As some of you may recall, last year I completed work on the manuscript of a novel. Since that time, I have submitted it to four publishers in Canada, all of which publish fiction, the first one around early August of last year, the others roughly between the end of last year and early this year. It’s been many months and only one of them has given me feedback: I think the second one to which I submitted the manuscript replied quickly to reject it - although I’m Canadian, I’m not currently resident there and they wrote to say they gave preference to residents of Canada. The other three, not a word, except that, when after a number of months I made an edit of the manuscript and re-sent it to the first publisher that I had submitted it to in August (maybe 5, 6 months later), they wrote back to say they would read the edited version and that they were still reading manuscripts from 2023. Since then, I have received no futher feedback from any of the three publishers.
I have already been through the book publication process once, with one non-fiction book. Most publishers I contacted back then gave me a speedy response, nothing like this. I’m wondering if I may not have determined the cause of these delays.** Perhaps two months ago, I wanted to submit a short story to the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I went on the submissions page on their website, and I read this message: at the time, they were so swamped with AI-generated publications that they had a lot more work sifting through manuscripts and picking out those that were written by a person from those written by AI. For this reason, they were temporarily putting a hold on accepting new submissions.
Could this be the reason why the three outstanding publishers have not contacted me? Are publishers now being inundated with AI submissions and is it slowing them all down from being able to read all manuscripts submitted within a reasonable amount of time?
** Assuming each publisher even gives feedback from every submission. As I recall, one of them wrote on their website that they don’t send rejection letters.
Publishers are probably being inundated by RI (Real Intelligence) manuscripts. And the giant slush pile is probably being pawned off on some intern or other low-level employee to read the first few pages to determine if it is worth anyone higher up the ladder be given a look at it. Tending the slush pile is generally considered an awful job.
I’ve see lots of tales about now-famous stories that got rejected dozens of times over years before finally being published. I think that expecting to get an answer from a small handful of publishers in a few months is not reflective of the (long existing) reality of publishing
Please SHARE! Writers! We want to apologize that we are still processing the recent short story submissions. Uncanny Magazine was hit with a massive volume of submissions due to AI subs. We hope to get through the pile over the next two weeks. Thank you for your patience.
Regardless of anything else, the answer to this is an unqualified “yes.” Not just fiction, but academia as well. Expect to see a lot more submission fees going forward as a means of discouraging the AI mills from flooding publishers. It will negatively impact good actors but there’s no good solution. Even if the big LLMs agree to embed digital watermarks in their output (which is already possible and is already getting pushback), there will be plenty of ways to generate text using other models.
About a year and a half ago we had a whole long thread about Clarkesworld not accepting submissions because they were swamped with AI-generated stories.
As for the OP, what does the publisher say about response times? And do they take unagented submissions?
For everyone else, has AI been a problem for long form fiction and non-fiction? I judge humor submissions for a contest for independently published books, and I got one that was clearly AI generated, with short incomprehensible sections generated around a prompt. One book had AI generated illustrations, but they were clearly labeled as AI.
I started a thread about AI-generated technical papers. I fear that people from less well know institutions might get their stuff scrutinized more because that kind of place is where these things came from in my experience.
They all take unagented submissions, I always check their websites for their exact publishing guidlines.
As I recall, the first publisher said it usually took a couple of months to respond - it’s been more than a year. Another said they tried to answer in due time but to bear with them - it’s been perhaps 8 months.
Thanks. I did some research, and found a bunch of publishers who specifically say they don’t want AI generated books, some that have limits as to AI content (like 5%) but nothing indicating they are getting swamped.
Amazon does seem to have a lot of AI generated self-published books, though. Not surprising. But those who just dump the output on Amazon are probably not cluttering up the email of agents and publishers.