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Once upon a time, a rave review from the Associated Press could make an author’s career. Now, with the AP officially ending all book reviews, that era is over, leaving readers to look elsewhere—like The Real Book Spy—to help them find their next great read.
Yes, the AP has indeed completely abandoned book reviews. However, they claim to be still “pursuing publishing stories,” which sounds like a polite way of saying they’ll pursue stories about authors, rather than covering the stories those authors work so hard to bring their readers.
I can’t say I’m shocked, though I am disappointed. This is yet another change the publishing world must contend with, adding to a list that already includes dwindling interest in physical books—especially hardcovers, a format that is quickly declining—and shifts in consumer habits. Keep in mind that the publishing industry, as a whole, is already struggling to adapt to the new ways that retailers, such as Barnes & Noble, are deciding which books to sell in their stores. B&N, for example, no longer has a central buyer; instead, it has moved to a model that allows for each store manager to select which books will sit on their shelves, eliminating many of the ways that publishers could spend additional money to ensure that a title they believed received proper placement to provide more discoverability.
There’s also the death of the mass market paperback, which has many bracing for what, exactly, that will mean to authors’ salaries and overall sales.
Much like the music industry, which shifted away from CDs in favor of streaming, and Hollywood, which was forced to forge a new path forward without DVD sales, dwindling moviegoers, and multiple streaming services demanding a different type of original content, the publishing world is also heading into uncharted waters.
The rise in E-books and audiobooks has reduced the demand for physical books, as I mentioned above, while hardcover costs have now soared to $30.00 per book, at a time when many—because the cost of living is currently so high—don’t have the cash to throw around. All of that, coupled with the rise in AI, and whether you’ve realized it or not, things are tough right now in publishing.
Not only are tech companies illegally stealing and ripping off authors’ work (mine included, FYI) in order to teach their supercomputers how to emulate our styles—something #1 New York Times bestselling author David Baldacci just testified in front of Congress about, in fact—but lazy, bad actors looking to “get rick quick” are using said AI technogly to crank out multiple books per day.
Yes, whereas most authors sweat their deadlines and pour everything they have into writing a book, spending months and months working, grinding to produce the best possible story and reading experience for their fans, others are instead using artificial intelligence to “write” books for them, oversaturating the market with poor, machine-written books that, quite frankly, don’t deserve to sit next to a real writer’s genuine work. And yet, it’s become such a problem that Amazon has now had to limit the number of books someone can self-publish and upload to three . . . per day.
Oh, for the record, the average time to write a thriller, for example, generally 80k-100k words (sometimes longer), is 6-12 months. The shortest amount of time it’s considered possible to produce something worthy of being traditionally published is usually about four months, and I can tell you firsthand that that requires a lot of late nights, locked away in your office, trying desperately to hit your daily word count.
And yet, some people are cranking out three per day. What a joke.
In fairness to the AP, they actually put a (soft) end to most reviews years ago, eliminating freelance critics; it just wasn’t widely reported. Still, because it truly does mark the end of an era, I reached out to a good friend of mine named Jeff Ayers, who actually wrote book reviews for the Associated Press, and asked him to provide his take on what this means for the state of publishing as a whole.
Ayers, like me, started as a critic before launching his career as a novelist. A talented writer—check out his work here—Ayers was kind enough to provide me with a full-length article, where he charges headfirst into the issues I’ve laid out, offering his analysis of what the AP’s decision means for the publishing world at large.
Read his article below.
ASSOCIATED PRESS, BOOK REVIEWS, AND THE WORLD OF PUBLISHING
By Jeff Ayers
It continues to become increasingly difficult for books to be discovered, for markets to emerge for authors to write them, and for readers to rely on authors they have already found in this complex world of publishing. With the decline of mass-market paperbacks over the years, Readerlink, the vendor that supplied paperbacks to places such as Hudson News in airports, Walmart, and Kroger, announced that it would stop distributing them. This essentially eliminates . . .