Authors, AI Read My Book and Told Me I Was Wrong
Using the wisdom of the crowd, the bots, and the pros
In the 1990s, well before anyone could self-publish a book on Amazon and ebooks were a thing, I joined a group of about 40 self-publishers in my city who had each invested serious money in thousands of paperback and hard cover books that were sitting in their basements, garages, or rented storage units ready to sell. I was the youngest of the group, the only one with no established career, probably the one with the smallest bank balance, and 30 years later I have gone the farthest of all in the world of publishing. One of only a handful that even made it past the first year or two.
I knew nothing and knew I knew nothing so I was not too proud to ask questions, make mistakes, and learn.
I did not have a bank-load of money nor the overconfidence from other businesses successes to lose wild amounts of money as so many did, so my losses were modest and they instead became the foundation of future successes.
The biggest thing I had going for me was that I had an ear for advice: Knowing who to listen to in the publishing world and who not to. Knowing what rang true and absorbing that into my knowledge cache — and knowing what required a bit of skepticism.
