Five Things: September 5, 2024
This is my bi-weekly “newsletter” delivered straight to your inbox, with at least one guaranteed typo I’ll catch after hitting send! If email’s not your thing, don’t hesitate to switch to the RSS feed. I encourage you to click through the main links (there’s only five and they’re all interesting!), and if you enjoy something — send me (or them) an email, leave a comment, or hit the socials!
_ONE
You Don’t Need AI To Write A Novel | Riley MacLeod
When AI is brought into the mix, it doesn’t matter what you produce or how and why you produced it, simply that words exist that didn’t before. You could even argue, if you wanted to be haughty, that this is the problem of NaNoWriMo itself, and the organization’s AI statement lays that bare.
We can add NaNoWriMo to the list of organizations scoring AI-assisted own goals, possibly for the laziest reason imaginable: sponsorship money. It’s literally no secret that they’ve had some serious financial challenges, among other things; they have a page dedicated to it, prominently linked in their main nav: Changes at NaNoWriMo. As I’m writing this, it’s dated May 2024 and the only mentions of “ai” appear within words like complaints, training, and, most notably, fundraising.
I remember NaNoWriMo’s innocent early days of building community around methodically cranking out a terrible first draft without your internal editor interfering, and even participated a couple of years, resulting in one of the weirdest things I’ve ever written. (I’ve reread it a few times since then, wondering if I could revive it, heh, and have no idea where it was going, and in true NaNoWriMo pantser style, I probably had no clue when I was writing it, either.)
I watched in disappointment over the years as some writers started believing these rough first drafts were worthy of submission, first for traditional publishers and, ultimately, posted on Amazon. The organization itself became increasingly institutionalized and started taking itself way too $eriou$ly, particularly during my Writers Digest years when I tried to partner with them on education, but they were only interested in sponsorship opportunities. This latest misstep is disappointing but not surprising, and they surely won’t be the last arts organization to make a tone-deaf decision related to “AI” nonsense.
PS: I don’t know anything about the organizers, but there’s already a push to reclaim the original spirit of NaNoWriMo that might be worth keeping an eye on if you found its structure and community appealing: writingmonth.org.
__TWO
SHHH! DON’T TELL THESE DIGITAL COMICS STARTUPS THAT AI IS A BAD IDEA | Rob Salkowitz
It turns out Kaepernick was just the first player flushed out of the pocket and subjected to a massive pile-on. Several other companies are rolling out similar offerings that probably look awesome in the pitch deck, but may face a different reception in the market.
Salkowitz calls out several AI-driven comics startups on their “democratizing access to creativity” nonsense, and jokingly asks if their press releases were written by bots — which they probably were. It will be interesting to see how other media outlets cover them, if at all, and which ones will be given the benefit of the doubt because an industry insider is involved vs. getting raked over the coals like Kaepernick deservedly was.
The investments in these startups are all chump change for VCs, but the variety suggests they’re desperately trying to find another audience to drink the Kool-Aid — because relying on “influential” business execs who think writing emails is too difficult but marketing is easy aren’t going to deliver the ROI they need fast enough.
___THREE
Set Your Book Up For Success for the Library Market | Becky Spratford
When we know what their issues and concerns are, we can be better partners with them in our shared goal of getting more books by independent publishers into our collections.
I’m glad to see Spratford connecting with IBPA members to teach them more about libraries, and even more so for framing the opportunity to librarians themselves on her excellent blog.
I’ve been encouraging smaller publishers to learn about and engage libraries for years, especially at the local/regional level, partly because many of them can offer libraries what they aren’t typically getting from Big 5 bestsellers: diverse titles, often having local relevance, with fair licensing terms and pricing. I’ll actually be in Nashville later this month doing it again.
Librarians, though, have to be willing to meet them halfway and do a little extra legwork to learn about these publishers and their titles because traditional marketing channels simply aren’t designed to support their discovery, and Foreword can’t cover them all.
One thing I vehemently disagree with Spratford on, though, is her advice (on the podcast) to have family and friends request an author’s title from their libraries, and even worse, that authors should regularly check out their own books to feign interest and avoid weeding. If you haven’t been able to generate legitimate demand for your book nor have a local angle of interest or specific expertise that appeals to your library, you need to be focusing your energies elsewhere.
____FOUR
Manga is Not “Backward”, and the Format is Not a Reason to Restrict Access to a Book | Ashley Hawkins
Having worked with many young people in all grades from 3K-12, I can affirm that manga as a format is an excellent way to engage readers of varying abilities, neurotypes, and reading levels. It is a multimodal format, and the difference in printing style has benefits to our readers.
The first time I met Hawkins was during a webinar for the day job, Understanding Manga, where she mentioned that she was on the spectrum and that manga was particularly notable for the clarity of its characters’ facial expressions, making emotional cues more accessible, and the stories themselves more engaging. It immediately changed how I viewed manga, and I’ve become an avid reader ever since.
I’m not much of a fan of Shonen, but I get its appeal, and I always find it annoying when I read articles claiming boys don’t read and middle grade book sales are declining, but there’s never any mention of manga despite it being one of the best-selling categories in the industry the past few years — dominated by Shonen series. Unfortunately, it aligns with corporate publishing’s perception of who its primary readers are.
Communities attempting to use the right-to-left format as an excuse to limit access to manga simply demonstrate that a) they don’t understand visual literacy, and b) are running out of masks to hide their real agenda.
_____FIVE
The practice of Ways | L. Rhodes
A Ways folder should be more than just an archive of instructions you’ve copied or paraphrased from somewhere else. Everything in it should be personal, experiential, practical. Each page should explain something you’ve made your own.
I love coming across a name and definition for a thing I’ve had a vague idea about but couldn’t formulate into a coherent thought. I recently stumbled across Rhodes on Mastodon, enjoyed what I saw on his feed, started poking around his blog — as one does — and this post jumped out at me.
I suspect I’ve had at least a few posts over the past 20+ years on this blog that qualify for a Ways folder, but I love the underlying premise. As social media continues to devolve and the web itself is being purposefully disrupted to force AI’s lie of inevitability down our collective throats, personal websites can once again become valuable sources of information and connections.
This is the way.
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Re NaNoWriMo, I always feel that one of the worst aspects of capitalism is how everything one does for love is seen as a money-making opportunity as soon as one gets half-way good at it–or one’s reach is large enough that monetizing for more than hosting costs seems likely. Because then it invariably becomes a game of “how can we maximize profit?” and if the answer is, “by exploiting someone else”, it soon stops mattering.
Tangentially related to point two, this part: “relying on “influential” business execs who think writing emails is too difficult but marketing is easy aren’t going to deliver the ROI they need fast enough.” makes me think of the heavy push for AI earlier this year at the large corporation I work for–and how just a couple of months after everyone was forced to take “AI training”, no one has ever brought it up again. And no one uses it, because it was never actually usable for anything we do.
Point three: well, yikes. I adore RAforAll blog and I admire the hard work both Becky and Robin put into their anti-racist training. Discoverability is the hardest issue for indie- and self-published authors to figure out, because the system is stacked against them. Having their books in libraries, especially those that actually work on putting out good reader advisories, can make the difference for many authors. (Nothing you don’t know) But telling authors to game the system that way seems not only unethical, but also it sets them up to fail down the line–it’s unsustainable.
The manga discussion brings to mind the whole “ebooks aren’t real books” and “listening to audiobooks isn’t reading” bullshit. Narrow definitions of what reading is have never encouraged anyone to actually become a reader, but boy, sure they make some people feel superior, don’t they.
Thank you for always making me think.
Thank you for reading and the always thoughtful comments!
re: real books, as much as I know better, my own reading suffered for several adult years because I always felt like I had to offset comics with a “real book,” and ended up forcing myself through (or completely avoiding) novels I wasn’t enjoying and simply not reading anything at all for long stretches. I finally broke through it last year and have been having a great and varied reading year so far.
And yes, Becky and Robin do great work, which is what made Becky’s advice so disappointing. Whenever I speak at writing conferences, I always explicitly say it’s a bad tactic because I’ve heard it so many times, but never from a librarian themselves.
We’ve all grown up in a world that tells us that only some books and only some kind of reading are valid, and it’s hard to go against all that subliminal indoctrination, even when we know better.