File photo of author Geetanjali Shree (right) and translator Daisy Rockwell after winning the 2022 International Booker Prize | Photo Credit: AP How does a book evolve from scribbled pages into a professionally packaged novel backed by a major publisher , distributed all over the world in a range of formats and languages, or even brought to life on the screen?
A key step in the traditional publishing process is writing a query letter to a literary agent who will help the author wrangle the best possible contract from a publisher. To jumpstart this relationship, authors must send an introductory email that explains their manuscript’s plot, synopsis, genre, word count, and target audience. The author may also flaunt their own laurels to sweeten the deal. In short, a query letter is where the book meets the industry, convincing it that the project will be both a creative and commercial success. The Path to Publication
The writer drafts the novel
The writer edits their manuscript until it is ready for submission
The writer sends query letters and sample chapters to literary agents
The literary agent reads the complete manuscript and decides if it is suitable for publication
A literary agent signs on the author as a client and makes further editsThe literary agent submits the updated manuscript to publishing companiesThe publishing company offers a contractThe literary agent represents the writer and negotiates the best offerThe author signs a publishing contractThe literary agent receives their payment as a percentage of the author’s income after the book is sold (the exact […]
How does a book evolve from scribbled pages into a professionally packaged novel backed by a major publisher, distributed all over the world in a range of formats and languages, or even brought to life on the screen?
A key step in the traditional publishing process is writing a query letter to a literary agent who will help the author wrangle the best possible contract from a publisher. To jumpstart this relationship, authors must send an introductory email that explains their manuscript’s plot, synopsis, genre, word count, and target audience. The author may also flaunt their own laurels to sweeten the deal. In short, a query letter is where the book meets the industry, convincing it that the project will be both a creative and commercial success.
The Path to Publication
The writer drafts the novel
The writer edits their manuscript until it is ready for submission
The writer sends query letters and sample chapters to literary agents
The literary agent reads the complete manuscript and decides if it is suitable for publication
A literary agent signs on the author as a client and makes further edits
The literary agent submits the updated manuscript to publishing companies
The publishing company offers a contract
The literary agent represents the writer and negotiates the best offer
The author signs a publishing contract
The literary agent receives their payment as a percentage of the author’s income after the book is sold (the exact details may vary based on region)
Authors do not pay to publish their book if they are working with a reputed, traditional publishing company. Only self-publishers, “vanity publishers,” or fraudulent companies may ask authors to pay for their services or buy copies of their own book.
For this article, we asked ChatGPT to generate a (hopefully) award-winning Indian literary novel idea, develop a plot for it, and prepare a query letter. Then, we asked two publishing industry leaders to decide if the next Booker Prize would be ours.
ChatGPT was first prompted to produce a plot for a “literary fiction novel that would appeal to urban, upper class Indian readers in metropolitan cities” to see how the chatbot would interpret this controversial prompt.
After providing more specifics, ChatGPT eventually pitched an idea for a novel called “The Palace of Illusions”—a retelling of the Mahabharata from Panchaali’s point of view.
However, there was one problem. Readers of Indian writing in English would know that ‘The Palace of Illusions’ is a 2008 novel by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, which narrates the events of the Mahabharata through the eyes of Draupadi (Panchaali).
When told that the idea already existed, ChatGPT apologised and instead offered up a query letter for ‘The City of Secrets,’ a Mumbai-based contemporary novel narrating the story of journalist Aria and rising tech star Rohan who fall in love while struggling to cope with family demands and restrictions. The chatbot repeated its line about “upper class Indians.”
Next up, we had ChatGPT plot out another literary novel. It gave us ‘The Last of the Paanwallahs.’ This novel explored the conflicts of Ajit Banerjee, the last paanwallah of Kolkata who struggles to keep his tradition alive while his son chases his dreams in corporate America. ChatGPT also wrote a query letter for the same plot.
For our part, we thought there were two major risks for a writer trying to find a prize-winning book idea with ChatGPT. First, the danger of accidental plagiarism due to either machine or human ignorance. Second, the chatbot’s initial inability to refine a prompt entered by the writer—bringing the issue back to the human’s writing skills.
Feedback from a publisher
We showed both query letters to Ananth Padmanabhan, the CEO of HarperCollins India, to learn whether either novel idea stood a chance of being published.
“It is great, I’m not saying it is rubbish. If you hadn’t told me, I wouldn’t have known that it is an AI generated plot,” said Mr. Padmanabhan.
“If I just received one email out of the blue, I might miss it being computer generated, but if you saw the two emails that you sent, they have the same structure, as it were,” he observed.
Also read |Unlocking the power of Open AI: how to automate information extraction
For his part, Mr. Padmanabhan noted that the book itself was a different beast, and that submitting a “credible” plot did not guarantee that the resulting book would be written, edited, marketed, sold, or even read.
While U.S.-based literary agents and publishers have already started to receive ChatGPT-generated query letters or even books made with ChatGPT and the text-to-image generator Midjourney, Mr. Padmanabhan said it was still early days for the Indian publishing industry. He added that HarperCollins India did not yet have a policy in place for AI-generated works.
“I think if you see more of it happen, any trained human eye, especially in publishing, would know what is non-human and too generic, as it were,” he explained.
Feedback from a literary agent
Kanishka Gupta, head of the literary agency Writer’s Side, which represented award-winning authors such as Jerry Pinto, Avni Doshi, Shobhaa De, Daisy Rockwell, and Anees Salim, did not mince his words after reading the ChatGPT-generated plots and query letters. He declared the two storylines were “absolute rubbish,” and said they were full of cliched phrases, while regurgitating the plot lines of other published novels.
“I’m not going to read these books,” Mr. Gupta said simply. “I would just think of the writer as a wannabe and I would not respond to the writer. I would think that they do not even know how to summarise the novel they have set out to write.”
He felt the “Paanwallah” plot line was problematic, and revealed logical cracks. Meanwhile, he said the “City of Secrets” query letter failed to link its paragraphs or detail its main conflict.
“If the storyline is also ChatGPT, then it’s bad news for wannabe writers,” he concluded. (It was.)
Pointing at the stock phrases used by AI programs, Mr. Gupta said that authors needed to have a unique voice to stand out in a market saturated with books.
About entertaining query letters created by machines, Mr. Gupta said, “No, I will not be open to accepting AI-generated query letters. But if I get some AI-generated query letter which reads like a query letter written by an actual author and it’s creative enough, then I might invite the full manuscript.”
He added that tools like ChatGPT could work better for handling emails, official correspondence, work-related communication, boilerplate rejections, or other tasks which did not require much creativity.
AI technology and Indian readers
Mr. Padmanabhan pointed out that AI technology could be leveraged to boost Indian readership in other ways. Print still dominates the country’s bookselling sector, and retailers are yet to be fully computerised, making it difficult to analyse readers’ demands, he explained.
Mr. Padmanabhan said that AI tools could instead be used to understand literary trends, and help India become one of the largest book reading communities in the world.
“The future can be completely crazy, I have no idea what that’s going to look like. But I think that the larger belief is that when it comes to publishing and writing — especially in fiction — humans will write for humans,” Mr. Padmanabhan said.
“Let’s see what the world does.”
*Disclaimer: AI-powered chatbots are prone to a phenomenon known as “hallucination,” where they generate logical sounding yet completely false answers. For this reason, a response generated by an AI chatbot cannot be taken as a fact at face value. This report was researched using the February and March versions of ChatGPT.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.