The End of an Era

Howey reflects on the closing of two "lucky windows" for authors. The first — cheap digital publishing without gatekeepers — let him bypass agents and publishers when he started writing in 2009. The second — a stretch when publishing was easy but writing was still genuinely hard — he now estimates lasted barely ten years, roughly 2014 to 2024. With AI-generated prose now good enough to spark bidding wars and confound provenance, he argues both windows have shut for good.

The post was prompted by a news story: a debut novel about Nigerian cartels reportedly lost a $2.4 million advance after publishers raised AI concerns. Howey treats it as a Rorschach test — if the book was human-written, the accusations were devastatingly unfair; if it was AI-generated and still impressed professional editors, the era of human-exclusive literary prestige is already over.

He offers four predictions. Publishers will cave and sell lightly-edited AI-generated books. Most readers won't care about provenance any more than they cared about self-publishing stigma. A niche of machine-book enthusiasts will emerge, analogous to chess-engine fans. And every author will end up using AI tools — for research, editing, marketing, even drafting — himself included.

The heart of the essay is a distinction between writing for external rewards (money, attention, status) and writing for the love of thinking in words. The former is threatened by AI; the latter is untouched. Howey notes he now second-guesses his own prose, wondering if his signature em-dashes and comma splices read as bot-like — then reminds himself that the models sound like him, not the reverse. He closes by urging writers to do the thing for the love of it, and to let jealousy over who profits pass through rather than pool up.