Front Matter: Printing Error
This is coming to you a day later than normal due to a post scheduling snafu, I hope you took the extra time you had on your hands to read another chapter of Moby-Dick. Silver lining: two days of Dear Head of Mine in a row.
“Biggest” News in Books: TikTok is More Powerful Than Publishing
In scouring the news from last week, you cannot avoid articles about ChatGPT and its effect on…everything. If you’re unfamiliar with ChatGPT, it’s basically an AI-based search engine that looks to give more humanlike answers than Google does when you ask it a question. It can write poetry, play chess, or write an essay about Aristotle. Or that’s the hope anyway—in all of those examples, ChatGPT failed (rather comically) at the type of tasks it’s hoping to revolutionize.
ChatGPT holds a particular interest to the world of books where a rolling wave of articles have been commenting on its potential uses for plagiarism or replacing people as storytellers altogether down the line. As a way to cover the PEN awards, The New York Times decided to take the weirdest possible angle and interview writers about ChatGPT. In an equally strange gimmick, one of the presenters even used it to help write his speech…
If ChatGPT has succeeded at anything so far, it is getting AI into the conversation. ChatGPT is unique in that it is a user-facing AI tool that humans manipulate, rather than the majority of AI and algorithms which are designed to be invisible and manipulate humans. It makes ChatGPT more fun, both to play around with and to talk about around the water cooler. But the more important AI out there, and the one with far scarier implications you don’t have to wait for, is quite obviously TikTok and its machine learning. TikTok has mastered the most dopamine rich form of creative content (short videos) and the feedback loop that this rush creates, it has simultaneously become the thing responsible for a shorter cultural attention span and the only tool that can puncture through the quick-hit universe it has created.
The story everyone has been talking about for the past couple of weeks in publishing is the sensation of Stone Maidens, a novel that rocketed up the Amazon sales charts. Fourteen years in the making and published eleven years ago by an Amazon subsidiary, the unwitting author of Stone Maidens , a dad in his 70s was catapulted to fame by his daughter’s TikTok. Thus, sixteen seconds did what it’s publisher couldn’t in more than a decade. The New York Times bestseller list, roughly half of which is driven significantly by TikTok, reflects the Stone Maidens example. This is a humbling reminder that, while editors and publishers spend months and years putting together a campaign for a book, tiny whims of short video content can blow the winds more than our herculean efforts. This may sound like alarmism, but it’s worth remembering that the majority of books still make their way the old-fashioned route. And with a technology that is specifically designed to be fleeting, who knows how long TikTok’s algorithm will stick around dominating our attention and culture. After 600 years of the publishing business, ours is one based on the long run to say the least. But for the time being AI is certainly changing the book business and our daily lives, but not because of poetry writing robots.
Dime Novels: Will Smith and Chris Rock
In this reoccurring segment we review cultural news that is fit for dime novels, pulp magazines, and melodrama serials.
Chris Rock preformed a live comedy special for Netflix on Saturday. This article summarizes my feelings about the show itself, which was some pretty subpar, low-hanging material by Rock’s standards mixed in with some flashes of fiery, personal material that came closer to his brilliance. But he saved the big reveal for last, going after Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith’s affair without mincing words. He touched on Smith punching down, on taking out his misguided anger on Rock rather than his wife or the people who had routinely belittled him, and finally dropping the mic by pointing out that “fighting in front of white people” has implications beyond the slapping incident itself. But that’s not what I’m here to talk about.
A 2022 Vulture article resurfaced, which gives a telenovela worthy recap of Jada Smith’s “entanglement” that set off this drama in the first place. Entanglement is Jada Smith’s word of choice for her ongoing relationship outside of her marriage, which is certainly the kind of very intellectual but unintentional goofy euphemism you’d find a character in a novel using. I won’t bother recapping the entire saga, but Jada’s relationship was started with a friend of her son’s, a friend who was just 22 when they started to become…entangled (honestly the implication of this word feels worse than just saying what’s happening here). And then Jada interviewed Will Smith, her husband, about the relationship on Facebook. A video that is still up and has 39 million views. It’s a plot you wouldn’t believe in fiction. But what makes the recap a literary tragedy is that Jada chose to have her tryst with a twenty-year-old in a TikTok world. He made no less than three songs about their private affair, put it all on Twitter, and even posted publicly screenshots of his texts to her. As humbling as it is as an editor and to be getting out-hustled by a ten second video (see above re: Stone Maidens), it must be a magnitude greater to be a powerful actor and get taken down by autotune, text threads, and Memoji.
Back Matter: Links and other happenings
Somehow novelist Haruki Murakami kept his 1,200 page novel, his first in 6 years, a total secret until a month ahead of its Japanese publication in April—my favorite part of the announcement is that the publisher releases no description of the book because his readers love to come into it cold, god bless them. WaPo shows you how people organize books. TikTok also makes 10-year-olds into composers. A pro-BookTok take from someone on the inside. “It all adds up to a narcotic pudding.“ And Random House gets a new CEO.
What a world to live in this TikTok maybe never tomorrow or yesterday - dizzying view from the cliff!!!
Totally Loving Dear Head of Mine!!!❤️gma