-
People and AI have worked together to grind down a small publisher.
Effective March 6, 2024, I will begin the process of winding down Bards and Sages Publishing.
…
I am spending four to five hours a week trudging through submissions just to weed out AI-generated trash. I have editorial assistants who actually read and review the submissions, but I still look at every submission myself first to make sure I am weeding out the obvious junk before wasting their time, otherwise the submission response rate would take 20 months. Just over the weekend, I rejected twenty obviously AI generated submissions. My inbox is flooded with it.
…
Two to three times a month, I need to fight with Amazon over negative reviews that get spammed on multiple books because an author got upset about a story being rejected. Or I get some snark response back about how my reviewers need better training, or that I am not a "real" editor, or something outright vulgar. Or I get a prank call to my phone. These sort of people have always lurked around the industry, so I am not unaccustomed to dealing with them. But it seems like they have grown more emboldened, and there seems to be this weird social currency tied to the bad behavior now.