Rise of the Indian writers and what it shows

The first thing I want to say is that I have found a shady line separating "indie" from the rest of the world; while I am indie, 100% indie, because I pay for absolutely nothing, very few writers are as absolutist as I am, especially when it comes to cover art, proofreading, and marketing. When I find a number of writers out there peddling their books on the read-marketing sites, I tend to think of them as indie, but in many cases they are not completely indie, and in fact even people who get publishing houses to peddle their books still have to go out and peddle their own quite a bit.

On the sites I inhabit there is a recent flood of very good Indian writers. Their books are well edited and interesting and among the best I have read, and as a result I tend to choose them often. They are choosing me, as it turns out, for entirely different reasons probably, but I'm proud to say my books are being read over there on amazon.co.in, and hopefully they are enjoying them.

The first thing it shows is that AI or Google Translate or whatever you call it, or whatever they use, is quite good going from Hindi to English, although I'm sure also that many Indian writers are simply fluent in English right off the bat due to their education or training or whatever. In other words, I'm not totally clear on whether they are relatively fluent in American/universl English or whether they have had some help from a machine, but in any case these are pretty good novels with no typos and not even Britishisms or Indianisms that would be unrecognizable to us Americans. I am interested in going the other way - making my American work available in Hindi - but I would have no way of assuring myself that the translated version was good, without friends picking through it and reminding me. Perhaps these writers have those friends. Perhaps even they are paying someone - it's not unheard of.

In this country paying someone to go over it with a fine tooth comb is quite expensive and it is simply unavailable to a wide swath of indie writers just because of price alone. And so, we have this problem where "indie" to some people means rough, not-proofread, full of errors, etc. and lots of times it is. There are still, by the way, some fantastic books that are full of errors so I want to point out that reading a lot of indie (as I do) means you never quite know what to expect and also that there is a wide variety and definitely plenty of diamonds in the rough so to speak.

The main thing it shows me is that writers and readers will quickly become more worldly. It is definitely in my best interest to get AI to help me translate all my books into as many languages as possible, and simply figure out the method to assure myself that they will be of the quality I want, even in the language they've been translated into. As a 30-year ESL/EFL professional I can't bear the thought of my books being sloppy in that regard even though I know that in lots of places there's quite a wide tolerance for a few errors and everyone knows enough English to know where a lot of those errors come from. So I could conceivably put my books into these languages and just wing it, or find out what the things are that AI has trouble with, and this would be quite interesting, but soon enough even this won't be necessary. AI will just get it right the first time, every time.

And that might make the literary world a mite more boring.

General report

The first thing I want to say is that I know a lot of really excellent indie writers, and I had fully planned on featuring them here, and showing off what I know as well as what they do, but it really hasn't panned out that way. I haven't had time to consistently update this blog. So I apologize for that, but at the same time want to share a little of what I know.

The self-publishing revolution really did turn the book world upside down in many ways, and I feel it, being totally indie, every time I rub up against that other world. They are not happy that people can simply publish quality work by themselves, and it doesn't take long before they let me know. But I have the advantage of not needing to make a living from what I'm doing, being a retired teacher and all, and not needing much except a good place to sit, so I'm going to keep cranking away at what I'm doing and staying up on the indie world which I find fascinating. It's kind of like ESL (which I taught for thirty years) in that every single person brings a unique set of skills and circumstances to the table, so that even if they produce what I consider flawed work (as I was quite used to with ESL) there is still a lot of value in catching what they are saying and appreciating the choices they made it bringing it to you.

This is one reason I do so much of what I call read-marketing - reading others' work so that others will read mine - because I like having a wide range of experience with different kinds of books, and also, by the way, I'm just retiring and its nice to just sit down and read. But, getting better at choosing what I know I'll like, and still feeling a little pressure to give some 4s just so I don't look like a dupe - well, this is the kind of problem I want to have. As a teacher of thirty plus years I can tell you that the problem you want is when everyone does it right and you still have to separate out the best from the pretty good. My other problem is that I read so much that I often find it difficult to put it all down and just write. My wife used to say she hated bad writing because it made it harder for her to write; I don't find that, really, but just find it makes me want to less. A good book is giving me so much of what I get writing: its own world, the challenges of different ways of saying things, etc. I get started reading in the morning and want to just keep reading and drinking coffee until I'm called away (btw I get called away often, having thirteen kids, so that's another excuse to just read, it's interruptable as opposed to writing, during which I get mad if I'm interrupted....

One of my big challenges will be to tell you a little about what I've found. I'm especially interested in things that may have been taught in writing programs yet tend to be over-used or poorly used, as if people seem to think they have to use it to prove they've mastered modern writing. One of these is Multiple POV, which, if you back off of it and ask yourself "does this really help this book?" or "is there a real benefit to seeing this situation from different points of view?" often the answer is, well, maybe ambiguous is a polite way of putting it. Are all books Multiple POV now? A lot of them are. Maybe it will be the new standard.

More on this later; really there's no rush. You can see that I can be very casual about this stuff; no purpose getting out there making a flashy blog (I've seen a few good ones) surveying the books out there, if I can't be consistent, thorough, and prolific, i.e. consistently deliver you good stuff. I'm struggling enough with that in my main output, the books I'm trying to write. I have them lined up; I've been stuck on one for quite a while; and things like this blog have fallen by the wayside as I just do what I have to, and try to manage thirteen kids, the grown ones of which tend to be the biggest of the problems. It's a crazy world. But my revenge is, I'm the one who ends up documenting it.

AI Detection

The Navajo always wove an error into each quilt or rug they made. They reasoned that if God was perfect, people being perfect was an insult to God as it was pretending to be like God. An error would therefore be the mark of humanity.

In the same way, AI detection software is finding that if an indie author has good proofreading, or access to it, that author's grammatically perfect production is "AI-generated" which could be said as "70% AI-generated" or "70% likely to be AI-generated" with the number before the percentage varying wildly depending on time of day, or which program, or whatever; it's somewhat random according to most accounts. While the vast majority of observers consider such numbers and this software in general to be a total fraud, meaningless and utterly useless, some writers are actually concerned that if software identifies your writing as potentially AI generated, that can be bad for you, so you should do whatever you have to to prevent that or redirect the software. But what to do? Make bad grammar? Unusual grammar? Make up your own words? Good question.

One obvious solution comes from the Navajo. Just slip a little imperfection in there. If a typo makes it clearly not AI-generated, make a typo. Better yet, put the same typo in every paragraph, or even every sentence. Make your own distinctive typo (for example, always spell "the" as "th") so that the reader is regularly if not constantly reminded that a real person generated this sentence.

Now I find this soluution fascinating, yet I haven't done it yet. That's partly because I haven't published anything since I became aware of this problem. When I do, I always tell Amazon that AI did not generate any of my work (although I am a little unsure of the definition of AI when it comes to the pop art I use on my covers). But telling Amazon, I figure, is meaningless. So is putting a clear statement in the front of the book that says A real person wrote this book. AI could generate this statement; AI could publish everything I do. Why would it be worried about telling the truth? It simply does as you tell it.

Back to my solution: every author inserts a flaw into his/her work, ddeliberately, as a kind of signature. The "AI detection" which trips up on anything, as long as it's good grammar and proofread, now clearly recognizes your work as. "not AI." Not even a sentence of it? Do you have to put a flaw into every sentence?

Here's a world where typos are not errors, but rather an urgent attempt by real people to coommunicate to other real people. It's a wild world, isn't it?

Local Author Fair

White Elephant

(my new one) White Elephant: A folktale retelling of Beauty and the Beast. Magical realism in a well-known story. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FSXS741M

Be Our Guest

Same book, new cover
Be Our Guest: A retelling of Beauty and the Beast
I can now say that it's part of a set of three, all retellings of Beauty and the Beast; second one's done and coming soon.
Paperback $7.39, kindle $2.99, free on ku
https://www.amazon.com/Be-Our-Guest-retelling-Beauty/dp/B0FM82CSKX

Be Our Guest

Be Our Guest
A retelling of Beauty and the Beast

Now available on Amazon:
Paperback $7.39 + shipping
Kindle $2.99
Free on Kindle Unlimited


(prices can change)

This tale was written to be part of the Global Beasts Series, in which every book features a different country. This one is set in Thailand, against the government shutdown of Tiger Temple, a famous tourist theme park in Kanchanaburi. It's a tale as old as time, but it can be seen in many ways, with a wide variety of characters. The original tale was written in 1740, and this one brings the original to light against the traditional ideas of karma, reincarnation, and animism that have been in Thailand since before Buddhism ever arrived.