There are writers who rely on industrial processes to produce their work. I’ve read that R.L. Stine uses an entire team of ghostwriters. Erle Stanley Gardner did the same with Perry Mason, and there are surely countless other famous authors who have teams of writers, editors, and creatives working for them—without us ever knowing.
AI will only accelerate this way of producing stories. It will also give rise to hustlers who see writing purely as a means to make a quick buck.
A while back, I heard about a guy who mass-produced short erotic stories for Amazon just to make money. He wrote two or three short stories on weekends and sold each for $2.99—a price apparently acceptable for short fiction in that genre. His stories were mostly about tall, heroic men saving damsels in distress, or about vampires and werewolves in steamy fantasy-erotica subgenres. One day, he started making YouTube videos, and it turned out he was an old, bald, overweight, divorced man in his sixties writing for the target demographic of bored housewives. If it sells, it’s fine, I guess.
But does it make him happy?
For a while, I actually considered copying his business model—churning out a few short stories in that genre every week just to make some easy money. But the moment I started, I felt awful about it. I hate writing those kinds of scenes. I don’t enjoy reading explicit fiction. And I couldn’t bring myself to charge $2.99 for 3,000 words of something I wouldn’t even read myself. As simple as it looked, it made my skin crawl. You could offer me a million dollars a year, and I still wouldn’t do it. I just can’t.
Yesterday, I wrote a short horror story about rats infesting a house. I’ll mostly give it away for free. On the days when Amazon won’t let me set the price to zero, I’ll charge less than a dollar for the 4,000-word story. It will never make me rich. It won’t pay my rent. I might make less than minimum wage for it over a lifetime. But I enjoyed writing it. And when I enjoy writing something, I’m pretty sure that some people will enjoy reading it too.
When you love what you do, you do it well. You want to look back at it and feel proud of what you’ve created. But when you write something you don’t care about—and would never read yourself—you’ll just do the bare minimum to get it done.
R.L. Stine clearly loves the genre he writes in. So did Erle Stanley Gardner. They both became successful because of that passion like many other authors. The hustlers will not. Some will make money here and there, sure. But none will be able to look back and say proudly: “I did that, and I’m proud of it.” And none will be happy with what they’ve created, just like the guy writing mass produced short erotica.
