Anthony Camber

You can think of the traditional publishing industry as a manufacturing production line. Manuscripts drop into a big bin at the start, and a succession of complex widgets evaluate and reject and poke and measure and tweak until finished books pop out of the end and into the virtual/real shops.

Reject is the typical operation on that production line. Traditional publishers want to make money, and they reject manuscripts that in their judgement don’t fit their business model. Most manuscripts are rejected, and most authors are disappointed.

The democratisation of publishing in the last twenty years has changed the equation. Disintermediation, to use the hundred-dollar word, gives writers the opportunity to bypass that traditional production line and sell directly to readers, or indirectly through a distributor like Amazon.

This has undoubtedly brought benefits: more marginalised voices can tell their stories without being blocked by unthinking gatekeepers.

But there’s a difference between a writer telling a story and a reader hearing it.

In 2025, the gap between writer and reader has never been smaller — and never been harder to traverse.

Changes since 2016

Since I last released a book — back in 2016 — the publishing environment has altered in significant ways.

The pace of book releases has increased. More authors have the tools and the ability to release more books. Bad actors are using generative AI to flood the market with dross (“slop” is the term used), and Amazon has little incentive (or likely ability) to detect and stop them. It’s significantly harder for a single book release to even be visible in a market like this without some additional oomph behind it — such as a celebrity author, or a traditional publisher’s marketing clout, or a friend in the media, or the author having an existing audience in another arena.

It’s easier/necessary to sell directly to readers. Through platforms like Shopify, Kickstarter or Patreon — more commonly used by authors than in earlier days — it’s possible to bypass the behemoths like Amazon and get even closer to your readers. Author newsletters are more popular too. This puts the onus on you to perform more marketing yourself: you can’t rely on any middle-men to market on your behalf.

Algorithms control visibility almost everywhere that matters. If you want to find readers on social media like Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or Threads, you have to navigate the algorithms. And those algorithms aren’t identical: what works on one site might not work on another. You might find that a professionally produced book trailer does no numbers at all, but a blurry, underlit photo of your cat gains you forty followers overnight. People do the social media equivalent of throwing things against the wall to see what sticks — except there are several walls, each of a different material that varies daily.

Audiobooks are more popular. And here comes AI again. Synthesised, automated narration is now possible and — while not great — it’s not awful, and will improve. Human narrators still dominate, for now. Can I afford not to release an audiobook? Is it ethical to use an AI as my narrator?

Traditional publishers are boarding the struggle bus. Mergers and merge failures. Midlist authors left to fend for themselves in the marketplace, with poor advances. Book prices in the UK haven’t risen in line with inflation for a long time, and costs haven’t sufficiently dropped through new technology and practices to offset those effective losses.

The rise of AI assistants. This is a massive, complex topic that didn’t exist in 2016. The effects of ChatGPT, Claude, CoPilot, Gemini, Perplexity and friends are still only beginning to be felt. There are obvious downsides: the rise in AI slop on Amazon, with some “authors” releasing a novel a month and occasionally forgetting to cut out the prompts they gave the AI. There are big and growing implications for graphic design: AI tooling can generate reasonable cover images now. The ethics of doing so are questionable at best. But it’ll happen, and identifying a cover image as AI, which used to be easy — count the fingers; trace the limbs; spot the alien writing — will soon be impossible. The writing community is struggling to decide where the boundaries lie: is it OK to use an AI to help brainstorm a storyline? A character? To give developmental editing feedback? To check grammar? To write the blurb? 

Regime change. In 2016 Barack Obama was the US president. In 2025, Donald Trump is in charge for the second time and Republicans are banning books. Corporations are pre-emptively complying. Is anyone even certain that authors will be allowed to sell LGBTQIA+ books on Amazon in a year’s time? Or books about the Black experience? Or books about evolution? Or fantasy books? I’m not certain at all. As Hemingway wrote in The Sun Also Rises a century ago (map it to censorship): “How did you go bankrupt? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” Or if you prefer a more modern quote, here’s J. Michael Straczynski in Babylon 5: “The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote”.

How does this affect Unstable Orbits?

As I start to focus more on marketing efforts for Unstable Orbits, I need to consider how best to promote the book in this new world.

I’m going to ignore the regime change problem: I’m not based in the US, and if someone tries to ban my books I’ll consider that a net positive in marketing terms. I also don’t think I’ll submit to literary agents or traditional publishers.

To try to increase the book’s visibility in the sea of releases — slop or otherwise — I’ll need to keep talking. Figure out how to force myself out of my comfort zone. Be proactive rather than reactive. Be controversial, perhaps.

And I’ll try to work the algorithms. That likely means I’ll post weird stuff on socials. I have a couple of ideas here.

I might start selling direct to readers. I’d love to create an audiobook.

I’ve been exploring AI from a purely experimental perspective. Absolutely not to brainstorm or write stories, and the book’s cover will be created by a real graphic designer (it’s in progress!). But I think authors need to understand the state of AI: where it works and where it doesn’t (today), because it isn’t going away.

The book is still on schedule for a release in June. Remember you can preorder the Unstable Orbits ebook today at Amazon to buy at the cheapest price — the price will rise after launch. (There’ll be a paperback edition available at launch too.)