if you build it, they will come". It's just that AI is evolving so fast that book do seem like the market for vinyl (as the article said).

No amount of marketing can help you out is your entire market is shrinking daily. Shriking markets are also not won by quality. The more competition, the more marketing then becomes the main thing, and you also need to alter the book in the process so that it fits the bite-sized pills you can push on most channels, or worse change it so much for the audience until it becomes something else entirely.

by mihaic

5/21/2026 at 8:38:51 PM

Also, marketing is expensive. You can spend $50 to place one copy. You'd honestly do better buying your own books, if you care about bestseller status, which will do less for you than you might think, but pays off in certain categories. [1] "Just do marketing" is advice every self-publisher hears, and yet most don't make money. Even most traditionally published authors, who benefit from enormous unfair advantages, fail.

The worsening health of the market is a real issue. And yes, writing to market is a grind. Writing for virality is worse, because you compromise the work and also don't get anything for it most of the time.

----

[1] Own-buys are common with business books. You take a loss, but you get a promotion or you earn speaking fees from the status of being a bestseller, even if no one read the damn thing. For literature, they'll cost you more than they're worth—you'll get a better advance, but not as much as you paid for the bestseller distinction.

by mocpocalypse

5/21/2026 at 7:52:10 PM

You're telling me.

by ishouldstayaway

5/21/2026 at 6:12:01 PM

> Why wouldn’t people read it? The problem is not writing - the problem is finding an audience.

And that's precisely the issue here. For a while, the internet allowed you to find an audience, just like that. Start a blog / podcast / YT channel, keep going, get enough attention. You could then approach a traditional publisher and tell them "hey, I'm kind of a big deal", or you could self-publish and rely on the word-of-mouth from your followers.

Now, how would that work? If you have a blog, AI answers will summarize it without attribution and not send anyone your way. Even the "references" cited in AI answers often point to AI-slop blogs, not the original source. The articles we discuss on HN are often AI-written too. So yeah, it's about reaching the audience, but you're now competing with machines that produce an endless stream of human-like text, good enough for most consumers, practically for free.

by lacewing

5/21/2026 at 8:12:04 PM

Word of mouth is not marketing. The way you find the audience is by marketing. Paying to get in front of people. Targeting people who read similar books. Getting people who already have audiences to review your book or interview you.

A book won’t sell itself.

Which addresses your second point: machines can produce an endless stream of human-like text, but they have exactly the same problem as human generated text: finding an audience.

How are these endless streams of human-like text finding an audience? Most of the time they are not.

And as soon as you scratch beneath the surface there is no one to interview. No one to turn up at literary festivals. No one to write opinion pieces or blog pieces for book-interested audiences. As I said: writing isn’t the problem. Finding the audience is the problem.

What distinguishes a book that is read by no one from a book that is read by a bunch of people? It’s definitely not the writing. There are great books out there that never find an audience because no one ever went out there to find an audience for those books.

by saaaaaam

5/21/2026 at 8:35:41 PM

The low budget marketing channels that worked in the past are harder in this post-LLM world. SEO seems to have changed a lot, email marketing now involves trying to escape the Promotions tab, organic social media marketing is much harder too (I suspect the large social networks want you to buy ads, not get organic reach as a person/business promoting a product or service). Marketing something like a self published book online has changed dramatically.

by camdenreslink

5/21/2026 at 8:43:13 PM

You're not wrong, but you're sorta saying "the reason most people don't make money on Kalshi is because they're bad at gambling." Marketing matters, but most writers have no idea how to do it.

Maybe I am being too hard on you, but I think everyone who follows the writing world knows that writing doesn't influence sales. That's why publishers exist. Authors right now fucking hate traditional publishing with a passion—not just rejected authors, but career midlisters and lower-tier lead-title authors—and the only reason you don't hear more rage is that they know how replaceable 99% of them are. No one would put up with them if there weren't strong economic reasons to do so.

Most marketing strategies break even or have slightly positive EV for traditional publishers, due to all the entrenched unfair advantages they have. They're -EV for self-publishers who are trying to replicate the benefits of the stolen village on a shoestring.

by mocpocalypse

5/21/2026 at 6:14:52 PM

[dead]

by jdw64

5/21/2026 at 6:50:26 PM

For what it’s worth, that sounds like a very interesting premise. N=1, but you have a potential reader here!

by backprop1989

5/21/2026 at 7:46:53 PM

I would like to read it!

Please publish it!

by i5heu

5/21/2026 at 5:40:56 PM

It's a bad short story. Whether it was generated at the hands of humans or a computer isn't really relevant. Speaking in riddles is cheap now, so authors better learn how to surprise the reader in simpler, more readable words. It seems to be something that LLMs are quite bad at.

by unglaublich

5/21/2026 at 8:46:23 PM

The Granta story was superslop. It's a bad writer's idea of what good writing looks like. It beat AI filters (which use heuristics that solidly classify the natural slush distribution, but fail against adverse examples) and it apparently beat human ones as well.

Sadly, there are published authors who basically stack literary devices without much attention to whether they actually work. If they're good at promoting themselves, they often get the benefit of the doubt.

by mocpocalypse

5/21/2026 at 7:00:53 PM

Yeah, I found this extremely unpleasant to read. I wouldn't have pegged it as LLM-assisted, but I would have pegged the author as pretentious and bad at coming up with compelling analogies.

by InsideOutSanta

5/21/2026 at 5:36:03 PM

I liked the playfulness of:

  Mixed metaphors which sound nice at first glance, but slip away from meaning like an echo chasing itself off a cliff.

  Similes that catch in your mind like river trouts tangled in the roots of a redwood tree.
Also mentions some interesting AI tells, for AI generated stories.

by robocat

5/21/2026 at 6:13:45 PM

It can be "playful" once or twice, especially if the text is playing with how nonsensical the metaphor is. By the twentieth time something is as tired as a willow tree on a Tuesday in May, as persnickety as an ant with a fever, or as rambunctious as a horny lobster, it's just nonsensical bad writing.

Metaphors are generally used to transfer the qualia of one experience into another. When the referent has no qualia, that is, you've never in your life experienced "river trouts tangled in the roots of a redwood tree", it's a failure of a metaphor. You can quibble about how special this or that metaphor is, which I've already given an example of with the "playing with how nonsensical the metaphor is", but when all the metaphors are broken that way, all the time, the writer is not "breaking the rules because they've transcended them" or anything like that, the writer is breaking them in the bad way that the rules were put there to stop and the writer should consider taking a Writing 101 course.

Though anyone taking a Writing 101 course should be aware that as near as I can tell, completing such a course is prima facie proof that they are overqualified for the vast majority of modern writing jobs.

by jerf

5/21/2026 at 6:17:52 PM

https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/778041178124926976/hy...

by bananaflag

5/21/2026 at 6:49:34 PM

The haiku observation is an interesting one:

"Likewise, he discovered that the contrast of two seeming opposites was a common feature in haiku. Ginsberg used this technique in his poetry, putting together two starkly dissimilar images: something weak with something strong, an artifact of high culture with an artifact of low culture, something holy with something unholy."

I think some of these broken metaphors could be turned into some sort of haiku-like poem, especially if we ignore the requirement to reference a season somehow, though it would still take some sort of additional work to add something to tie them together more thoroughly than the metaphor does, some third component a poet uses to glue the two bits together in some interesting way.

    tree roots sheltering
    river trout find safety but
    growth is treacherous
Eh. I'm not a poet. And I still just chucked the "Redwood" part. But maybe you can see how I also added a bit of a concept in there to tie it together. But then, of course, it's no longer a metaphor, it's a poem. It's not referencing an experience we've all had and transferring that on to something else, I'm creating a new experience. Very different.

by jerf

5/21/2026 at 7:51:45 PM

Author here - just wanted to clarify in case there is any confusion that those two (intentionally bad/weird) figures of speech about the echo and the trouts in the redwood roots were human written, by me! I wrote them as parody of an AI trying to do "literary" writing. The actual (probable) AI written excerpts are below that part.

I was thinking about the immortal Twin Peaks line "there's a FISH... in the PERCOLATOR" when I wrote the trout one.

by benbreen

5/21/2026 at 6:14:34 PM

And as much as there are still people on HN who insist that AI text can't be detected algorithmically, it's worth noting that the original story is marked 100% AI by Pangram. So it's not just this person seeing things.

by lacewing

5/21/2026 at 8:03:34 PM

AI detectors are notoriously unreliable. They constantly flag stuff I wrote as AI while letting actual AI-generated stuff pass when I've tested them.

by Kye

5/21/2026 at 8:32:17 PM

I actually really don't like the the "slip away from meaning phrase" at all. I do like "echo chasing itself off a cliff" though.

Saying "Metaphors..., slip away from meaning" instead of "Metaphors..., from which meaning slips away"

I dunno, it jumped out at me immediately.

by irishcoffee

5/21/2026 at 5:56:03 PM

I recently built and delivered an AI-driven novel-writing program. The architecture involved chaining the Claude, GPT, and Gemini APIs together so they could cross-critique and iteratively revise the text, while systematically saving key plot points and lore chapter-by-chapter. (Serialized 'web novels' published on a per-chapter basis are a massive industry here in Korea). AI has already heavily infiltrated the fiction space in Korea, and it looks like the exact same trend is hitting the US.

Personally, I find it incredibly easy to spot AI-generated text in Korean, but catching it in English is much harder for me. That being said, they still have very distinct, overused patterns. You constantly see words like 'ultimately' or 'structural,' and they rely heavily on highly formulaic 'X is Y' sentence structures.

by jdw64

5/21/2026 at 7:30:04 PM

I actually think there's going to be a big industry there, and right now, it's just mass-producing slop to exploit not-very-discerning publishing channels, but eventually an AI pipeline that can churn out mediocre, but extremely personalized one-off novels and stories on demand will be a real business.

by empath75

5/21/2026 at 7:39:21 PM

If I can figure out a way to securely manage the AI API keys, this actually sounds like a viable business idea. However, I’ll need to think it through, as I don't have experience running a live web service—my background has strictly been in custom software delivery.

I initially built and delivered this system for a specific publisher to accommodate the Korean market's standard, which requires hitting a certain character count for a text to be recognized as a single chapter. I'm not entirely sure how to pivot this into a standalone SaaS yet, so I'll need to give it some more thought.

Thank you for the advice

by jdw64

5/21/2026 at 7:42:47 PM

Will it be? I used to think that was an obvious opportunity in short-form video content, but Sora kinda flopped. I'm increasingly sympathetic to the idea that people consume content as a form of indirect community-building, and if that's the case there may genuinely not be much demand for a one-off novel that they'll love but nobody else will ever read.

by SpicyLemonZest

5/21/2026 at 6:28:22 PM

On the point of the impermeancy of digital media, I will say that actual traditional podcasts with distributed by rss can and are downloaded by design which means just like with books, a publisher can only destroy their own copies not listener copies. Also even if we pretend that YouTube podcasts can’t be deleted, most of the major ones also publish traditional podcast feeds too.

by Macha

5/21/2026 at 6:19:04 PM

I wondering about other thing - I'm assuming that publishers are now using LLM's en-masse to "proofread", do initial evaluation, do editorial work etc.

So if an author abstained from using LLM in the writing process - isn't then new, original, not yet on the market book ending up in the LLM training data corpus even before it hits the market?

by pxtail

5/21/2026 at 6:54:21 PM

>I'm assuming that publishers are now using LLM's en-masse to "proofread", do initial evaluation, do editorial work etc.

I think there is going to be a large market in all domains for providers who can convince people that they don't use LLMs.

by qsera

5/21/2026 at 8:06:15 PM

If I liked reading fiction, I wouldn't care if it was AI generated or AI-assisted, as long as there were good reviews or an indication that it's good to read. Otherwise I'd probably never find it as I wouldn't sift through AI's duds until I find a story I like.

I don't care for fiction but I like music. If I like a track, I would still like it if it was AI generated. I would love it, in fact. That would mean I likely wouldn't have to wait a long time before the artists release a new track.

If it sucks, if it's obvious slop, etc. - I'll notice or someone would tell me via reviews or thumbs down or something like that.

Earlier today there was a comment somewhere about the possibility of modern art happening by chance - that it would be fake, have no human process behind and so on. Personally, I don't care about the process behind it. I care about the art. Maybe that makes it "entertainment" for me, not "art", but it's just 2 words for the same thing. I wouldn't care if a dish was made by a Star Trek replicator or by someone's grandma who had worked all her life to perfect it.

Other people want other things, I get it, but I don't really care. I'm not afraid I'll get stuck in some weird local maximum of AI-generated music (or fiction or food), just as I haven't got stuck listening to the radio - I can search and find various types of music.

by iamalizard

5/21/2026 at 8:20:44 PM

Hard disagree. ESPECIALLY with music and fiction. It cheapens it, makes it feel hollow and is a disappointing letdown. It’s like finding out Santa Claus isn’t real. A big part of fiction and music is the act of human creation meant for other humans. It’s a form of communication and connection.

I think I get where you’re coming from if you’re thinking of fiction or music as just like pure baseless entertainment. But that’s like talking about food and meaning Soylent or a handful of sugar cubes in place of a home cooked meal or pastry-chef crafted dessert.

by soupfordummies

5/21/2026 at 7:35:11 PM

Publishers loose money on most books and most advances they pay authors, and are simply gambling for the big hits.

by daedrdev

5/21/2026 at 7:21:23 PM

Loses some credibility with this footnote; https://resobscura.substack.com/p/what-is-happening-to-publi...

> I suspect the hum obsession has something to do with LLMs “awareness” that their “physical selves” exist in data centers.

by ldite

5/21/2026 at 7:24:11 PM

That's possible, right? LLMs probably do know that they are in data centres and that data centres hum. If asked to write a story they may also have internalized that writers write best from their personal experience. All of that's in the training data....

by dash2

5/21/2026 at 7:52:42 PM

LLM’s don’t ‘know’ anything in the conventual meaning of the word.

by lazide

5/21/2026 at 5:41:25 PM

The worst thing about this is not really that somebody might have had AI help writing a story, but that an editor thought they could get any kind of useful information from asking an AI whether the story was written by AI. If there's any hope of editors staying ahead of this phenomenon, they will need to educate themselves a lot better about how it actually works.

by wrs

5/21/2026 at 7:50:12 PM

[dead]

by warumdarum