Publishers Wouldn't Take on the Classics Today

And Other Struggles for Writers

As I wrapped up reading Journey to the Center of the Earth, I couldn’t help but reflect on how dated the book is. Not just the vernacular (words like chalybeate and sepulchral) that serve as a glaring reminder of how much the collective vocabulary in our society has decreased over time, but in the story arc itself. Don’t get me wrong; I loved it! It’s an action-filled adventure and speaks to the science nerd in me (my degree is in earth science, after all). I can’t believe I haven’t read it sooner. But if Jules Verne submitted the manuscript today, what would modern publishers think of it? I believe they wouldn’t take it on—at least, not in its current form.

• The hook/inciting incident: The story begins with no less than five pages of description of the uncle’s personality and physical appearance. The actual hook (which coincides with the inciting incident): finding a handwritten note in an old manuscript doesn’t happen until page eight, and the discovery that the stowed page hints at a passage to the center of the earth isn’t introduced until chapter three. Editors today would call this info-dumping and would cut half the description and introduce the hook earlier.

• The journey to Iceland and specifically, to the crater in the volcano Sneffels, takes twelve chapters. They don’t actually start the journey to the center of the earth until chapter thirteen! Chapter fourteen is even called, “The Real Journey Commences.” Surely, after this late start, the story keeps moving from here? Well…

• The story takes the sideline to frequent intrusions of scientific arguments. This is in character, as the two main characters, the uncle and the nephew, are learned, scientific men. However, it’s hard to imagine publishers allowing this today. They’d fear losing readers who signed up for action and adventure—not a scientific lecture. The longest rant of this type is in chapter thirty-five, whereupon finding a human skeleton (or corpse, since it still had hair!), the uncle proceeds to give over a four-page-long lecture to a pretend audience, which ends up being the reader.

• They hardly spend any time at the center of the earth (or you may argue they never reach it at all) before they are spat out back to the surface by volcanic action. (Never mind that this creates its own plot hole of why the other prehistoric beasts are not likewise transported to the surface.) This would make Ralph Waldo Emerson proud for the embodiment of his famous quote from 1841 (twenty-three years before this book’s publication):

  
  

“It's not the destination, it's the journey.”

And it’s not just Journey to the Center of the Earth that modern publishers would whittle away with edits and rewrites. My sister-in-law’s favorite book is Pride and Prejudice, so I recommended Jane Eyre. I had somehow forgotten that the entire first nine chapters (almost a quarter of the book) are dedicated to her miserable childhood. The book completely changes course as Jane Eyre reaches adulthood, focusing more on her relationship with Mr. Rochester and finding her place in the world, which most would argue is the essence of the story. So why is so much of the book dedicated to her childhood? Yes, it makes the reader care more about the character, but I find it difficult to believe that a modern editor and publisher would take the risk of drawing it out so long. (As a side note in defense of Jane Eyre, the book was originally published and marketed as an autobiography, despite being a work of fiction).

I read an interesting post about publishers acting as gatekeepers and effectively killing literary fiction: The Big 5 Publishers have killed Literary Fiction.(1) Readers are buying less literary fiction, so publishers are selling less. Or are readers buying less literary fiction because publishers are releasing less? Which came first? It may be an arbitrary argument. The fact is: there’s less lit fic.

Maybe it’s readers’ appetites changing and evolving. If we make a jump to another genre in another media form, we can see this clearer. Psycho was a 1960’s horror film that scared audiences at the time, while few horror enthusiasts today would deem it as anything more than a classic. This isn’t limited to horror. The more we consume, the higher the stakes need to be in order to spark those same feelings of fear or thrill or [insert emotion here]. The idea of an insatiable appetite is the very premise of the popular television show Squid Game, where a group of obscenely wealthy old men have become so calloused to excitement that they needed to up the stakes to a real-life-or-death scenario.

Is that growing appetite leaking into the literary field? I think so. Readers today expect a fast-paced adventure or a grisly horror or a passionate (sometimes raunchy) romance. I often wonder what the average reader from the 1800s would think of our modern stories. Would they think them exciting or garish? This evolving nature of readers’ appetites is just one problem that writers have had to become increasingly creative to overcome.

There’s another imminent problem at our doorstep: the dreaded AI revolution. Is it coming for our jobs as writers? Who knows? At this point, we can do nothing but speculate—such has always been humanity’s limitation when looking to the future. The popular consensus is that readers don’t want AI anymore than writers do. So who’s pushing it? Those who will profit the most from its use. Think of it this way. Writing and publishing, at least books, is like no other business. A book is a product that takes a year or more to develop and put on the shelves, yet it often sells for $10-$20. I can’t think of a single other business model like it. Writing takes time—or does it? Enter AI, the fastest way to write.

According to a post on Threads, an author (I won’t mention the name) was recently caught with an AI prompt response still copy and pasted into their book! Embarrassing, I know. As a writer, I wouldn’t dream of blatantly copying AI into my work and slapping my name on it. So is this just a one-off event or an emerging trend? How many so-called authors are writing books with AI? According to a survey from Statistca,(2) 23% of writers reported using AI in their work. Of that 23% that use AI, 47% reported using it for grammar and editing. Another 29% reported using it to brainstorm plot ideas and characters. Are these acceptable uses of AI? Where do we draw the line? That’s perhaps another argument for another day. Keep in mind that those are the writers being honest. We may never know the percentage of those using it to actually write their stories.

There’s another question with AI outside of the obvious moral debate: Is it any good? I was curious about this. According to writers on Reddit, AI is terrible, and anyone would be able to see through it immediately. No one wants to read AI because it’s bland and inconsistent. But is that true? After reading one post where an writer was astonished to find her roommate actively creating her own novel by feeding AI prompts one chapter at a time, I decided to run my own brief experiment.(3)

I used ChatGPT to spit out a chapter of a story to see for myself. (Disclaimer: I am not using this in any way in my writing; this was purely to see for myself what AI can do.) The results both surprised and frightened me to a degree. It wasn’t half bad. In fact, it was better than a number of indie books I had read. The writing looked like it was done by a human author—at first.

When I looked into it a little more, though, the dialogue was off, just slightly. The most obvious instance was with a character struggling to suppress her magic saying, "It’s too much. I’m too much.” That made me laugh. No one says, “I’m too much.” What does that even mean? And while the rest of the scene was surprisingly good, I still have my doubts with how advanced AI writing is. It was one chapter. If you fed AI a prompt for an entire book, I doubt it would be consistent or draw any meaningful metaphors or foreshadowing. AI is nothing more than a machine drawing from established human works. If it gives you a metaphor, it would either be a silly combination of other metaphors that doesn’t make sense, or it would be copying from another source.

But AI is fast. Faster than any human can write. Perhaps the real struggle from AI won’t come down to it writing entire books outright, but rather a rough draft. I’m in no way arguing in favor of this. I’m only speculating what a business trying to make money might do. Why pay authors at all if they can have a machine spit out a rough draft that’s already grammatically correct, if just a little wonky? You could still give it to an editor who would polish those pesky human elements like dialogue and metaphors. They already have to fix plot holes with human writers, why not with AI?

If regulation doesn’t step in to curb this future, publishers might do just that. Still, you might ask: Is that ethical? To which I would answer: Do they care? For every business that’s run ethically, there are scores more that aren’t. There are only two forces holding businesses accountable: 1. regulation and, 2. consumers. If consumers push back and demand human writers over machines, publishers will be forced to acquiesce. They’ll have nothing to sell if no one’s willing to buy it.

There’s a second factor at play when it comes to consumers. If publishers replace authors with AI, why do we need them at all? AI is free to use. Currently anyone can type prompts in and create their own story, albeit not a very good one, as I’ve already pointed out, but one they could fix up. If publishers push for AI, they’re shooting themselves in the foot (or in the arm, as AI might say). No one will buy the inhuman product that they can make themselves for free. Readers follow their favorite authors and willingly pay for their work. You can’t interview a machine.

This post evolved more than I thought it would. Feel free to comment with your concerns and opinions (I know you have them).

Reference:

1. The Big 5 Publishers have killed Literary Fiction

2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1388542/authors-using-ai/

3. my roommate is letting chatgpt write her book

   
   

Janine Eaby loves to read, write, and garden. She is the author of the Beyond the Water's Edge fantasy book series and enjoys experimenting with poetry.