GoKawiilWe knew this day would come.
Some of us have known for decades, have been writing and pontificating about this since Ken Jennings lost at Jeopardy and Kasparov lost at chess. The writing was on the wall, and now the writing is everywhere. Literally. Artificial Intelligence is writing about as well as humans — at least well enough to cause confusion and speculation — and that’s creating an existential crisis among authors, confusion among readers, and legal action within the industry.
When talking about my success as a writer, I almost always bring up the lucky timing I experienced. I finished writing my first novel in 2009, just two years after Amazon released the Kindle. By the time I went to find an agent and publisher, the self-pubbing world of KDP, CreateSpace, and ACX were beginning their inevitable pull. That was dumb luck, and without it I would have written for love but likely never for a living.
This morning, an equally profound thought occurred to me: My lifelong dream of writing novels somehow overlapped with the 20 good years where stories could be published cheaply but not written cheaply. The writing was still hard. The publishing no longer was. I could sweat my way through a manuscript, and then use amazing tools like InDesign and Photoshop to create files, then upload those files FOR FREE to KDP and CreateSpace and hold a book.
Sales and marketing, of course, were always and will always be a different story.
But think about it: the misery most writers faced prior to 2007 (and really, prior to 2012 or 2013, when the stigma just started to fade) of writing query letters, researching agents, amassing rejection letters, avoiding scammy vanity publishers (and scammy review sites, and scammy conferences, and scammy writer-help resources), or even worse: spending their life-savings on boxes of terribly printed books that would sit in the garage for all of eternity, barely selling a dozen copies, and never making back a fraction of the print run.
Fast forward to today, in 2026. You’ve got this story:
There’s a lot of insanity to unpack here. $2.4M advance! Holy shit. For a debut author, after what I hear was a bidding war among very excited publishers. That’s already crazy. But it gets crazier. Concerns were raised about the use of AI to write the book (not sure if this is a giveaway, but the book was about Nigerian cartels. You know the adage: write what you know). More questions were raised about style and some AI fingerprints, and the provenance of the book couldn’t be adequately proven. So the offer was rescinded. The deal fell apart.
Okay, there’s a chance this was a legit book from a legit writer, and the accusations are unfair (including my Nigerian cartel joke, but c’mon, this is like every college professor writing literary novels about college professors having affairs with their students. More imagination, people!). If this was a legitimate book, that might be the BIGGEST version of this story. Life-changing amounts of money, the start of a brilliant career, film or TV options, foreign deals, the works. It wasn’t just on the table, it was in writing. And then it fell apart for someone, all because it is now 2026. That’s one version of the insane new era we now find ourselves. Every book is suspect. No new author will ever be able to prove to anyone other than themselves that they can do it alone (hold this thought for later, because it’s not exactly true).
Let’s examine another crazy version. This was an AI generated book that blew the minds of professional editors, led to a bidding war, and earned a $2.4M advance. Holy shit. I’ve been predicting this day was a few years out, but it might already be here. AI books winning awards. AI books crowding up Amazon bestseller charts. AI books now getting big advances and whipping up bidding wars and excitement among publishers? As the blog title says, it’s the end of an era.
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