I Welcome Our New Robot Authors

By Steve Weddle

If you're like most writers, you probably like to sit in the basement, passing gas, and playing "When Did I Eat That?" all morning.

That leaves very little time for writing.

Lucky for you that Combinatorial Publishing is now a thing.

All you need to do is to come up with a topic. Already, a sizable number of books exist concerning Snooki. Also, shark attacks. Archaeology. Here are some of their best sellers.

After some thought, I decided that there are too few books about a certain subject, so I created my own book --

I typed in that, then clicked a thing and voila:

Your search terms have been submitted to Nimble Combinatorial Publishing and the e-book is being built now.  If the alpha system understands the search correctly, the book will appear in the catalog after review by the publisher, typically within 24 hours.  In future, notification of status will be provided and appearance in the catalog will be nearly immediate.

So, I'll soon be a non-fiction author, I guess. 

Here's more on Nimble Books and CEO Fred Zimmerman, via the Boston Globe:

Zimmerman’s company, Nimble Books, is a small part of an industry that looks set to balloon. At its most vulgar, auto-generated content is used to churn out Web pages whose only purpose is to snag online searchers and drum up advertising. On a more substantive level, outfits like Narrative Science and Automated Insights are producing computer-generated articles on everything from Little League baseball to Wall Street trends. There are even efforts underway to produce automated snark, to cover the blog market.

But Nimble Books is something else—and the difference isn’t simply a matter of degree. A culture does not define itself by its ability to accurately portray box scores or stock movements. Our books, though—these are supposed to be the things that elevate us, that endow us with meaning. It’s hard to see where “Shark Attacks” fits into the literary canon. “Do we even know what a book is any more?” says Calvin Reid, senior news editor at Publishers Weekly. “It changes all the time.”

Right now, it seems, the Nimble Books software runs to Wikipedia and grabs some information. The idea, though, is that it will run around the internet, picking up pieces of information on your topic, then plop them into an ebook for sale.

By the way, Forbes also had a lovely article about the idea.

Right now, this seems mostly a non-fiction kind of thing.

Of course, fiction authors have had to do this the hard way, copying and pasting passages from Ian Fleming and Robert Ludlum together, trying to make sense of them. I wonder how we can capitalize on this so as not be required to write anything original.

Take, for example, the recent spate of Public Domain Literature PLUS Monster story -- Jane Eyre and the Romulans, Sense and Sensibility and Salamanders, on and on. These authors have been forced to come up with their own salamander portions of the books. How 20th-century!

Imagine being able to type in a few book titles -- Moby-Dick, Harry Potter, 50 Shades -- and having a freshly derivative novel to sell.

These could be cheap, gimmicky books. As Zimmerman has pointed out, these books cost a couple of cents to put together. Even if, for some reason, the fiction books cost a little more, you'd still be able to make money from writing.

So, even if the book were to cost a nickel produce, you could sell it on Amazon for a dollar and, even with Amazon's thirty-cent cut, you'd be ahead.

No more writing novels that only you and your agent see. No more writing your fancy "linked stories" and waiting for the Pulitzer.

This is the path to publication. As the noted book-salesman John Locke said, you don't have to write good books. You just need to write entertaining books.

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Speaking of entertaining books, friend of the blog Chris F. Holm had his second Sam Thornton book, THE WRONG GOODBYE, come out this week.

I've said that these books from Holm read like Jim Butcher meets Charlie Huston. I stick by that. There's this gritty, noir telling of a fantasy story, but the telling itself is so real, so palpable and engaging. Here's my Amazon review of the first one in the series, DEAD HARVEST.

And the second one, THE WRONG GOODBYE, really cranks it up a notch, especially the demons in a cave section. You'll want to get the book.

My guess is this will be one of the last really good books before the world is over-run with robot-generated novels.

Interestingly enough, THE WRONG GOODBYE is published by Angry Robot Books.

Fantastical Noir: Guest Post

By Chris F. Holm

Since Steve was kind enough to hand over the controls to DSD for the day, I thought I'd try my best to quell the urge to start mashing buttons and flipping switches just to find out what they do, and actually talk about what I'm here to talk about. Namely, my debut novel DEAD HARVEST, which dropped just yesterday in the US, and goes worldwide on March 1. DEAD HARVEST is a story of fantastical noir (a term I just made up because "urban fantasy" only kinda sorta fits the bill; it seems to me fantastical noir could just as easily take place in the country), so I figured I'd talk a bit about the hows and whys that led a guy mostly known (by the five-odd folks who've heard of him) for writing straight-up crime fic to pen this particular bit of crossover fare.

Every writer's got their elevator pitch – a punchy line or two encapsulating their latest earth-shattering work of staggering ingenuity they keep at the ready should they happen across an editor, literary agent, or particularly fetching barista in the wild. Mine for DEAD HARVEST is as follows:

DEAD HARVEST is the first in a series of supernatural thrillers that recasts the battle between heaven and hell as Golden Era crime pulp.

See? Short and to the point. But I'll admit, it does raise a question or two, the most obvious being: "Why the eff would anyone recast the battle between heaven and hell as Golden Era crime pulp?

Well, Strangely Standoffish Hypothetical Interrogator, I suppose I could answer that with your basic Reese's Peanut Butter Cup defense; you know, two great tastes that taste great together? I dig stories about angels and demons. Ditto classic pulp in the vein of Chandler and Hammett. Smoosh 'em both together, and how could you go wrong?

The thing is, as answers go, that one's both glib and wildly incomplete. I mean, I love whiskey, and I love bacon, but we can all agree that bacon whiskey would be terrible, right? (Actually, that doesn't sound half bad. Okay, then: how about steak-flavored iced cream?) Point is, for any flavor combination to really click, both components have got to be complimentary. And if you ask me, religion and old-school pulp are mighty complimentary indeed.

No, wait, Second Hypothetical Vociferous Objector, hear me out! The two have more in common than you might think. The broad strokes, for one: both feature countless tales of murder, betrayal and revenge, as well as lean heavily on the notion of free will as humankind's greatest strength and most dangerous weakness. But digging deeper, one realizes the archetypes of sacred texts provide the foundation upon which the devout build their very conception of morality, and from which skeptics draw to craft their arguments. In short, they're hardwired into our cultural lexicon. It only stands to reason our greatest pulp practitioners employed those archetypes in crafting their lurid, modern takes on the classic morality play.

James Cain's tales of forbidden romance leading to violence, misery, and regret may as well have taken place in Eden. Chandler's cops and criminals were often cut from the same cloth, while Revelations and the Book of Enoch talk of angels and their fallen brethren. Genesis tells the tale of Sodom and Gomorrah; in RED HARVEST (from which I not-so-subtly took my title), Hammett writes of Poisonville. And speaking of Poisonville, while nearly every culture on the planet has their own flood myth of rising waters sent to wash away the wickedness from the world, Hammett's violent cleansing of that corrupt burg came courtesy of his nameless, unflagging Continental Op – but it was no less awesome for it.

And what would any pulp tale be without a decent femme fatale? The Babylonian Talmud first introduced the world to a redheaded, acid-tongued temptress by the name of Lilith, who, in one form or another, has since wreaked havoc in darn near every religious or occult text penned. I'm pretty sure she popped up in THE MALTESE FALCON, too, only then she was known as Brigid O'Shaughnessy.

Lilith shows up in DEAD HARVEST, too. She plays handler to my main character, Sam, a man damned to collect condemned souls for all eternity, and deliver them to hell. Sam's sent to collect the soul of a young girl who's been condemned for brutally slaying her own family, but he comes to believe she's been set up. So he does something no Collector's done before: he disobeys his handler's orders, and sets out to clear his target's name. Soon he's got angels, demons, and half the NYPD on his tail, but that's the least of his worries. Seems if he doesn't sort out the mess he's in, and fast, he may wind up jump-starting the Apocalypse.

So yeah. Sunday School, it ain't (though I'm fairly sure sitting through some Sunday School in my youth probably had a hand in pushing me to write it). And it ain't quite old-school pulp either. But if I've done my job right, it's at least one hell of a ride...

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Read an excerpt and purchase.