Authors, You Can Enjoy Fifteen Minutes of Fame for Only $1200
Matilda Battersby, writing in The Bookseller reports on a new “disrupter” in the book publishing industry. The start-up, called Spines, began in 2021 and it published its first books this year. It published 273 titles in September alone, including 33 that were released on the same day. Its goal is to publish 8000 authors in 2025 and eventually to help one million people find their way into print.
How is this possible, you may ask? No, you don’t have to ask. AI, of course.
The technology enables Spines to reduce the publication process from between six and eighteen months down to two or three weeks. Authors will pay an up-front fee of between $1200 and $5000, and the AI takes care of the rest. Authors retain 100% of the royalties as well as copyright. Spines’ co-founder Yehuda Niv claims that this is not self-publishing, and it is not vanity publishing. Spines is a publishing platform. That is “a new concept,” says Mr. Niv.
But is it? This does not seem different from publishing on Amazon, which I would call a publishing platform, and a standard definition of vanity publishing is one where the author pays to be published. So Spines seems like vanity publishing platform. Which part of that is new? If Spines is not benefitting from royalties or from intellectual property rights in the books that it publishes, it seems that its model is based on volume, which means that publishing with Spines will carry with it all the cache of self-publishing — you pay someone to publish you because you cannot interest a reputable publisher in your book.
But wait, if you want to get your book out there quickly, you might also try a new Microsoft’s new imprint 8080 books, which I fear means that Microsoft too, through the wonders of AI, intends to bring out thousands of new titles each year. But of course, the world does not want for books; it wants for readers. Publishers, for all their inefficiencies, perform a valuable service in selecting which books find their way into print. Spines boasts that some of its books have become “bestsellers,” but The Bookseller could find no evidence that Spines’ best-selling titles have found more than a few hundred readers, and Spines itself would not provide evidence of book sales because “that data is private and belongs to the author”.
In short, I can see no reason why this business should succeed, which means you should probably invest because in 2025, dumb things are edgy and cool.