2024 Predictions in Publishing (100% Human-Written) by Agent Laurie McLean

 

By Laurie McLean, Fuse Literary

Publishing woke up from the pandemic years of big backlist profits and came out of the gate swinging in 2023. Publishing houses did not buy as many books as in 2022. (Anecdotally, I sold 24 books in 2022 and had a million-dollar sales month, but I only sold 4 books this past year. Ouch!) But readers did not slow down too much from the heights of book buying during the pandemic’s enforced solitude. And that is promising.

Today, there are so many things in the world that are influencing publishing from the outside, it is an interesting time for this stalwart industry. Publishing companies are struggling with decisions about everything from how to combat the banned book movement to contractual battles with agents surrounding how much AI to let publishers and authors use in writing and publishing books. There is a lot of chaos and fear, tempered with searches for golden opportunities. Chaos and opportunity are clashing. What a great time to be alive.

Let’s get into what I foresee happening in publishing in 2024:

When I wrote last year’s prediction article in December 2022, ChatGPT and generative artificial intelligence had burst onto the scene mere weeks before. So I did not understand the earth-shattering influence it would have on book writing, editing, marketing, and research.

Now, a year later, I feel that AI could become as much a force of societal change as desktop computing, the World Wide Web, and mobile phones. Yes, AI can be evil and nasty, making human jobs disappear and potentially making the Skynet singularity of the Terminator films a reality. (I only partly jest. Search on “Artificial Superintelligence” or ASI if you want to see where this is heading.).

But it can also be used as a tool to help human writers create better products if it is used wisely. It can also help overworked teachers use AI to teach their students…and that includes creative writing students. AI is in its infancy. It will be interesting to see how it develops over the next decade.

But before I let a discussion of my thoughts on AI take over my predictions, let’s look at several other important areas that will influence publishing in 2024.

BANNED BOOKS

According to a recent Washington Post study of 1,000 book bans in the US for the 2021-2022 school year, 60% of banned books came from 11 people. Yes, that’s right. A small handful of people are sharing lists across state lines, and convincing local school boards that kids must be protected from reading about subjects such as LGBTQIA+, Black history and slavery, racism, sexuality, drugs, and other things they may encounter as they grow and learn.

In some states, teachers and librarians “caught” with banned books can face stiff fines and jail time. Many of these banned books are ridiculous…like the book that was banned because the author’s last name was “Gay”. But this issue is very serious.

Authors, publishers, and professional organizations have joined together to fight this effort in the courts. Just recently Penguin Random House won a preliminary victory in their lawsuit against Iowa’s book bans, especially in the areas of sexual orientation and gender identity.

Those books are going back on the shelves. But that’s only one state, and I predict that at least some portion of book bans in Texas and Florida will be overturned in 2024. For the other southern states, I’m not so sure. But I feel the pendulum swung way too far in this book-banning battle, and it will surely swing back the other way…at least to some extent.

SOCIAL MEDIA AS A SALES TOOL

There have been a lot of changes since 2008 when social media broke into our consciousness in a big way and caused addiction to and dependence on our mobile phones. Over the previous decade, Twitter had risen to be the major social media platform of choice for promoting books and garnering a fan base. It was the hallmark for book discovery among readers. But since Elon Musk imploded the app and renamed it “X”, few in publishing use it anymore.

The two big platforms for authors to promote their books and grow their fan bases are BookTok (TikTok) and Bookstagram (Instagram). And even these are shrinking into small, fractional fandoms of mostly YA and adult rom-com books, leaving anyone who doesn’t write for those audiences to wonder how they’re going to promote their books and increase sales in 2024 and beyond.

Goodreads Scandals

Add to this the scandals on Goodreads, where, for example, from April to December 2023 a debut author with a big traditional deal, created dozens of fake accounts from which to subject her debut “siblings” to 1-star reviews while giving herself 5-star reviews and adding her name to awards and bestseller lists. This is called “review bombing”. See the NY Times opinion article from December 24^th for further details. (It’s behind a paywall, so if you don’t subscribe to the Times you can find the gist of it here.)

Goodreads has some reckoning to do if it wants to remain valid as a peer-review site. How could they have let one author game the system to that extent? C’mon Amazon. Fix this dumpster fire.

So if social media apps are not the best way to promote your books, what is? My prediction is that self-published authors especially will fall back on the tried and tested methods of appearing at writers’ conferences, teaching workshops, securing blurbs, making videos, and posting relevant and creative photos wherever their audiences flock. This migration might take more than a year, but my prediction is that apps will get less and less influential if you don’t write YA or romance. If you do write YA and romance, get onto TikTok and Instagram and get busy.

DRAMATIC RIGHTS GOLD RUSH

With a double hit to writers and actors, the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes in 2023 seriously hobbled the movie and streaming industries. Now that both strikes are over, and writers and actors are protected (at least temporarily) against deep fakes and AI-generated scripts and will be better compensated for their streaming shows no matter how old they are, there is a gold rush on for suitable properties to develop…including books-to-streaming projects.

If you have an agent, ask them how they’re promoting your books to Hollywood in 2024. If you don’t have an agent, network with indie producers, actors who have their own production companies, etc. This manic search for good projects will not last forever. I doubt it will last past 2024, since there is a backlog of projects that had already been optioned and were just waiting for the strikes to be over. Act soon or lose the opportunity.

NOTE: It’s a tough slog to get a producer or studio interested in your work. It helps to have a close friend or even an inside contact who will introduce your work to the decision-makers. I do not recommend paying anyone to turn your book into a screenplay. Hollywood simply does not pick up scripts from people they don’t know and haven’t worked with reliably in the past. (See Anne’s post on book-to-screen scams.) Also, if you’re not a Writers Guild of America member, your chances are close to zero.

Agents can be very helpful here, although I’ve got to be honest. After 20 years as an agent, and countless lucrative film and TV option deals, my first client project is in production for a movie. That’s a lot of work for very little reward. Just sayin’.

TRENDS

I hate mentioning trends in categories and genres of books, but there are a few that could be important.

• YA is coming back. It was in the serious doldrums for the past five years, but I see signs of life at last. If you write YA, be sure to read some of the recent bestsellers so you see how the writing and subject matter have changed over the past five years. But if you stay with supernatural, dark academia, contemporary issues, and even a bit of climate-change-caused dystopia, you should be good. Contemporary BIPoC and LGBTQIA+ stories written by BIPoC and LGBTQIA+ authors are also super popular with teen readers.
• Romantasy. It’s the new 50/50 split of romance and fantasy that’s either a marketing ploy or a real category. Time will tell. But it’s hot, hot, hot, in adult and YA romance. Write quickly though. Who knows how long this trend will last.
• Politics. Since 2024 is another Presidential election year, expect nonfiction political books to crowd the shelves. If you’ve got the scoop on a scandal and can self-publish quickly, go for it.
• With the rise in AI and robotics, I believe we might see a rise in books about the good, the bad, and the ugly of new technologies in both fiction and nonfiction.
• Climate change is a huge area of interest and I foresee that it will entangle itself into plots of all types. Especially in children’s and teen books. Kids are scared of what adults are doing to the world they are going to inherit. This can make for some great MG and YA stories about saving the planet.
• Graphic novels for children and adults continue to soar in popularity across all genres.
• Audiobooks continue their stellar growth rates in genre fiction and nonfiction especially.

AND LAST BUT NOT LEAST—AI AND HOW IT WILL TAKE OVER THE WORLD

Okay. So now back to generative AI and how it will impact publishing in 2024.

To me, the image I have in the front of my mind every time some person extols the virtues of AI for creatives, is Deep Thought, the supercomputer from Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Taking 7.5 million years to answer the ultimate question, “What is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything”, Deep Thought finally delivers its answer: the number 42. That’s what AI today is like to me. Churning out sometimes hilarious, often erroneous answers to human-directed inquiries. Famous Trump lawyer Michael Cohen just admitted that he used Google’s AI bot for a recent court filing, which resulted in fake legal citations.

It’s not there yet, folks. But it’s coming. Fast.

Will it become more sophisticated over time? Well, with the ridiculous amount of money venture capitalists and corporations have thrown at any company boasting of AI in their product plans, I don’t see how it could fail to become much more sophisticated. Hence the fear from creatives.

Do you know how the corporations who created the first generative AI products trained them? They used famous texts and bestselling books without permission from or recompense to the authors. WTF? In what world would that be considered okay? But they did it anyway. This should educate you on how AI will develop in profit-obsessed, power-hungry corporations and governments around the world. It will not be altruistic.

Bestselling authors and Big Five publishers (aka the ones with clout and big legal teams) sued Open AI and Microsoft for copyright infringement. That case will wind its way through our court system in 2024. The outcome will define how AI will initially develop over time and at what pace.

And what about the fear of self-published AI-generated books flooding the market? Well, that prediction was realized quite quickly in 2023, to the point where Amazon decided to limit the number of books published per day to three. Three books in a day, you say? Well, AI can generate a 70,000-word book in a few minutes. It will be badly written, full of cliches and repetitive words and phrases, with erroneous and out-of-date information and lacking depth and personality. But you can trick people into buying them and not care a whit about that because you care about quantity over quality.

Here is the text from Amazon’s AI policy:

There is one vestigial tail of the law that protects human authors against this onslaught. Copyright does not extend to ideas, systems, or factual information. That means while you can use ChatGPT to write a book, it cannot be copyrighted. This means that someone else can copy your AI-generated work exactly, undercut you on price, and steal your audience. You’ll have zero legal protection.

But it does affect the discovery by new readers of your human-written books. With thousands of AI-generated books clogging up virtual bookshelves (AKA Amazon), the chances that someone will stumble across your books get increasingly remote. With a limit of three books a day, one author can publish more than a thousand AI-generated books each year. I don’t know how you can protect yourself against that kind of onslaught.

Two Streams of Publishing?

One long-term thought I had, which doesn’t really rise to the level of a prediction, but I think could easily become true five or ten years down the road, is that self-publishing will split into two streams: the first are human-written books (maybe using AI as a tool, maybe not) and the second are proudly-identified AI-generated stories. Some readers will enjoy AI-generated books and won’t care that humans did not have a hand in their creation. If they are promoted correctly and branded, who knows? It could take off.

NOTE: If you want to identify whether something is AI-generated content, might I recommend OpenAI’s AI Text Classifier. These tools sometimes generate false positives, so like anything related to AI these days, check, check, and recheck before you blaze onto social media and cause a fuss.

There is a difference between AI-generated and AI-assisted.

I foresee many authors, both traditionally published and self-published, using generative AI as tools for research, writing social media promos, grammar checking and proofreading, brainstorming ideas, creating book covers and inside illustrations, and even doing that first developmental edit.

As long as you create the book’s content yourself, I think you’ll see a huge wave of authors writing with the assistance of AI tools. And you may not even know you’re using them!

Grammarly, for instance, announced that they have integrated AI into their grammar checker app and are training it on all their customers’ projects. So the helpful grammar hints you’ve come to depend on are being performed by generative AI. It’s already happening.

Another interesting suggestion I received from one of my best friends who is a computer science teacher at a middle school in the San Francisco Bay area (and also a kickass drummer and percussionist.) Companies should be forced to cite where AI bots got their information. This would make it easier to check the accuracy of information and rein in bad AI behavior. Metadata? Footnotes? It can be done and is probably being researched at AI companies right now. Do we have to force companies to do this necessary work? Or will they do it on their own? Time will tell I guess.

Stereotypes and Bias

Also, my buddy suggested that we need to fix AI bias in search results. I found many examples where generative AI bots were asked to compile text and images of hot-button words and phrases like “criminals”, or “kitchen cooking”, or “people cleaning”, and the results were, predictably racist, sexist cliches. This needs to be addressed NOW or it will be much more difficult later. So when you are doing research for your writing, please be careful to not use everything AI offers.

Just as you would wordsmith a finished draft of a manuscript, use AI tools cautiously, in a discriminating manner, and check your work for erroneous or biased results before publishing.

Here are some recent articles from a variety of sources with anecdotal stories about people using AI for book publishing and even book banning: Newsweek, Popular Science, The Gazette

And here’s a YouTube video about the seven stages of AI development. Warning…it’s kind of scary:

If you want an example of books that were written by ChatGPT, check out the Aum Golly series of “Poems on Humanity by Artificial Intelligence”.

The bottom line with AI, which is still in its infancy for 2024 at least, is that AI is here to stay. It may be overhyped and ripe for a bubble burst, but it is going to change so many aspects of society—some of them in good ways, some in bad ways. But this is the beginning of a big societal change and we need to keep up with AI developments in publishing and beyond.

Have I missed anything?

I hope you enjoyed these predictions for publishing in the coming year. If I’ve missed any, I’m sure you’ll let me know in the comments.

Generally, I think book publishing is once again on a growth path and I’m excited to be an agent in this industry.

Write, Write, Write. Read, Read, Read. The six laws of becoming a better writer!

by Laurie McLean (@agentsavant) January 7, 2024

About Laurie McLean

Laurie spent 20 years as the CEO of a multi-million dollar marketing agency and 8 years as an agent/senior agent at Larsen Pomada Literary Agents before co-founding Fuse Literary in 2013 with her business partner Gordon Warnock.

At Fuse Lit Laurie specializes in middle grade, young adult and adult genre fiction including romance, fantasy, science fiction, mystery, suspense, thrillers, and westerns.

Laurie is also the Director of the San Francisco Writers Conference, in its 20th year, and co-founded two ePublishing companies (now sold): Joyride Books for romance, and Ambush Books for tween and teen books. Find out more at FuseLiterary.com or on Instagram at fuseliterary, and on Twitter @FuseLiterary and @AgentSavant.

 

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featured image by Vincent Laurensz, Pushkin Museum