A friend of mine likes to say that books don’t spoil, and I like to think he’s right on the mark with that. As exhibits A and B, let me say that two of the last three books I’ve read were Charles Strauss’s The Atrocity Archives, written (or at least compiled) 22-years ago in 2004, and the first Nancy Drew book, The Secret of the Old Clock, which was first published in 1930 and entered the public domain this January.
Yes, I know that’s a weird combo. Deal with it.
I don’t know if I’m normal in this way, but I have a tendency to go on streaks where I read a string of older books. Last year ended with me going back to read both Vernor Vinge’s Rainbow’s End and Ian Banks’ Consider Phlebas. Earlier in the year, I read Ursulla K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed for what I’m sorry to say was the first time. Several years back, I got onto a kick where I was reading the true “old-timers.” Writers like Edward Hamilton and Clifford Simak.
All right. You got me.
I like old books, and I cannot lie.
Don’t get me wrong, of course. I am not a book snob—in age or genre, for that matter (see Drew, Nancy). I like fresh, new books as much as the next person. But I admit that old books have a certain thing to them—and by “thing,” I’m not talking about anything nostalgic. Reading older fiction is interesting in sooo many ways, not the least of which is that there is just a whole crap ton of great stories that have been told, and that, like The Atrocity Archives, I just missed the first time. I know I’m not alone there, too. My beloved better half just finished reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for the first time, after all. But I like reading these older stories, too, because I feel a sense of history in them. I’m almost certainly not who you think of when you picture the average reader of Nancy Drew, but I stumbled upon it, and found it fascinating—both for its content, which was (1) definitely of a time, and (2) known to have been scrubbed again in the 1950s to merge more closely to the Nancy Drew image we have today. [In this case, as writers, the concept of public domain is particularly interesting, because this means there are multiple Nancy Drews out there, so if one wants to write about her, one might be very careful as one treads on the more “modern” parts of her, which are not yet out of copyright.] Since I read a lot of science fiction, reading these old stories carries a sense of how history felt about the future, which changes quite a bit from the 50s into the 60s, 70s, and 80s.
Then again, sometimes an old book is comfort food.
Brigid, my daughter (who is also an amazing writer of fiction), plans an annual reading of Pride and Prejudice at least partly for the feels.
As a writer, there’s another reason I enjoy old books, too.
The backlist is a many-splendored thing. The backlist sells—especially to the people who are going to be your readers. This alone is 100% proof that old books do not spoil. I can almost always tell when a true reader has found one of my books because, all of a sudden, every one of my books will sell in succession. That always makes me feel good, of course. It’s always nice to see numbers go up, but in that case, it’s amazing to think that I’ve made a big enough impression on someone that they want to fall into my worlds like that. This is really why I write, at the end of the day. Yes, I love the process, and I love the feeling of creating something. But the connection we get to a reader is a particularly special thing that cannot be replaced, be it by AI or anything else, for that matter.
Brigid just finished a fun Kickstarter where she brought her “old” Songbird River Chronicles series to life by releasing them in hardcover for the first time. Last summer, I put out a tenth anniversary edition of my Saga of the God-Touched Mage series, repackaged into a beautiful special edition that you can get only at Skyfox Publishing right now.
The long tail is the thing for us independently published writers.
Really, it should be the thing for dependently published writers, too, but alas, the traditional houses have to feed the corporate beast, so they are focused on a different model. Thank goodness we have the indie world to be a landing place for those more than a little defenseless writers who get chewed up by the houses. In my day, he says in his best curmudgeonly growl, when you bounced off the publishing houses, you bounced hard.
If you’re an independently published writer, I’m sure you know what I mean.
I track my book and series sales across the years, and find it fascinating to see that stories I wrote a decade ago are still being found and still being read. But realize that a part of that is that they are still fully in print. Unlike some books stuck in the mire of the trad pub no-man’s land, it’s not particularly hard to find anything I’ve written. My website alone, as archaic as it may seem, will eventually point you to anything I’ve done.
I can also say that the backlist sells because it’s that backlist that serves as the Add-On meat to the bones of almost every Kickstarter a writer launches. Putting backlist into a Kickstarter is a great way to introduce new readers to different slices of my work.
These thoughts were fresh in my mind as I saw the news story about romance writer Coral Hart (a pen name), who is a major advocate for the use of AI in her work, and who has been featured in a longish article in The New York Times in which she reveals exactly how fast she writes a book. Hint: It’s very fast.
If you read my thoughts much, you’ll know that I’m not an AI advocate, but that I’m also certainly not as rampantly anti-AI as it seems a lot of the writers in my camp are. I’m all good if somebody can use the tool to make themselves better, but that requires a certain sense of self-control and a strong work ethic applied to the act of learning the craft of storytelling. A tool that helps you turn your vision into something you love is one thing. A tool that hands you 80% of your vision is another.
The thing I found most interesting about that article—because of course it would—was what it said about readers. It’s interesting, isn’t it, that whatever she’s been doing has been at least good enough to keep readers reading.
Ignoring for the moment your thoughts about the ethics and morals of AI, my pragmatic side says that we are literally at the fulcrum where the readers are going to tell us what’s good enough. Or, put another way, while my fellow writers are often getting all huffy about the idea that they cannot be replaced, the tech is really only getting to the place that readers are going to get the say. This, of course, was the point of my last post here…so while I enjoy being “proven correct” (ha!) at any time, I’m actually a little surprised it’s happening so quickly.
Silly me.
Anyway, I’m thinking about this a lot. I assume most writers are.
The near-term future looks like it’s going to be loaded with new books. Usually, I would think that’s a good thing. But for at least the nextyear, maybe that’s not going to be the case. Who can tell? The good news, though, is that backlist sells, you know.
Or, better put, as a reader, there are a lot of great books already out there.
If you get tired of dealing with the AI, and it turns out that I’m right, that readers will do a great job of rejecting it … well …
Remember that books don’t spoil, okay?
And I’m pretty sure that if the flow of books stopped cold turkey and there wasn’t another new book published for half a century, we could all read for the rest of our lives and never worry about running out of something wonderful and new.
I am a human. Not an AI. You can tell because keep a Patreon page where I talk about writing and being a writer (among other things). In other words, I post a lot of things there before I post them here. This post, for example, was there first. I also share occasional work in progress for Patrons only, and give special discounts and sometimes even free books to Patrons at various levels. If you’d like to support me–or just this blog–you can do so by clicking here:
