In a new blog post, Association of Ghostwriters founder Marcia Layton Turner takes stock of the future of the ghostwriting industry, tapping into a range of agency owners (including GG CEO Dan Gerstein), veteran publishing people, and those at the editorial acquisitions helm. Her results may surprise you — particularly if you’re the “doom and gloom” type. While many have heralded AI as ghosting’s ultimate threat, she’s found that the glut of AI content is increasing the demand for human ghostwriters and the high-quality, customized, and thoughtful work they do.
When it comes to book format trends, Turner has found another surprise: books are increasing in popularity as luxury objects, particularly as readers recoil at the constant digital-everything frenzy and crave something tactile, high-quality, and analog. Still, her post doesn’t shy away from the industry’s challenges, including ghostwriters’ need to boost their visibility, AI-related ethical and legal concerns, and shifting publishing landscapes and hybrid publisher consolidations.
We agree with Turner that the biggest issue confronting our industry is the impact of AI on how books are getting written and published. It dominated the conversation at our second Gathering of the Ghosts, hovers over broader publishing discussions, and comes up repeatedly in our initial prospective client consultations. But, anecdotally, what we’re seeing is that instead of depressing demand for our services, AI is clearly making what we do more valuable. Indeed, over the last year, we’ve encountered a whole new sub-class of prospective clients we refer to as AI refugees — non-writer authors who tried to use ChatGPT to write their book and found the results to be, at a minimum, unsatisfactory — and often unusable.
We expect this trend line to only grow in the next few years. AI absolutely has its enthusiasts and incisive uses. But a technology that relies on human prompts can’t come up with concepts and book hooks that are original to an author’s ideas and life experience. It can’t extract insights and stories that can’t be found in an LLM because they exist only in an author’s head. Perhaps most notably, as Turner’s work confirms, AI can’t win an author’s trust, break down their walls, or get them to be vulnerable and go deep in a way they never would on their own.
