I don’t know man, the older I get, and after the f**ked up situation of my divorce, I can’t say that too many things surprise me anymore. Messed up things in the publishing world suck, but don’t shock me. Yet, every once in a while, I learn that my jaw can still drop.
Rosa Linda Román recently told a story on her Substack that did just that about a white man speaking at a writers conference on how he uses AI to pose as a young Brazilian woman author and is making bank on it….and he is teaching other people how they can do it too.
You can read her piece Pretending for Profit and see how that story turns out, here. You can also hear her talk about it on her Youtube/Podcast at the 18:33 minute mark in this is video. I promise, as angry as the events in the piece should make any real creative feel, Rosa Linda still offers a glimpse of hope in what everyday activism can look like and why it is important and matters in our creative business.
I am going to write a longer piece making an argument for Amazon's need for a disclosure message and weeding option against AI content, but for now, I recommend reading Rosa Linda's piece to see what is getting added to the market. You might not see AI-using book publishers as your competition, but they are for sure distracting readers while on Amazon and making it just that much harder for them to find your books.
I came across this really beautiful TedTalk by the artist Zaria Formanwhere she speaks about her art practice, her activism, and an experience of grief that touched her work. If you have 7 minutes, give it a watch. Not only is it an excellent oral memoir of grief for her own loss and the planets, it could help you see new ways to speak about your own work publicly. A TedTalk would be a great way to draw interest to your work. Imagine, long after you gave your speech, someone could still feature it in a letter to thousands of people.
If you have only just started reading my letters, or occasionally skip over some, here are some topics you might have missed:
I wrote about cease-and-desist threats for writers in not onebut twoletters because it worked some of my readers up a little bit.
Over in the Letters From Libby James: The Private Drafts I wrote about my move across the country in multiple posts, including my latest piece where I talk about my strugglewith commitment to place.
So if you like it when I talk about my own drama, that would be for you.
And I spent a lot of the last year writing about lit journals in different ways. Some lit journals are dying, yes, but there are a lot of journals and magazines popping up that are putting a new spin on things and continuing to create spaces for artists to share individual works and promote bigger projects. You can find those letters here.
Lastly, I want to recommend Werner Herzog’s new book The Future of Truth. Not because I think it is his best work, but because I think it is entertaining and weird.
Werner Herzog's New Book The Future of Truth
I wish us all the kind of creative freedom and success where we can just write about whatever we want and no one stops us, including ourselves.
