On this week's Self-Publishing News podcast, ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway covers Spotify's Partner Program expanding to 35 more markets, a self-published audiobook making the Speakies shortlist — and what the sponsor list says about Audible's standing. He closes with “AI in the Wild,” a new study of 500,000 prompts showing readers are using AI to write fiction for themselves, raising the question of whether the biggest AI threat to writers comes from readers.
Listen to the Podcast: Spotify Expands Its Partner Program
Show Notes
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.
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Read the Transcript
Dan Holloway: Hello, and welcome to another Self-Publishing News podcast. And we have another in the ongoing series of academic articles about AI in writing that you are definitely going to want to hear all about today. But before we go there, let's go to Spotify. And I guess this is the big news of the week, is that Spotify is extending its partner program.
Spotify Expands Its Partner Program to 35 More Markets
So Spotify's partner program, which was launched a few months ago, is available to creators who have — and this is their criteria — 1,000 Spotify audience members in the last 30 days, 2,000 Spotify hours consumed over the previous 30 days, and at least three podcast episodes published ever.
And the partner program offers … Basically, it offers podcasters access to different forms of income. So you will either get a cut of premium subscription fees, or for those listeners who don't have a paid subscription, you can earn advertising royalties. So what the partner program does is it pairs podcast creators with sponsors who want to get their products embedded within podcasts.
You choose the sponsor you want to align with. Then the idea, as Spotify sell it, is that it's sort of win-win, because people who are listening to the podcast only hear a couple of adverts, so they get fewer adverts, and it's a win for creators because we get a cut of people who on the sponsorship side have signed up for the partner program.
And it's not just that allegedly it gives you a higher income from advertising. In the piece announcing the new expansion of the partner program, Spotify are claiming that those podcasts who've signed up for the program have seen a 45 percent increase in their listenership since they joined it.
The Speakies Shortlist Includes a Self-Published Romance
So there we go. That is the Spotify Partner Program, which is now extended to a further 35 markets, and Spotify has a list of all those markets. But basically, this is turning into a global thing, so it will garner you revenue wherever your podcast is listened to. And while we're on the subject of audiobooks and all things audio, the shortlist for the UK — or the British Audio Awards, otherwise known as The Speakies — has just been announced.
The Speakies is the UK equivalent of the Audiobook Association of America — the US version, anyway — which is known as the Audies. And it has 18 categories. And like the Audies, it is open to self-published books, which always makes it something that I make sure to scroll through.
And congratulations are in order to Sacha Cotman, whose audiobook, A Wild English Rose, has been shortlisted in the romance category. So very best to Sacha. I very much hope to be reporting, when the winners come out, on a self-published winner. That would be fabulous. And to tie those two things together, the romance category is sponsored by Spotify Audiobooks.
And it is interesting to note that 11 of the 18 award categories have received sponsorship. Spotify, as I say, sponsors the romance category. There is no category, as far as I could see, that was sponsored by Audible, and that is very interesting and is in itself probably a comment on the landscape of audiobooks.
As it stands currently, it is definitely very much no longer the case that Audible stand alone at the head of the market. Spotify are very much up there, at least with them. So that's audiobooks. And that brings us to the subject of academic studies of the use of AI in writing. And there have been a couple of studies on this that have gone viral and caused a lot of angry words or encouraged words, depending on who you listen to.
New Study Finds Readers Writing Their Own Fiction With AI
One of those studies was looking at market saturation and the phenomenon of AI-generated e-books potentially eating away at the potential revenue for human authors. And it concluded that there was a genuine market danger presented by AI-generated e-books for human authors. So that's a threat we've been thinking about for quite some time, is that of AI authors.
So not just human authors using AI, but AI essentially becoming an author in its own right — AI-generated titles with fictitious authors who are nothing more than a front for a bot. There was genuine concern raised by this article that this was going to be presenting a possible threat to human authors.
And one of the things it cited was that these titles generated by AI were commercially relevant, I think is how they put it. So they weren't earning quite as much as titles written by human authors, but they were earning commercially significant amounts, and that in itself was interesting.
And that led us to a second study that you'll remember, which showed that readers actually responded more positively to AI-generated e-books than to human ones. In particular, it noted also that people who thought they knew a lot about literature couldn't actually tell the difference between AI-generated books and human-authored books, and they also preferred or spoke more highly of some of the AI-generated titles than the human-generated ones.
So that raised a very interesting question, going back to the first study, of whether actually in future, as the pool of known human authors maybe decreases as AI gets more traction in the market, whether this threat will grow and become a bit of a feedback loop, posing even more of a threat to human authors.
And that brings us to the latest study, and this is a really, really interesting one, because it doesn't talk about what writers are doing, and it doesn't talk about how readers are responding to AI-authored books. Instead, it is a study of readers who are themselves using AI to write books for themselves — so writing books for a niche of one, as it were.
And the paper is called AI in the Wild, and it begins with this fascinating question: Are readers generating their own fiction using AI? And the answer is yes, they are. So the study looks at 500,000 prompts that readers were using to generate their own AI titles. And what they found was, and I'll put it in their words, “We argue that AI technologies may lead to a shift in the conventional relationship between author and reader, potentially producing what we call a solipsistic reader-writer who both generates and consumes fiction within a closed conversational loop, interacting with a machine rather than a human other.”
So that is very interesting. And what they do is they also look at the areas that readers were asking for stories to be generated in. They found, not surprisingly, that people were interested in niche versions of erotica, shall we say, and things that were very, very specific, but were largely within the fan fiction and the erotica genres.
And basically, what readers were doing was they were clearly demonstrating they wanted to read about things in a very particular niche. And AI was providing them with a way of reading books that catered to that niche, where maybe no other writers were doing so. So it's taking what we're seeing increasingly as writers, which is the growth of the niche market and the popularity of books that appeal to a very niche audience, and it is driving that to its logical conclusion, which is that ultimately people who have very niche interests may be able to find books for them, even if there are no writers out there to write them, because they are getting AI to write it for them.
That to me is a much more interesting thing than whether writers are using AI or not when we think about the future landscape and the future of our ability to make an income. Because maybe it isn't that our biggest danger is other writers using AI or companies using AI to pump out loads of generic content.
Maybe the greatest danger comes from readers themselves, and who would've thought that is the conclusion that we would be reaching? That maybe the greatest danger to writers is the action of readers. As I say, it's an interesting paper. I would highly suggest you go and read it, and I will make sure that Howard has a link to the paper to put in the program notes.
With that, I will leave you to go and think about the latest niche you would like to write in and look forward very much to speaking to you again at the same time next week. Thank you.
