Indie authors are in serious trouble right now, and the disturbing truth is that indie authors are one of the biggest reasons why. While generative AI “authors” are working together, celebrating each other’s success, promoting each other’s work, and even buying each other’s books as a collective effort, actual human indie authors are doing the opposite. We are treating each other as direct competitors in a shrinking space, hoarding readers, avoiding promotion of our peers, and acting as if supporting another writer somehow takes something away from us. It does not. But this mindset is quietly destroying the very field we are trying to survive in and enabling slop like Guarded by the AI to make enough sales to ran in the top 20 of some romance categories.
Hey, indie authors: If you read nothing else in this post, read this paragraph and stop just talking about how indie authors should support each other and actually fucking do it!!! Stop posting empty, feel-good statements about “community” while never once sharing another indie writer’s release, preorder, cover reveal, or struggling book. Stop treating promotion like some scarce resource that you have to hoard in order to survive. It costs nothing to share a link. NOTHING. And yet so many indie authors refuse to do it because they are terrified that if they give anyone else even a sliver of attention, they will somehow lose their spot. There is no spot. There is no throne waiting for you if you just compete hard enough. All that mentality does is fracture us into isolated little islands while people who are actively damaging the creative ecosystem work together and rise. Everyone wants promotion, but no one wants to do the promoting. No one should expect support if they are unwilling to give it. Don’t wait for others to promote you first. Start now. Share upcoming releases. Share books that are struggling to gain traction. Do it.
I can call asses out on this because most of what I post is promoting other indie authors, and no, I do not get that support returned. (I also exclusively buy indie novels, often from those I share regardless of genre or niche.) Ironically, if you check my Threads posts, you’ll see how pretty much no author shares any post but the one about themselves. But despite the lack of support in return, I keep doing it because this isn’t about ego or numbers. It’s about whether human writing survives at all. Posting that we should promote each other without actually promoting anyone is performative bullshit, and it’s helping bury real books under an avalanche of machine-generated slop. When I see indie authors promote any books, it’s always either their own or a trad pub.
Who will promote the indie authors of we don’t bother to promote other indie authors? Think about that. Why the fuck do we promote major trad pubs with huge-ass marketing teams and massive budgets, but we won’t promote each other? I think it’s because those trad pubs are seen as operating on a different plain than us, and so aren’t competition to us. We shouldn’t be seeing it as competition at all, though we do, and we compete against the low-hanging fruit that are our fellow indies. Promote the big guys. Fight the ones on our own level. Ignore those trying to harm us, though they don’t need to make much of an effort when we’re doing that well enough ourselves.
The rise of gen AI has been incredibly damaging to creative industries, not only writing, but music and art. Writing an entire book from start to finish, revising it, polishing it, and preparing it for public consumption is difficult, time-consuming work, which is why so many people don’t ever finish. The idea that writers should write only for the love of writing shows a misunderstanding of the truth. The initial story is for the writer. The words, the revision, the refinement, the cleaning up of language and structure, covers and blurbs to convey tone and story—that is what we do to share our work with others. That is why most, if not all, writers have hidden folders of drafts that are never meant to be shared and never fully polished. We know what we mean without needing specific formatting and such. We can read our own imperfect drafts and get lost in our heads as we immerse ourselves in our stories. The moment we prepare our stories for publication, we are doing labor specifically for readers.
Gen AI has allowed people who were never willing to do that labor to feel suddenly creative. Someone can now feed a vague idea into an AI system, have it fill in the structure, characters, and plot, and output something that resembles a book. There are already programs capable of generating entire novels in minutes, such as Squibler and AI Book Generator (such a clever name, eh?). Youbooks AI generates entire non-fiction books, and that, frankly, is terrifying give the self-help nature of many non-fiction books. Novelcrafter reportedly requires a bit more prompting, but the program guides the “writer” and prompts the “writer.” The quality of these books is often poor, but quality doesn’t matter to AI advocates in the same way it matters to real writers. What matters to them is scale, speed, and volume. They promote each other aggressively and buy each other’s books in large numbers, effectively creating an internal market that does not rely on general readers who may dislike AI-generated work. This collective behavior gives them visibility and momentum.
This pattern is not unique to publishing. We see it clearly in politics. Conservatives in the United States understand politics as a collective cause. Even when they are smaller in number, they work together toward shared goals. They support candidates they may not personally love because winning and “making the libs cry” matters more than individual the individuals (ironic given all the other areas in which they are all about individual rights even when it means children get murdered or people get sick and die). Democrats, on the other hand, tend to fracture. We rally behind multiple candidates, seeing others as the enemy to fight, divide our energy, and when our preferred choice doesn’t win the nomination, we go home and whine about how we’ll never vote for so-and-so, even if it means the side wanting to strip our autonomy wins. We don’t unite behind the outcome. We treat allies as competitors rather than as part of the same effort.
Texas is a clear example of this. About 47% of Texans identify as Democrats, while Republicans make up only 38%. By numbers, Texas is a blue state!! Yet Republicans dominate statewide power. Gerrymandering plays a role, but it is not the whole story. Republicans win because they show up, vote together, and act collectively. Democrats lose because we splinter and disengage. The numbers alone should favor Democrats, but collective action matters more than raw popularity.
The same thing is happening with AI. We know that AI-generated creative work is not popular with the general public. Readers, listeners, and viewers consistently express discomfort with it and a desire for actual human creativity over programs and machines that bastardize humanity. But AI advocates are winning anyway, because they present a unified front. They treat adoption and promotion of AI as a cause. They support each other, amplify each other’s voices, and push forward together. Meanwhile, human creators who should be natural allies are busy competing with each other for scraps.
Fifteen years ago, indie authors routinely worked as teams. We ran blog tours together. We interviewed each other. We hosted group readings both online and in person. Authors across different genres collaborated to introduce readers to new voices. When one indie author succeeded, it was seen as a win for all of us, because we were collectively pushing against a traditional publishing industry that largely ignored us, or, when it looked our way, sneered that we were just talentless hacks who couldn’t get agents, though many of us did have offers of rep, myself included, and didn’t agree with the terms. That sense of shared cause has disappeared. We now see each other as enemies to defeat rather than allies fighting for the survival of a creative field.
There is a dangerous myth circulating that audiences, not just readers, but music- and art-consumers, will eventually reject AI content and seek out higher-quality human work. History shows otherwise, and the clothing industry demonstrates this clearly. Fast fashion did not create a mass return to bespoke craftsmanship. It normalized lower standards. What passes for high quality today would have been absolute shit quality 50 years ago. When people become accustomed to slop, they stop seeking out better alternatives or even think that slightly better slop is high quality. In fact, genuinely human-written work may eventually be perceived as too complex or demanding simply because it uses language and structure that AI does not. We all know that AI’s vocabulary and writing ability is stunted. At best, readers who actively seek human writing will become a niche. When that niche is flooded with more writers than readers, the odds of any individual being chosen become even smaller, and the value of the work diminishes.
If writing means anything at all, then this has to be approached collectively. If this fight ends and it does not end in favor of human creators, there will be no sales numbers left to chase, no audience left to compete over. At that point, it will not matter who sold the most books. The field itself will be gone.