I’ve been doing some research – yes, it turns out that do-it-yourself authoring involves rather more marketing and market research than I’d really like it to. So it goes. Anyway.
Research. Because I wondered if there were trending genres or ideas that I could pull into my writing, since I’m currently in planning mode. I have learned several things.
- No one actually has any idea.
- Tiktok really is the most likely place for those trends to form and grow, so I need to get off my lazy backside and start making some videos. (This causes me fear and anxiety – I really am not good at being funny or interesting on demand, much less while staying on topic and keeping it to 30 seconds or so. But still, it’s an actionable lesson from the research, so that’s something.)
- Everybody online has gotten super fucking lazy and is using “AI” (in quotes because LLMs, which is to say limited language models, as in ChatGPT and its cousins, really aren’t Artificial Intelligence any more than a timer to turn on your lights at sunset every day is; they’re complex software, yes, but they’re not intelligent) to make all their content.
The infographic below is thefted wholesale from some website which did just that. (As AI-generated content (which I am certain it is) it’s non-copyrightable, so thefting it is fair game.) Check it out. It looks like it’s a real infographic if you don’t look closely. But if you do, then… well. Too many fingers, the text version.
And the worst part is, it was super easy to fix. I just put some text in. Took me 15 min, tops, to invent words for it and get the font right-ish.
Apparently the gestalt of the internet (aka the training data for the not-an-AI that almost certainly created the original image) thinks that the upcoming book trends are going to be cyberpunk, climate fiction, multicultural narratives, and interactive storytelling. Which is probably as good a guess as any, given the breadth of training data it’s working from.
So… multicultural cyberpunk narratives about climate issues. I mean, sure, why not?
The interesting one, for me, is interactive storytelling. The other three ‘trends’ are interesting in their own right, but this one is the one that grabs my attention.
What does interative storytelling look like if you’re not making video games, or using a visual medium? (Yes, the written word is, technically, visual but you know what I mean.)
I think interactive storytelling has to lean towards the TTRPG space, but solo TTRPG play is hard to do. Do we go with the journalling games that are increasingly popular? (I’ve seen more and more of them so I assume they’re more popular; it could just be that I’m seeing more of them.) Old-school choose-your-own-adventure books? I’m kinda tempted to try writing one of those. I loved them so much as a kid, I still have some of my favourites. Something else?
I wonder if you could make an ebook that changed according to choices made. Like a game contained in a book – or like the Young Lady’s Primer in Neal Stepehnson’s Diamond Age. I know there are apps that translate books into foreign languages as a language-learning aid, and you can choose what % to translate, so maybe an app rather than a straight up EPUB. I’m seeing more research in my future.
Oh – before I go, the update for Contract Law is a launch in September! The venue (the WA State Library Theatre) is booked up til then 🙂
