On this episode of the Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast, Dan Holloway covers Spotify’s new publishing program for indie authors, which focuses on short audiobooks in popular genres like romance, mystery, and sci-fi. He also discusses the latest AI-generated fiction making waves in the literary world, including reactions from authors and critics to OpenAI’s new model.
Listen to the Podcast: Spotify Launches New Program for Short Audiobooks
Sponsors
All our ALLi podcasts are proudly sponsored by Bookvault. Sell high-quality, print-on-demand books directly to readers worldwide and earn maximum royalties selling directly. Automate fulfillment and create stunning special editions with BookvaultBespoke. Visit Bookvault.app today for an instant quote.
Self-Publishing News is also sponsored by book cover design company Miblart. They offer unlimited revisions, take no deposit to start work and you pay only when you love the final result. Get a book cover that will become your number-one marketing tool.
Thoughts or further questions on this post or any self-publishing issue?
If you’re an ALLi member, head over to the SelfPubConnect forum for support from our experienced community of indie authors, advisors, and our own ALLi team. Simply create an account (if you haven’t already) to request to join the forum and get going.
Non-members looking for more information can search our extensive archive of blog posts and podcast episodes packed with tips and advice at ALLi's Self-Publishing Advice Center.
About the Host
Dan Holloway is a novelist, poet, and spoken word artist. He is the MC of the performance arts show The New Libertines, He competed at the National Poetry Slam final at the Royal Albert Hall. His latest collection, The Transparency of Sutures, is available on Kindle.
Read the Transcripts
Dan Holloway: After all the fun and games of last-minute breaking news from the Selfies at London Book Fair, it's back to relative normal this week in self-publishing news, with most of the news dominated by Spotify and, obviously, you will have seen across many parts of the media, the latest ventures of AI into writing fiction.
Spotify Announce New Program for Short Audiobooks
We will start with Spotify and the announcement of their new program aimed directly at indie authors. So, this is a program for short audiobooks.
As they put it in their press release, this is a new publishing program for independent authors, which is a slightly strange way of putting it. They want indie authors, and they want to publish them. Nonetheless, it is aimed at indie authors, albeit giving up a little bit of your indie status.
Although, they do make very clear throughout the article that if you want to retain absolute independence, you are always free to self-publish your titles direct to Spotify, whether they're short audiobooks, long audiobooks, or intermediate length audiobooks, and they remind you that Spotify is never exclusive so you can publish to them and publish to many other places as well.
But this new program, it is looking specifically at targeting books of the 10,000-to-20,000-word range. For me, that feels like something that is going to be 60 to 90 minutes, which is basically something that falls into the long form podcast range, the kind of thing that would see you through a commute there and back to work, which is very much a hot format at the moment; seeking to cash that in.
This looks like a great opportunity to tie fiction into that, calling them Novelettes. You may remember some time ago when novellas started becoming really popular that Novelettes became a thing as well. Again, about the same range and the same principle; this is something you could read on the way to work in a day.
It's also no surprise where they're focusing this. So, at the moment they're looking only at three genres, and those genres, of course, are romance, mystery and thriller, and sci-fi/fantasy.
There is a note, of course, it says cross genre works like romantasy, dark romance, thriller mystery, sci-fi, or psychological thriller are encouraged.
Again, no surprise.
What do you get if your books are chosen? So, this is submissions. It's a gate kept process. So, they're looking for books that they think are really going to fit their readership or their listenership, and then they're going to, as they put it, publish the audiobook. It includes paying an advance and royalties, managing all aspects of production and distribution to major audiobook retailers.
They do make clear this does not affect the eBook rights. This does not affect the paperback writes.
So, even if you are accepted with them, you can still self-publish in those other formats. Exciting program. Very much hoping to see some ALLi titles there.
And as I say, a reminder at the end of the piece, and I will end with that reminder as well, that if you want to publish direct to Spotify, you can do through Findaway Voices.
You also, of course, as I mentioned last week, can do so through Eleven Labs, if you want an AI-generated narration.
AI’s Latest Venture into Fiction Writing Sparks More Debate from Authors
That segues into our other topic this week, which is AI's latest venture into the world of storytelling. You will, I am sure, have seen Sam Altman getting very excited that his new AI model, which he calls an AI model that is very good at creative writing, as he puts it.
Oh, sorry, no, it says it's good at creative writing. The very is clearly yet to come.
He posted an extract on X of a short story that is being called, The Machine Shaped Hand, and this was in response to a prompt, which was, please write a metafictional, literary short story about AI and grief.
So, that's really quite a short prompt, and he says this is the first time that something written by AI has, in his words, really struck him.
And it has struck other authors too. So, The Guardian has a lot of authors reactions to this. They are pretty much what you would expect. They all focus on the fact that this is written by AI.
Tracy Chevalier has a really interesting insight that she says, if this had been handed in by someone on her MA course, she would say they are a really promising student. But because everyone knows it's written by AI, you expect people to say something else.
This struck me in general about the comments is, I wonder what people would've said if they hadn't known it was written by AI.
It's a piece of metafiction. It's exactly what it says on the tin, what the prompt has asked it to do.
Interestingly, it has a protagonist called MILA that was the first thing that to me, really smacked of Milan Kundera, who is obviously one of the most famous writers of metafiction of recent times.
This read a lot like a Milan Kundera short story, the way it handles the subject of grief and metafiction, and the way that the narrator breaks the fourth wall, and yet somehow manages to draw the reader in, and so on.
I am sure that there may have been Milan Kundera in the training of this model.
Jeanette Winterson is an interesting responder because she really likes the piece. She says it moved her.
Interesting that I have to say I found the piece to be quite emotionally powerful.
There are a lot of people who aren't going to like that. There are a lot of writers who will say it's not actually powerful because it's derivative and therefore it can't be.
As several people have pointed out, it really is redolent of students, but then this is a student kind of AI. It's that kind of pretentious creative writing student. But then again, it was asked to produce meta fiction. So, what do you expect?
I think it does what it does exceptionally well. Whether we should be worried about this as writers, I don't know.
So, Jeanette Winterson definitely says we shouldn't. She thinks that the, what she calls alternative intelligence, that is illustrated by something like this is actually quite a healthy thing because it can help to give us alternative perspectives on the world.
As someone who thinks of themselves as a teacher of and expert in kinds of creativity, I think I very much see where she's coming from.
For me, creativity is about how you combine things that already exist to form something new.
That is clearly what this kind of AI language learning model does. It's also what we as writers do, and I've talked about human exceptionalism a lot over the years. I get a lot of flak for it from many in the creative community, but I think I do stick by it. I think when something produces something like this, is it any more or less pretentious than a human being?
Can you ascribe things like pretension to it? Can you deny the emotional impact of a story just because it's written by a machine? If you didn't know it was written by a machine would have more or less emotional impact?
All sorts of fascinating questions that a piece like this raises. So, I'm sure that this is a debate that will carry on.
And like Tracy Chevalier ‘s precocious MA student, I am sure that this is the start of a very fast expanding career for AI written fiction, and we all need to work out what to do with that landscape.
That's either a really positive or a really bleak note to finish on.
Maybe we could take our minds off it by coming up with some nice novelettes and dark romantasy to submit to Spotify.
In the meanwhile, I'm getting back to formatting my latest book, which is out this Tuesday. It's lovely to have a little break to talk to you because I'm at the point where, I'm sure you all know, where the eBook formatting does things that you cannot understand from the source text you've given it. So, now I've calmed down a little bit I will go back and seek to remedy them.
With that, I look forward to speaking to you again next week. Thank you.
