My two books didn’t do what was expected, which was to have people buy them. I have felt guilty about this failure since they were published in 2012 and 2019, though not enough to offer any of my advance back to my publisher.
For years, Hachette would passive-aggressively send me a graph showing how my sales are inching closer to fulfilling my fiduciary promise, which will occur when my great-great-great-great-great grandchildren are alive and books cost $40,000 each. This triggered me.
So I was pretty excited when, on Sept. 5, everyone’s second-favorite A.I. company, Anthropic, settled a class-action suit with authors for $1.5 billion. The company had been accused of sucking up pirated ebooks from the digital libraries Library Genesis in 2021 and Pirate Library Mirror in 2022 to train its chatbot Claude.
Approximately 500,000 writers will be awarded about $3,000 per book. That’s about 10 percent of my books’ earnings. According to The Atlantic’s A.I. Watchdog search tool, this will almost certainly include me, though I won’t know for sure until this fall.
I was about an hour into my excitement over this potential jackpot when it struck me: Do my books deserve the same payout as other authors who may have been assimilated into the Large Language Model data set? The market has been pretty clear I’m not worth as much as Michael Connelly (the Harry Bosch, Renée Ballard and Lincoln Lawyer series) who has sold something close to 100 million copies of his books, which is approximately 100 million more than I have.
“I was thinking the opposite,” Mr. Connelly told me. “What if you’re a Joel Stein or a Jonathan Franzen and it takes you many years to write a book, and I write one a year? I have two coming out this year. It’s almost like I knew this rule was coming down.” I thought Mr. Connelly had an excellent point when he said, “a Joel Stein or a Jonathan Franzen.”
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