Month: February 2025

Britain’s Wealth to Be Plundered?

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Yesterday’s Telegraph has an article by Philip Johnston about the dangers of giving AI companies (particularly American ones) a free hand in training their artificial intelligence.

Philip Johnston has been with the Daily Telegraph for more than 20 years. He is currently assistant editor and leader writer and was previously home affairs editor and chief political correspondent.

Philip Johnston

He wrote, “Labour is planning to undermine copyright laws. The only winners will be the Silicon Valley tech bros.

Have you read any good books by Franklin Chase recently? Who on earth is he, you may well ask. I was on the Amazon site looking to pre-order Ungovernable, the diaries of Simon Hart, the former government chief whip, only to see another copy of almost the same book was already on Kindle. Moreover, it was “available instantly”, unlike Mr Hart’s which does not come out until the end of this week.

Only it wasn’t the same book, but an AI generated imitation with just 46 pages for £8.99. I downloaded it to find what might charitably be called a pile of old rubbish. “Politics is not for the weak,” its prologue begins. “It resembles a battlefield where alliances shift unpredictably, loyalty is often quickly exhausted and the difference between success and failure is extremely narrow. Few have navigated this perilous journey … Simon Hart is one of those exceptional individuals.”

Chapter one opens with the “August sun casting long shadows across the undulating hills of the Cotswolds” where a six-year-old Hart “dashed through the fields, his laughter carried by the breeze”. At least I hope this isn’t the real book. Who has got my wasted £8.99 I have no idea.

I called up Simon, an old acquaintance, and pointed out that this book by one Franklin Chase was basically pretending to be his and might be bought by an unwary would-be reader who had enjoyed the newspaper extracts of the real McCoy last week. He had recently been alerted to this but was told by his publishers that nothing could be done about it. “It is one of those those things in the new AI world” they said.

Indeed, it turns out that Mr Chase is quite a prolific mimic of other books. Among his recent publications are the memoirs of the actress Tuppence Middleton – Rising Through the Storm: A Journey of Fear, Fame and Fierce Resilience. Or the footballer Duncan Ferguson – From Prison Walls to Premier League Triumph. Or Robert Dessaix, the Australian author, Abandoned at Birth, Shaped by Love.

Each of these authors has a book coming out which these titles purport to emulate, all with the real name far larger than the enigmatic and indefatigable Chase, who is clearly an AI bot. These rip-offs are examples of the way generative AI is able to plunder massive amounts of data to create an almost instant book.

Since they are not plagiarised, they are strictly not a breach of copyright but doubtless they use information from some sources that should be protected. Amazon says it takes these fakes down if complaints are made but so many are appearing it is hard to keep up. Indeed, there is already another Simon Hart lookalike on the website: The Untold Story of a Modern Conservative by one Maeve Sterling, who also managed to publish a biography of Louis B Mayer this month.

The Labour Government now proposes to blunder into this brave new world by making it easier for tech giants to “mine” for creative material to feed into the voracious maws of their AI monsters. A 10-week consultation period into plans to remove copyright protections enjoyed by authors, musicians and others so that their work can be plundered to “train” their algorithms ended on February 24. This would be done by way of what is known as the text and data mining (TDM) exemption that currently applies to non-commercial research and would be extended to creative works still under copyright.

The work of British writers, composers and artists could be purloined allowing AI companies to profit from them and, in many cases, not repay the creator. The AI creations would then get IP protection despite having compromised the intellectual property of others. It is astonishing that a British government would contemplate this and yet this is the preferred option in the consultation paper.

Ministers are even planning to block an attempt in the House of Lords to preserve copyright laws by amending the Data (Use and Access) Bill now before Parliament. Baroness Kidron, a film-maker and crossbench peer behind the amendments, said this would be a “travesty”. She added: “The Government has just shown its colours again. It wants to make the UK an AI hub of America and they’re sacrificing the creative industries to do it.”

The Daily Telegraph in common with other newspapers has issued an eleventh-hour plea to ministers to drop the idea. If anything, they should be strengthening copyright against this wholly new and sinister attack on creative material.

Some big stars have joined the hue and cry. Brian May, the Queen guitarist, fears the industrial scale theft of other people’s talent by the AI behemoths cannot be stopped. Simon Cowell, the music producer, said the artistic livelihoods of many risk being wiped out. A letter signed by scores of artists said the Government’s approach “would smash a hole in the moral right of creators to present their work as they wish”, jeopardising the country’s reputation as a beacon of creativity.

The idea that a Labour government is bending over backwards to fill the coffers of Meta, Google and Elon Musk in this way is frankly baffling. So, too, was the Government’s refusal along with the Americans to sign a recent communiqué in Paris about controlling the growth of AI.

Sir Keir Starmer, who is to meet Donald Trump on Thursday, may have calculated that it would be better to be seen to support the AI Wild West that the new White House is happy to see and hope we get a slice of the action.

In the absence of anything else, Labour sees AI as the key to unlocking growth. Supporters say copyright restrictions get in the way of AI’s development and leave the UK struggling to catch up with America and China. Meanwhile, the people who invented AI are terrified about what it might do next.

Of course, the theft of creative material is hardly new. When a Christmas Carol was published in December 1843, knock-offs were on the streets within days claiming to be by Dickens. When a pirated version appeared in Peter Parley’s Illuminated Magazine the author sought an injunction against the publication.

He won but the magazine declared bankruptcy, leaving Dickens with costs of £700. It was thefts like these which necessitated copyright laws. It would be grotesque were Labour now to preside over their demise just to ingratiate themselves with J D Vance.”

Hows true! We’ll have to write to our MPs!

Trump’s Book Bann?

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The Guardian’s website has an article by Ed Pilkington, dated 13 February 2025 under the title ‘Pentagon schools suspend library books for ‘compliance review’ under Trump orders’.

Ed Pilkington is Chief Reporter for The Guardian in the US

He wrote: “Tens of thousands of American children studying in Pentagon schools serving US military families have had all access to library books suspended for a week while officials conduct a “compliance review” under Donald Trump’s crackdown on DEI and gender equality.

The Department of Defense circulated a memo to parents on Monday that said that it was examining library books “potentially related to gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology topics”. The memo, which has been obtained by the Guardian, said that a “small number of items” had been identified and were being kept for “further review”.

Books deemed to be in possible violation of the president’s executive orders targeting transgender people and so-called “radical indoctrination” of schoolchildren have been removed from library shelves. The memo states that the titles have been relocated “to the professional collection for evaluation with access limited to professional staff”.

The censorship of library books in defense department schools provoked a furious response from Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House judiciary committee. He slammed the practice as “naked content and viewpoint censorship of books”, during a hearing on the “censorship-industrial complex” on Wednesday.

Raskin invited other members of Congress to join him in “denouncing the purge of books, the stripping of books from the Department of Defense libraries or any other public libraries in America”.

The purge of library books will affect up to 67,000 children being taught in Pentagon schools worldwide. The Guardian understands that all 160 schools, located in seven US states and 11 countries, are subject to the censorship.

The Guardian has obtained a list of books that have been caught up in the blanket evaluation. They include No Truth Without Ruth, a picture book for four-to-eight-year-olds about the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second woman to sit on the US supreme court.

The book, by the award-winning writer Kathleen Krull, describes the sexist discrimination Ginsburg had to overcome in her rise to becoming a supreme court justice.

Other titles that have been caught up in the review include a book by the American Oscar-winning actor Julianne Moore. Freckleface Strawberry, also for four-to-eight year olds, features a young girl coming to terms with her freckles.

The Guardian invited the defense department to comment on the review of these and other titles, but a spokesperson did not refer to individual titles.

In a statement, the Department of Defense education activity confirmed that it was carrying out a review of library books as part of an examination of all “instructional resources”. The purpose was to ensure that Pentagon schools were aligned to Trump’s recent executive orders, Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.”

All book banns, except those which include books advocating violence, are to my mind a violation of the concept of Freedom of Speech. In their enthusiasm for cancelling DEI and gender self-identity, the Trump administration has gone too far.

Soulless Fiction Factories?

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There is an article in the February 6 issue of the Telegraph by Jake Kerridge which exposes a publishing process which is not well known and could mean ‘the end of original thought’.

Jake Kerridge is a UK-based journalist who specializes in writing about books and literature. With a keen eye for detail and a passion for storytelling, he has established himself as one of the leading books journalists in the country. As a regular contributor to The Telegraph, Kerridge’s work reaches a wide audience of book enthusiasts and industry professionals alike, making him a go-to source for the latest news, reviews, and insights into the world of literature.

Jake Kerridge

Jake says, “Reader demand for the world-conquering genre of “romantasy” (romance/fantasy) has grown so voracious that publishers are struggling to keep up the supply. That’s the conclusion I drew recently when I stumbled on an advert asking for “unpublished Young-Adult fantasy romance authors to audition for the chance to write a YA novel”.

One burden the successful applicant would be relieved of was thinking of a plot: this was already outlined in the advert. “Trapped on an enchanted cross-kingdom train to her wedding, a fiery princess works alongside her infuriatingly attractive new bodyguard to expose a killer onboard.”

Working Partners, the company that placed the advert, describes itself not as a publisher but as a “book packager”. The phrase might conjure up visions of people wielding bubble wrap in a warehouse, but for some decades now these organisations have played a vital role in the publishing ecosystem – though they tend to stay out of the limelight.

Book packaging companies vary in scale from conglomerate to cottage industry, but they usually comprise a permanent editorial staff and various freelance writers. The majority of them deal in fiction and non-fiction for children and young adults, and they are collaborative affairs, with the writers fleshing out ideas given to them.

There are generally two ways for a packaging company to become successful at placing books with publishers: produce, through the alchemy of collaboration, brilliant ideas; or get your staff to churn out books far more quickly than the publishers could do themselves in-house. If it sounds like literature on the factory farm model, packagers seem reluctant to dispel such ideas by shedding light on themselves.

“I think part of the reason book packagers get a bad rap is that there is a secrecy around the process, so it feels all a bit smoke and mirrors,” says Jasmine Richards, who founded the packager Storymix in 2019. “For example, celebrity fiction titles are often produced by packagers and traditionally that’s not been publicly acknowledged, although publishers are now getting better at crediting ghostwriters.

The Carnegie-nominated Fablehouse by EL Norry is one of Storymix’s big successes

“Personally I’m really proud to be a packager and to say out loud that we find talent and support it. So many writers get their first break with a book packager: you come and get paid to work on a project, build up your writing muscle and learn about the industry. Then maybe go on to sell your own project.”

Nevertheless, publishers remain wary of being publicly associated with the packaging model. In the US the romantasy community has been rocked this month by a lawsuit alleging plagiarism against Tracy Wolff, author of top-selling girl-meets-vampire yarns such as Crave.

In mounting her defence, Wolff’s lawyer revealed that her publisher, Liz Pelletier, was heavily involved in the writing of Crave, “a collaborative project with Pelletier providing to Wolff … the main plot, location, characters, and scenes, and actively participating in the editing and writing process.”

Pelletier, who runs the publishing company Entangled, has told The New Yorker that she commissioned Wolff to write Crave – “the fastest writer I’ve ever worked with” – to fill a gap in her publishing schedule when another author failed to deliver a book. Wolff produced the first draft in two months.

Commentators have dubbed Entangled a book packager in all but name, something Pelletier has denied almost as strenuously as the plagiarism accusations. If a conventional publisher gets a reputation for following the packager model in-house, they may struggle ever to woo big-name authors to their stable.

However, the romantasy genre does perhaps seem more suited to the packager model than to authors who want to express themselves artistically or come up with original ideas. Romantasy novels repeat tropes ad infinitum – love across class (or species) divides, love triangles, enemies becoming lovers – and the sales figures suggest that the more formulaic the book, the better romantasy readers like it.

With publishers able to see what tropes are trending on BookTok – #morallygreymen and #daggertothethroat are popular hashtags for romantasy readers – they are reportedly shaping books accordingly. (The New Yorker reports that Pelletier told another author: “the problem with traditional publishing is that they just let writers write whatever they want, and they don’t even think about what the TikTok hashtag is going to be”. Pelletier has said that she does not recall this conversation.)

As one fantasy novelist (who asked not to be named) put it to me, publishers do seem to be following the packager model more. “It is expensive to build up an author’s career over time, especially if you invest in them and then they turn out to be, say, Neil Gaiman. There’s a sense among publishers that the TikTok generation responds more to individual books than authors.

“It’s cheaper for publishers to hire packagers, or work like packagers, and tailor a book to its potential readership. One outcome of that is books become not just formulaic – they’re indistinguishable.” (I asked the big five UK publishers whether they were increasingly using packaging companies when it came to fiction; none responded to my request for comment).

If it’s easy to see why publishers commission work from packagers, what’s in it for the writers who toil away for them? Certainly not the money, says Honor Head, a veteran writer of children’s non-fiction for numerous book packagers. “It’s really badly paid. Usually if you work in packaging you don’t get a royalty, you get a flat fee. And if the publisher comes back and says ‘I don’t like what you’ve written’, you don’t get any more money for doing it again. But I love writing for children, and I’ve got to a stage of my life now where I don’t need to make as much money.”

There is a suggestion of the salt mines about working for book packagers. In 2010 the packager Full Fathom Five, founded by the author James Frey, was denounced by the New York Times as a “fiction factory”, with creative writing students or graduates writing up Frey’s story concepts for the unprincely sum of $250 per novel.

In China, the phenomenal popularity of wuxianwen, a type of serial fiction published straight to smartphones and tablets, is maintained by the equivalent of packagers: editors map out story arcs and farm various portions of the story out to different writers, each of whom is expected to produce 10,000 words daily.

Head recalls that when she started her own packager some years ago, she and her partner “were working dawn to dusk seven days a week”. Life is more relaxed now she freelances writing children’s non-fiction for other packagers, although her rate is impressive: “I would say the longest I’ve spent on a single book – researching, writing, and then doing any checks – would be a week. It depends on the age group, but I can get a book done in half a day.” She enjoys the discipline of writing to guidelines, although it can be frustrating working on, say, a book on dinosaurs for the US market and being obliged not to write anything that contradicts creationist theory.

Storymix founder Jasmine Richards favours an organic approach to packaging, devising ideas for YA and children’s fiction with her writers and then approaching publishers rather than being commissioned. Her aim is “to put kids and teens of colour at the heart of the action”.

“When my son was about five we were in the bookshop and I couldn’t find a single book on the shelf that featured a character that looked like him. As an editor and author I thought: what’s the best way to change the look of that shelf as quickly as possible? As an author I can write one book a year, but if I start my own book packager I could get several books on that shelf.”

Among Storymix’s big successes is the Carnegie-nominated Fablehouse by EL Norry, which was sold by Richards to Harry Potter publisher Bloomsbury.

“My job is often to matchmake the right idea with the right writer,” says Richards. “I had thought about a fantasy novel with a setting based on Holnicote House, which in the 1940s and ’50s took care of the children who came from relationships between African-American GIs and white British women. I knew exactly the writer I’d love to work on this project: Emma Norry, because I knew she had grown up in care and was of mixed-race heritage. I gave her a storyline, and I remember when she sent me the first chapter, I let the dinner burn in the oven while I read it. That’s a good example of how this method can unlock something amazing.”

Factories undermining the traditional autonomy of the author, or crucibles of collaborative magic? Whichever way you look at them, it’s clear that, despite most of us being unaware of their existence, without packagers the publishing landscape would look very different.”

This is a segment of the publishing market in which most of us would have no interest, either as writers or readers, but it clearly exists to serve the interests of some (perhaps a large group) of readers.

The Unreliable Narrator

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There is an intriguing article by Carter Wilson on the Writer’s Digest website on how and why to use an unreliable narrator in fiction – dated 29 January 2025.

Carter Wilson is the USA Today bestselling author of nine critically acclaimed, standalone psychological thrillers. He is an ITW Thriller Award finalist, a five-time winner of the Colorado Book Award, and his works have been optioned for television and film. Carter lives outside of Boulder, Colorado. 

Carter Wilson

Carter says, “Crafting a convincing unreliable narrator might be one of the most difficult things a thriller writer does. Of course, a narrator doesn’t have to be unreliable. A perfectly dependable narrator is often just what the thriller reader needs. A voice of reason and stability thrust in the midst of chaos. Sometimes we want that level-headed hero to guide us through those dangerous waters.

But sometimes…

Sometimes we, as readers, don’t want stability. Sometimes, in the middle of that chaos, we don’t want to believe anyone, including the voice that’s at the helm. Occasionally the fun is figuring out who to trust, if there’s anyone to trust at all. The best thrillers are often the ones in which the protagonist is not only fooling the reader, but themselves as well.

I specialize in writing unreliable narrators, and when I try to dissect why exactly that is, I can think of a few reasons. There are likely many more, but that may take thousands of dollars of therapy to tease out. But top-of-mind, these reasons stand out.

1) I don’t know what I’m doing. 

I mean that with 82% sincerity. I don’t outline, and usually I only have the vaguest notion of a plot idea, or sometimes I only know the first chapter. My stories unfold to me one day at a time, which means my narrator is just as lost as I am. I’m writing from my subconscious, which lends itself to a labyrinth of twists and turns, many of which the narrator has created for themselves. Simply put, my narrator is unreliable because the author is unreliable.

2) Life is unreliable. 

If one really considers what makes a narrator unreliable, a few choice adjectives pop up. Deceitful, delusional. In denial. Okay, do those words not describe all of us, at least in some part of our lives? Unreliable is honest. What’s not honest is a hero who can do no wrong, always has the answers, and is always willing to save others before themselves. Is this an admirable protagonist? Yes, of course. But it makes for a helluva boring thriller.

3) The intimacy of the POV. 

I typically write from a first-person, present-tense point of view. That means I’m seeing the world through my narrator’s eyes, moment by moment. This makes writing an unreliable narrator most effective, because the reader experiences the thoughts and actions as the protagonist does, and offers a fractured, almost stream-of-consciousness narration. What’s more unreliable in our daily lives than our swirling thoughts, our sudden fears, our whimsical and wholly unattainable daydreaming?

Striking a perfect balance

Writing an unreliable narrator brings me great joy, because I know readers will be lured into thinking one way until suddenly they’re forced to face an altogether different reality. But it’s also a tricky way to write, and the writer has to strike the perfect balance between believability and deus ex machina. An unreliable narrator shouldn’t be approached as a literary device; rather, a narrator’s unreliability should be an organic result of who they are and the decisions they make. 

No author should set out and think to themselves, “I’m going to write an unreliable narrator.” That leads to clumsy and shoehorned writing. Rather, the author should pen the novel as it occurs to them from the subconscious, and only after reading the first draft should they themselves realize their protagonist is not to be trusted. The best writing comes from ephemeral, naturally occurring thoughts rooted in decades of life experience and keen observation. The worst writing comes from market-conscious intentions.

In my newest release, Tell Me What You Did, my protagonist Poe Webb’s unreliability is less a device than a simple fact of life. She lies to the audience because she lies to herself. Poe committed a horrible crime in her past, and though that experience has largely informed who she is in the story, she’s suppressed the memory enough that she struggles to even admit to herself what she did until events force her to reckon with her past actions. Her unreliability is, at its core, human.

The final key in writing an unreliable narrator is to avoid coyness. Too many times an author hints over and over that their protagonist is not to be trusted, building up an anticipation that’s so great the payoff never quite satisfies. Rather, the best unreliable narrators are those who never wink at the camera, and when they look into the mirror they’re just as convinced as we are that the person in front of them is telling the truth.

Like I coach all my students, write from the heart, from the soul, from instinct, from the subconscious. From that perspective, an unreliable narrator is not a trick but rather a fully formed individual who is convinced they are doing the right thing, despite all evidence to the contrary. This results in a hero—or anti-hero—who is, above all else, uniquely flawed and morally gray. Just like all of us.”