Running A Writing Business In The Age of AI

Running A Writing Business In The Age of AI

(Early 2025 Edition)

Note to start: this whole series is prefaced mostly with the acknowledgement that we’re in early 2025 as I write this and who knows where the world is going. As per yesterday’s post, I’ve got a few ideas about possible threats and opportunities, but everything from Nuclear Armageddon through to AI-Communism (lol) seems to be on the table at the moment.

Now to the Topic At Hand

Back at the end of October, reader and long-time sufferer of my lack of updates, Rob, sent the following comment in:

And let me answer this to start with: all of the things Rob talks about are fair concerns. We’ve got internet and phone addiction, we’ve got the economics of running a writing business, we’ve got the idea that reading is a niche hobby at the best of times, and we’ve got AI.

All of those things on their own go firmly in the risks category. When you put them together, you’ve got a big set of issues that form to look something vaguely like an elephant in a room when you’re thinking of being an author.

However…

I’m More Optimistic About The Future Than You Might Think…

Well, at least as far as having a writing, and particularly a fiction writing business is concerned. I’ll address the concerns above one-by-one and then lead in to the reframe I think we need to talk about to correctly get some optimism about the subject in general.

On reading being a niche hobby:

Reading is a niche hobby, and almost certainly will be when compared to movies, video gaming, and the new hobby that seems to have taken the world by storm: watching random videos on the internet.

To this I can only say that reading has always been a niche that’s tailored to a certain type of individual. That’s fine; there are millions of readers out there, and I would argue that the pool of potential readers we’ll have in our effective life times isn’t getting smaller. For instance, I sold short stories in German, American and British markets as well as Australia last month. There’s a bigger market for young adult fiction than there’s ever been, and thanks to the technology available, (namely, selling on Amazon,) you can reach worldwide audiences from the comfort of your own home without a publishing contract, in no time at all. That’s simply never been the case until recently.

The market for readers on the planet might decrease overall, but a writer has never in history been able to expose their work to as big a market before.

Also, having done the copywriting thing, the “niche market” aspect absolutely works for me: of all the audiences you can have, literate mostly-introverts who are looking for entertainment is probably one of the better ones to have.

On internet and phone addiction, as well as waning attention span:

There are a few things to consider with this one. In direct response terms, remember, our audience is the audience that likes reading books. We’re not trying to convert Tiktok addicted teen girls who can’t concentrate for thirty seconds, and we’re not trying to teach illiterate baby boomers who flunked out of school in ’64, worked in a factory in Illinois and haven’t read a book in 50 years to read.

On the other hand, BookTok is a real phenomenon. There are millions of readers who share book recommendations on TikTok, Instagram and so on, and they read voraciously. I recently researched some authors in the romance genre, and they make more money than any of us need – and they do it mostly by freebie giveaways and viral selling of their books.

And these are booksellers; not gurus selling the idea of selling books. You can make more than a living selling just to people who read.

A final note on this for now; authorship is kind-of insulated from brainrot in a way that, should you want to be a writer, other forms of writing are not. For instance, copywriting is highly commoditised, it’s really suffering from the audio/visual takeover, and nobody can read long form sales letters anymore. Meanwhile, every teenage clown who wants to emulate a certain Bugatti-driving buttplug-looking gangster thinks they’re going to make millions being a barely-literate copywriter because they’ve watched YouTube Shorts about being a billionaire.

Being an author is insulated from that nonsense for the most part because the average IQ of the market is a lot higher and also, it’s hard work to put together long form writing and then release. There’s a huge barrier to entry for novels in that they actually take time to produce and more time for you to be good at it. The creation is the hard aspect.

On the economics of a writing and publishing business:

But, in good news, the rest of starting a publishing business is a lot easier, and the economics are a lot easier. I’ve made the shift from copywriting and online marketing except for my own IP, and the reason I’ve done so is basically twofold: it’s incredibly cheap to create your own IP, and it’s incredibly easy to distribute it.

In other words, the economics of creating books (and other IP) are fantastic. The Return on Effort/Investment is huge.

And there are no clients to deal with. Your IP is yours to do with what you want for as long as you live, (and another 70 years,) and it’s all stuff you can create from your laptop at your own pace.

On AI:

Here’s the trunk of the elephant in the room.

You might be worried that AI is going to create everything from scratch on its own, with no need for the lowly writer. And you might be correct. I don’t know what the future holds, but I’d make two informed guesses as someone who got into AI very early on:

1. Creative writing, novels, etc. are very hard to do with current LLM technology. It’s just not very good at understanding the point.
2. AI is going to majorly disrupt a ton of industries, probably including the publishing business. It’s just the hand we’re dealt. Opportunities, threats and so on always exist. If you have to worry as a writer, then so do programmers, lawyers, accountants. The effects of AI are going to be in massive job displacement and we won’t really know the second and third order effects for years yet.

So, with the above in mind, I’d draw two conclusions. Firstly, you can’t predict what’s going to happen with AI except that it’ll cause major disruption, and following on from that, secondly, we might as well do what we can while we can.

But with that said…

The Simple Reframe You Need To Understand

There’s a fundamental reframe that I think we all need to understand about “being a writer.”

This, the same as anything in the current year where who knows what’s going to happen.

But with writing, the reframe is that you stop thinking of yourself as a writer – that’s what you do, not what you are.

What you are is a creator of stories. A creator of narrative. Or, if you’re writing nonfiction, both of those things but in that different context.

You’re creating Intellectual Property in the form of the world you create through your writing. That IP is yours to have, control and get paid for.

It’s also something you can license out to the world in many forms. For instance, if you are worried about attention spans, you can write micro-fiction and put it into YouTube shorts. If you’re worried about nobody reading because they play games instead, well it’s easier than ever to develop a game and you can do it for your fictional worlds and IP.

And honestly, think about Harry Potter and/or Star Wars and/or Marvel/DC comics. Batman was created in the 1920s where we were still just coming out of Penny Dreadfuls and into the pulp fiction era, and comic books were for kids and probably cost five cents.

They couldn’t have dreamed that Batman would go on to be a multi-billion-dollar IP for the owners of the future. They couldn’t have imagined the video games because video games weren’t even a thing and wouldn’t be for fifty years after the creation.

There are a lot of things to worry about, but people need mythologies of the future, and there’s a lot to look forward to.

I’ll see you in the next one.

(P.S. I hope this also goes someway to explaining why I’ve taken so long to put the Vault together; I’m trying to help you all navigate the future here, not just teach you how to write sales letters.)