Fresh off the publishing press is the latest Amazon scandal:
Books imitating biographies.
These ebooks and paperbacks are entirely written by AI and are said to be capitalising on public figures currently getting a lot of publicity. For example, one article reports there has been a surge of books imitating the biographies of the women’s England soccer team after their historic win of the Euros only a few short weeks ago.
One so-called author has some 40+ titles under their belt since July 2025.
YES, FROM LAST MONTH.
That’s nearly 10% of Isaac Asimov's 500 books published across his lifetime — in mere weeks.
I imagine Asimov’s ghost is already busy locating and haunting the warehouses storing these AI servers. While he’s taking the fight directly to the tech, publishers and sports stars are now taking it to Jeff Bezos and demanding Amazon bring these shillers down.
Will they?
I doubt it.
It’s capitalism, after all, and from what I hear-tell through the grapevine, the e-commerce giant has no plans on prohibiting the use of AI, which I am not surprised about.
What this scandal DOES confirm is what I’ve always known:
With every new technology comes grifters who exploit it and dirty those who use the tool ethically.
Such is the human condition.
We cannot help ourselves. 🤷
But the market usually corrects itself over time; something I imagine the “author” in question hasn’t lived long enough yet to see for himself.
Oh whale.
God can’t save ‘em all.
While the grifters are busy grifting, I’ll continue to sacrifice my pound of flesh to the fiction gods for every new piece of material I create the old-fashioned way:
Typing.
I’ve tried dictation, speed typing, and even test-drove AI to draft my ideas to no avail. They either left me feeling dejected or had me spending 5x longer to clean up the mess.
And speaking of doing stuff the old-fashioned way…
Did you know that during the mid-20th century, the average novel was 40,000-50,000 words in length?
Even C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe clocked in at 36,000 words, which would be dwarfed by most fantasy novels these days. Fortunately for you and me, fun, digestible novels like these need not be a thing of the past.
Case in point:
Exiled, Forbidden Forest, Last Alliance, and One True King can easily be read in 2-3 sittings each.
And while The Great Betrayal is the longest book I’ve ever done-written (at just shy of 100,000 words), it, too, has the pace of an action thriller while still retaining the soul of an epic fantasy.
Don’t believe me?
Read or listen to them for yourself here:
https://djjwatsonstore.com/products/TDR-Bundle
DJJW