would you buy your book?
in fact, would you even bother to write it?
Sort of a weird thing to feel compelled to ask, but would you buy a book by you on the subject of your book?
As an agent, I receive plenty of slush submissions. A couple dozen earnest nonfiction proposals cross my transom every week. In most cases, I can’t help but notice that the would-be author lacks any real qualification to write the book they have in mind: No relevant credentials. No relevant experience. No track record of success at doing what they’re telling others how to do. None of it. As far as I can tell from the proposal, they thought really, really hard about something, came to a conclusion, and decided to run with it.
That’s fine! Write whatever you want, people. But when these authors don’t take rejection well, I wonder (to myself) how often they themselves go on Amazon to buy books by other people with no relevant qualifications. I mean, maybe that’s their jam? Perhaps they enjoy nothing more than spending twenty or thirty bucks on a meaty hardcover book about cosmology by someone who isn’t a physicist, weight loss by someone who isn’t a nutritionist or doctor (or even a successful loser-of-weight), or entrepreneurial success by someone who never launched a successful business.
But I doubt it! In fact, I doubt (based on many other clues in these proposals) that these enormously self-confident authors buy prescriptive nonfiction books at all, let alone read them. Instead, it seems as though they saw the success of those books (bookstore placement, New York Times bestseller status, etc.), failed to recognize the author, and decided that means anybody can successfully publish a book of prescriptive nonfiction.
Everyone warns us not to fall prey to impostor syndrome. Too bad the actual impostors are immune to self-doubt.
But sure: Write a book out of thin air and expect an agent to represent it, an editor to acquire it, a publisher to design, print, distribute, and market it, and readers to buy and read it. But at least write the damn thing in the first place!
This short blog post by software engineer Tom Bedor makes a simple request of all of us: If You are Asking for Human Attention, Demonstrate Human Effort. What a formulation! So clear, so actionable. It’s a Pollan-esque eat food, not too much, mostly plants for the AI era. You know exactly what Tom’s talking about because you experience this daily: someone sends you AI-generated work they were too lazy to read themselves—let alone write—and expects you to be the first to make it to the end. What a privilege.
My friend Doug Rushkoff just posted about the frustrating and dispiriting experience of being completely misquoted by a so-thinly-disguised-you-wonder-why-Doug-bothered-trying author. (Yes, you’ve already heard about the AI-generated book in question. But Doug’s too nice to name it, so I won’t either. Also, I’m going to try not to take it personally that Doug used “Dave” as the grifter’s pseudonym.)
After being interviewed by “Dave,” Doug checked the final text for accuracy only to notice some “discrepancies” between what was in the book and what he recalled saying. After pointing out that he’d never said any of that stuff to the author, Doug was astonished to receive the following response: “I did take a look at the text and your bibliography, so it may have come from one of your other works, and it may be a paraphrase that’s getting us stuck.” A paraphrase within quotation marks, mind you.
Naturally, the author’s damning “excuse” turned out to be a lie anyway because the quotes were all AI-hallucinated. However, even if it were true that this quote was a paraphrase and that this was the author’s genuine attitude toward the meaning and purpose of quotes, one wonders why he bothered wasting Doug’s time with an interview. If he didn’t have the patience to go over the transcription and select the most appropriate parts for inclusion in his book, why not just write down what he imagined Doug would say and go with that?
It’s a troubling evolution in the prescriptive nonfiction space: The people who used to write books they had no business writing and then got mad when nobody wanted to read them aren’t even writing the books anymore!
Everyone in my network is buzzing about the recent Tim Ferriss post marking the death of the entire prescriptive nonfiction category. Maybe so. Maybe we aren’t going to learn how to improve ourselves from books now that Claude can all-too-easily summarize the essential insights, from Seneca to Carnegie to Ferriss and beyond. If it’s any consolation, only a tiny fraction of people ever did read these books. I’m confident the best will always find an audience, and will continue to have an extraordinary impact on certain lives. Books have certainly transformed mine.
AI may be adding fuel to the fire, but for authors, it’s a distraction. Stop worrying about how many people will read your book. Instead, ask whether you would read your book if you weren’t you. Here’s my own prescriptive nonfiction Pollan-ism: figure out how to do something better than anybody else, prove it to us, then tell us what you learned.