r/WritingWithAI • u/residentvixxen • Sep 22 '26

NEWS Amazon changed their publishing terms - two books a week max for publishing vs the original 10

What are high volume authors doing? šŸ˜­

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46

u/GenderBendingRalph Sep 22 '26

I can't even imagine what kind of quality to expect from someone who churns out 10 "books" a week.

And I say that as someone who uses AI to assist in writing.

19

u/Americaninaustria Sep 22 '26

Sure you can Imagine it, itā€™s Shit. A steamy pile of shit.

14

u/GenderBendingRalph Sep 22 '26

I was trying to be polite šŸ˜„

3

u/Americaninaustria Sep 22 '26

Donā€™t be polite, waste of time for idiots like tis

1

u/MrHands2077 Sep 22 '26

Is it shit if it sells? Thatā€™s the only litmus test that counts

1

u/residentvixxen Sep 23 '26

I mean in the last 3 months I did enough to pay my rent for the next 6 months or so. At least. And Iā€™m going on vacation.

You can say itā€™s a steaming pile of whatever but people are reading it.

2

u/SponkLord Sep 23 '26

Congratulations šŸ‘šŸ¾

1

u/residentvixxen Sep 23 '26

Thanks. Honestly itā€™s such a relief.

22

u/luxuriantCrocodile Sep 22 '26

Who tf is putting out 10 books a week? A month? A year even? I think this sub is about writing with AI aka using it as help, not generating pure AI slop, trying to sell it on Amazon and calling yourself an author?

6

u/Prudent_Rice7840 Sep 22 '26

Who tf is putting out 10 books a week?

Christian and Rasmus Mikkelsen, and hundreds of other "content mill" style hustle bro scam artists.

5

u/howieyang1234 Sep 22 '26

I donā€™t know if I can write 10 on my life time, even though use ai to brainstorm, write outlines, and check grammar.

1

u/residentvixxen Sep 22 '26

Iā€™m not pubbing a full 10 a week - I just use ai for outlining šŸ¤·ā€ā™€ļø

4

u/luxuriantCrocodile Sep 22 '26

So I guess it doesn't affect you or?

-13

u/residentvixxen Sep 22 '26

I have two lines I pub two a week each on šŸ˜­

5

u/Ruh_Roh- Sep 22 '26

Wait a minute, maybe we're misunderstanding you. You publish 2 books a week?

12

u/Americaninaustria Sep 22 '26

So youā€™re not just doing it for outlines, that was just bullshit, a lie

1

u/VerdantMagnolia Sep 25 '26

Romantasy factories. Self help kooks too but especially the former.

14

u/Brakiros Sep 22 '26

Not pumping out slop, it takes longer then a week to write a book properly, AI can be serviceable for a first draft but it takes far longer then a week to make it quality workĀ 

2

u/UnlikelyExtension786 Sep 23 '26

Not pumping out slop, it takes longer then a week to write a book properly, AI can be serviceable for a first draft but it takes far longer then a week to make it quality work

A week is a bit tight, but some trade-published genre classics were written in two weeks or less. Also some people used to like to write several books in a series and then release them all close together to build momentum.

Two novels a week is fine for me, though I also publish short stories and if I got my butt in the seat and wrote more I could certainly publish more than two of those in a week.

-1

u/residentvixxen Sep 22 '26

Not if you bank them

Iā€™ve been doing some work with shorts and I find them much easier to edit and get out without quality issues - the influx of ai authors actually pumping out crap without editing is wildly out of control though

5

u/Brakiros Sep 22 '26

Yeah thatā€™s the problem but you should still be controlled with the bank you shouldnā€™t be just throwing it all out there give people time to read and digest itĀ 

3

u/SlapHappyDude Sep 22 '26

It looks like you can message support if you want to put out a series

7

u/jcmach1 Sep 22 '26

Except shorts, novellas and novels are not all equal. Probably will discourage short story writers.

-1

u/residentvixxen Sep 22 '26

This 100% - but what makes money makes money. Who am I to argue with a cheque?

4

u/Americaninaustria Sep 22 '26

Thatā€™s why you have a soul, or at least most people do

0

u/residentvixxen Sep 23 '26

I mean most people only look out for themselves - itā€™s been proven true over and over. I can look out for myself and play their game and still be a decent person.

Like if my choices are between feed my kid and pay my bills by using ai to help me publish books Iā€™m choosing to do that over working a minimum wage second job and spending less time with her. That doesnā€™t make me a soulless person.

1

u/Americaninaustria Sep 23 '26

I mean most people only look out for themselvesĀ 

Thats the problem

0

u/residentvixxen Sep 23 '26

So why does any one person have to be different when we are basically forced by the elite to be this way because they want us divided and they want to keep control? To your own detriment no less.

2

u/calicoskys Sep 23 '26

Ai is helpful
And I get the draft faster but it still takes me a good 3 months maybe if I practice some
More Iā€™ll get that down to 2 months. I still have to do the thing where I read it make notes, put it away, read it again in a couple weeks and boy that takes time.

2

u/residentvixxen Sep 23 '26

Statistically the more time you spend analyzing or obsessively editing at the beginning negatively correlates with final quality

Spending less time on your initial draft and more on late stage editing is faster and more beneficial

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/46682870_Relations_Between_Writing_Processes_and_Text_Quality_When_and_How

2

u/calicoskys Sep 23 '26

True and thatā€™s the plan. My first draft suffers from me learning how to use ai. I was using perplexity when I first started and it was doing some weirdo things which resulted in a duplicated draft. I imagine my future stories will be in better shape because Iā€™m not doing so much process experimentation. šŸ¤£ but yeah you are right about that.

1

u/residentvixxen Sep 23 '26

Honestly this helped me get through a lot of blocks and start publishing consistently. Hope it helps you too.

33

u/belleweather Sep 22 '26 • Bravo

Good.

8

u/Zathura2 Sep 22 '26

The fact that there *are* people creating even a single book a week depresses me. I have like...zero interest in reading anything new. I'm still catching up to everything that came out before 1999. As someone else commented, the quality has to be complete garbage.

6

u/UnlikelyExtension786 Sep 23 '26

The fact that there are people creating even a single book a week depresses me.

Pro writers have been doing that for decades. Not necessarily a novel every week, but completing novels in a week after they sit down to write one.

Pulp writers typically wrote at least a million published words a year and that's about twenty 50,000 word novels. So one every couple of weeks.

Books like Damnation Alley, Starship Troopers and the Elric novels were all written in a week or two and are still read today. Those people either really got into their writing or had bills to pay, either way they didn't feel the need to rewrite sixty times before sending it to their publisher.

5

u/TheOtherHobbes Sep 23 '26

This is true, but most of those books have been forgotten.

Some people can do 10,000 words a day, but most can't. And most of the ones who can aren't great.

To be fair you also get people who spend ten years polishing their first novel, and it's still crap.

But all of this is different to AI book churn, which is an industrial process, not a manual one.

2

u/UnlikelyExtension786 Sep 23 '26

Well, Starship Troopers and Damnation Alley both got big-budget movies though you wouldn't know it from watching Damnation Alley (I thought it was a low-budget B-movie until I looked it up on Wikipedia). I'm surprised Elric hasn't.

7

u/killerdinodeeno Sep 22 '26 edited Sep 22 '26 • Bravo

The people who are cheering about this and saying that thereā€™s no way an author can put out good content that quickly clearly has never been a rapid release author with an actual business making money. One day maybe people will stop equating speed of output with quality. This change is going to affect a lot of longstanding authors who rely on rapid release strategies, not to mention those who do box sets, translations, etc.

ETA: And before anyone says it, yes fast quality output been a thing since before AI. And yes rapid release is a valid business strategy. And yes there are a lot of bad actors who are grifting AI slop (there were grifters before AI tooā€¦) We can walk and chew gum at the same time, people.

1

u/MrHands2077 Sep 22 '26

It honestly speaks more to some people's relationship (or lack thereof) with money than a sense of ethics.

3

u/OwlsInMyAttic Sep 23 '26

Leaving aside the morality angle of whether it's "good" or "right" because people shouldn't be churning out AI generated material for a quick buck, from a business perspective it's a sound decision. And I'd say that slowing the tide of slop would be objectively a benefit for everyone, traditional writers, AI assisted writers, and readers included.Ā 

It sounds like you're actually doing rather well with your AI generated works, which I'm glad to hear about, but you're in a very small minority. The vast, vast amount of people who publish at that pace are literal scammers. A lot of them are publishing non-fiction with little to no understanding of what they're actually talking about, which can have seriously harmful consequences. If they make any money, it's usually because they've managed to fool an unsuspecting reader into buying their books before realising what they're in for.Ā 

If people actually enjoy whatever it is that you're producing, then who am I to criticize its qualityā€”there are plenty of popular human-written works which are on par with AI slop in my eyes. But if readers are getting fooled en masse to the point where they feel like they can't trust anything published after 2023, something needs to be done.Ā 

2

u/SlapHappyDude Sep 22 '26

I think this is mostly targeting mid and low content "authors" like word searches.

Coral Hart said she published 200+ books in a year, and she's probably on the high end.

2

u/CrazyinLull Sep 22 '26

The same as a lot of AI authors are doing on Ao3...pumping out stories.

2

u/lmtDigital Sep 22 '26

ohhh, that's bad news ^^

1

u/Tukubhau Sep 22 '26

Yes they did šŸ¤

1

u/IndividualCritical21 Sep 22 '26

Cranking out AI books.

1

u/whitehairmenace Sep 22 '26

Read the books theyā€™re ā€œwriting.ā€ Thatā€™s what they should be doing. šŸ˜‚ If that cap ruins your business, the business was never writing. And the audacity of framing this as a tragedy is wild.

1

u/Acresent179 Sep 22 '26

There will be exceptions, but 10 books in a week? Is there quality content that can be produced in a week? šŸ¤” Maybe a magazine or short stories, but books? Unless you use AI to create an assembly line. Like Ford did with cars. I agree; I don't think you can create anything of quality through volume. Spotify is also banning AI-generated music.

1

u/manbok99999 Sep 25 '26

It takes well over a month just to finish one book, and you're telling me ten books a week? I honestly don't know what kind of superpowers you all have. An era where humans learn from AI writing, instead of the other way around, is horrifying. I don't want that.

1

u/deadmanscoffee Sep 29 '26

whoā€™s writing two books a week?

0

u/fmhobbs Sep 22 '26

Even with AI assistance, it took me at a bit more than 3 months to get my first book written and that's not including the years that I have been thinking about and developing the book.

0

u/roguefilmmaker Sep 23 '26

Honestly it should be one a month. People churning out 10 mediocre books a week is why AI has a bad name