If You're Going to Use AI for Your Book, Work With People Who Know What They're Doing

Publishing people have been rightfully up in arms about a new start up called Spines which aims to “disrupt” publishing by having AI write and produce books. The company charges between $1500 and $5000 to do “everything” professional publishers do. And clearly people think this is a good idea; the company recently raised $16 million.

My issue isn’t with AI. AI is here to stay and can be incredibly useful when used appropriately. The problem is when people who know nothing about book publishing are charging money to create completely unprofessional slop.

Hopefully, this is obvious to anyone who visits the Spines site. It promotes “How Easy It Is To Create A Stunning Book Cover With Just One Prompt” and then provides this as an example: 

This is nothing against Jannati or her Journey but WTF? And speaking of titles, there’s a testimonial from an author of a book called “Biological transcendence and the tao” who raves about how amazing Spines was to deal with after his book had been rejected by 17 publishers.

(Couldn’t ONE person and not 17—or at least someone at Spines—have told him that the title doesn’t make sense and also that titles should have capital letters in them?)

The Spines site takes pains to show that it is not JUST a bot farm. And it does that by telling you that you can have a “human” proofread your manuscript for a “small fee,” alongside a bunch of stock photos of “humans,” like this one:

 

(Awesome side note: when you drag that beautiful “human”’s photo to your desktop, you can see that it is titled Human-06. If Human-06 doesn’t look like your average proofreader, that’s because she’s not. A reverse image Google search reveals that she has lots of other jobs—as a travel specialist, immersive sports & education expert and more.)

Of course, Spines isn’t the only AI book publisher coming out of Silicon Valley: Microsoft has launched 8080, a new book imprint that aims to be “faster and better” than traditional publishing. And its first book, No Prize for Pessimism, by Microsoft’s deputy chief technology officer Sam Schillace, is available now. Sam Schillace appears to be a terribly accomplished individual. His LinkedIn (where he has over 11,000 followers) lists him as a CVP and Deputy CTO at Microsoft and he is credited as the “father” of Google Docs! He probably knows a lot of very intelligent people. So why on earth did no one tell him that his Amazon page looks like sh*t?? Now, No Prize for Pessimism may be an excellent book. Its title has nice alliteration. But why couldn’t one of the intelligent friends have told him that people DO judge books by their covers?

 

Also, why didn’t someone say “Sam, no one wants to slog through a book description that unwieldy! Couldn’t you break it up with some bullet points or shorter paragraphs?”

Also, couldn’t someone have said, “Sam, you created Google docs, you deserve an Amazon page, man!”

And couldn’t another someone have said “Yo Sam, author bios tend to refer to authors by their last name?"

Finally, couldn’t he have gotten at least one or two friends to review? This man gave us Google Docs, people!

Also, while being connected to Microsoft is cool, it doesn’t really make sense to list that assocation in the Publisher section. When a book is published by Ballantine, it doesn’t list it as Ballantine, an Imprint of Random House.

This is meant as no disrespect to Sam or Microsoft or Spines, just a comment that millions of dollars along with no knowledge about how to make a book look professional doesn’t get you very far.