On this episode of the Self-Publishing News Podcast, Dan Holloway discusses allegations that the bestselling memoir The Salt Path misrepresented key facts, reigniting debate over truth in nonfiction. He also examines Globe Scribe, a new AI translation tool claiming human-level results, and reports on the closure of serial fiction platform Radish after struggling to compete with Wattpad.
Listen to the Podcast: Radish Shuts Down
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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: Hello and welcome to the Self-Publishing News and what will probably be quite a brief look at this week's headlines, which will involve Globe Scribe, the new AI tool, as well as the Salt Path controversy, which I'm sure you will have followed, which is a good place to begin.
That, of course, involves a 630-mile walk, and the reason this maybe a short podcast is because I was very sensible and went out in the ferocious heat of one of the hottest days of the year and did an ultra-marathon under the burning sun, and my legs are now telling me that was not necessarily the world's most sensible idea. It was nonetheless huge fun, which is something that Raynor and Moth Wynn, the author and her husband of the Salt Pass, are not having right now.
The Salt Path Controversy – Are Memoir Authors at Risk?
Dan Holloway: The Salt Path, as you are probably aware, is a 2018 book about a couple who lose everything. They lose their house and then the husband receives a terminal diagnosis of a degenerative illness, and they respond by going on a 630-mile-long walk. In the process, as is the way with such things, finding themselves and finding the real meaning of life.
It was recently turned into a film, and even more recently still was the subject of an investigation by the Observer newspaper, which claims that, as is again often the way with such memoirs, not everything is as it seems.
The book portrays the couple as having lost their house as a result of bad investment. The claim is that actually the author embezzled money from her employer and then took out a loan which she was unable to repay in order to pay back the money that had been embezzled, and as a result of not being able to pay back the loan, ended up losing the house. Doubts have been cast also on the husband's diagnosis, which was made many more years ago than the usual prognosis for such a disease to sadly take its course, and his health is looking not what experts would have expected.
At the moment, this is still allegation. Penguin Random House, the publisher of the book, have delayed the author's new book and, of course, the whole of social media, whether it's writer's social media or anyone else social media, is talking about this.
Dan Holloway: It's really interesting for me because it raises lots of questions about what memoir really is.
Partly, this may be because I studied theology, and this is one of the big debates in New Testament and Old Testament. Theology is to what extent are stories that portray themselves as literally true, actually literally true?
It's been going ever since then up until the time I first really became aware of the debate in the literary world, which was James Frey's, A Million Little Pieces, and every now and again we get continual reminders of memoirs which turn out to have a shady relationship with the truth, but are nonetheless claimed to express something that is more truthful than facts, or some variation there on, because what really matters is the spiritual truth at the heart of the memoir.
That is pretty much what the author is claiming. It's claiming that the fundamental truth is captured in the memoir, which is essentially what James Frey claimed for A Million Little Pieces.
I probably won't comment on my opinions here.
It is one of those things that readers in the wider world don't necessarily understand the complexities of these things, it feels like sometimes. It also feels a bit rich that we live in an age of influencers who patently manipulate the truth every day and are rewarded with huge amounts of money and celebrity. Is this a new landscape we're living in, or is it the case that influencers are held to one standard and writers of memoir are held to another?
All of those are things I'll leave to you, but it's such a big story, I couldn't not cover it.
It raises some absolutely fascinating questions to go away and think about, especially for those of you who are memoir writers or creative non-fiction writers.
Globe Scribe Promises AI Translations and Re-Opens AI Debate
Dan Holloway: That's the first story, and then we come to Globe Scribe.
Globe Scribe is and new AI platform. If you had to come up with a pitch for it, it would be the Eleven Labs for translation. By which I mean, it is a platform that is aimed, it says at publishers and indie authors, but the main market is going to be us, indie authors, to help people exploit rights that they might not otherwise be able to exploit in translation markets.
For a hundred dollars, Globe Scribe will translate your work into whatever language you want. It claims that readers can't tell the difference. Which reminds me of an old butter advert, or not butter advert. I think it was, “I can't believe it's not butter”, it was something to do with butter, and the catch line was the customers couldn't tell the difference.
Dan Holloway: So, it claims that readers can't tell the difference between human translation and AI translation. Of course, this is exactly what was said about AI-generated voice narration a year or so ago. Translators are understandably up in arms about this, partly because it's training on their work that has enabled this to happen. Also, of course, because this is their livelihoods.
As I've said many times in the past in other areas of AI, by saying things like, a machine can never capture the true nuance of something the human translator can do, I think that's the wrong argument. Because it's true until the moment it isn't true, and the moment when it isn't true, I think, if we have learned anything, is coming shortly. So, I don't think that's necessarily the right argument to be pursuing. Much better to stick to arguments around the kind of future that we want our creative industries to have.
AI tools have a huge potential to benefit, but also huge detriment potentially to those who work in the creative industries and Globe Scribe has reignited this debate, but this time in the sphere of translation.
Radish Closes in Face of Wattpad Success
Dan Holloway: To end a sad story, because it's always sad when businesses that have felt like they were a stalwart of the area close, after nearly a decade this time it is Radish that is closing up. It will be shuttering at the end of December.
Radish is, as you may have known, if you follow this column or just love serial fiction, it's a serial e-fiction platform. People buy tokens, they buy coins, and they can use those coins to buy episodes of their favorite serials. Very much along the Wattpad model, and I think from everything I've read, part of the problem is that Wattpad has that space so well sewn up that even though Radish was bought by the entertainment giant Kakao for over $400 million back in 2021, it has never been able to eat fully into the space that Wattpad dominates.
We've seen figures in the coverage of this closure that say that it has 500-million-episode views, and it has 20,000 stories by 2000 authors. You then go on to Wattpad and the top stories there have 500-million-episode views each, less alone views for the whole site.
Wattpad really does make it very hard for anyone else to work in this space. Radish has done very well with romance. It did very well with K-pop fan fiction and comics, but it's never really found its niche, and I think that anything that's going to succeed in a space where there's a player as big as Wattpad needs to have a niche.
Anyway, if you are a reader on Radish, then your tokens, your coins, will run out at the end of the year. So, do make sure you spend them. Make sure that creators who have contributed to the decade ride over there are able to make the most of it, and that the money doesn't go to waste or doesn't go out of the pockets of the creators where it belongs.
Dan Holloway: There we go, I very much look forward to speaking to you again next week. In the meanwhile, stay safe, especially those of you who are in the heat. Stay extra safe. Don't do silly things like running ultra marathons in the middle of the day.
Speak to you again same time next week.
