Just How Many Books Aren’t Written by Humans?

I received a surprising letter from Draft2Digital. It wasn’t dramatic. There were no alarm bells. No blame. No outrage. Just a calm explanation that, for the first time, they would introduce fees for account activation and maintenance.

On the surface, it reads like a simple business adjustment, but buried inside the text is something far more telling. It’s a quiet admission that something has gone wrong in my publishing world.

Not with readers. Not with authors. With the self-publishing ecosystem itself.

The letter refers—carefully—to a “significant increase in automated and low-quality account creation.” It mentions “content farms.” It hints at a flood of material that risks eroding reader trust.

That’s the line that caught me, as it raises a question most readers haven’t fully asked yet:

Just how many of today’s books are not written by humans?

The Rise of the “Junk Book”

It had to come. We’ve reached a point where publishing a book no longer requires a writer. That’s not hyperbole. It’s a technical reality. Anyone can have a book written with no effort, in the shortest of times.

With generative AI tools, it is now possible to:

• Generate a full manuscript in hours
• Create a cover in minutes
• Write a blurb instantly
• Upload and distribute globally within a day

No drafting. No rewriting. No lived experience. No voice. Just output. The result is what I’ve (and many others) started calling the “Junk Book.”

A Junk Book isn’t simply a bad book. Bad books have always existed—and many of them were written with genuine effort. A Junk Book is something else entirely.

It is:

• Mass-produced
• Algorithmically assembled
• Emotionally hollow
• Structurally competent but creatively vacant

And most importantly, it pretends to be written by a human.

Why Do Junk Books Exist?

The answer is brutally simple. They can make money. Not a lot individually, but enough at a larger scale.

1. The Volume Strategy

Instead of writing one book well, some operators generate:

• 50 different book titles
• 100 different book titles
• 500+ different book titles

Each targeting:

• Micro-niches
• Long-tail keywords
• Low-competition categories

The goal isn’t quality. It’s coverage. If even a small percentage sells, the system becomes profitable.

2. Algorithm Gaming

Ahh yes. That awful word that mathematically aligns humans to products without care or emotion.

Online retailers reward:

• Frequent uploads
• Keyword optimisation
• Category saturation

Junk Book producers understand this. They don’t think like writers. They think like search engineers. Titles are crafted for discoverability, not meaning. Blurbs are written for clicks, not truth.

3. Low Barrier to Entry

There is no gatekeeper standing at the entrance vetting those who cross the threshold.

There’s no editor saying no. No publisher filtering submissions. No cost beyond time—and now, not even much of that.

This is where the Draft2Digital letter becomes important. That $20 activation fee?

It’s not about revenue. It adds a braking zone to submissions—a friction point.

And friction is the enemy of automation.

How Are Junk Books Marketed?

This is where it gets interesting—and slightly unsettling. Because Junk Books don’t look like Junk Books.

They are designed especially not to look like a fake.

1. Professional Covers

AI-generated covers are now:

• Clean
• Genre-appropriate
• Visually compelling

At a glance, they are indistinguishable from legitimate works.

2. Convincing Blurblines

The descriptions often:

• Hit emotional beats
• Follow genre expectations
• Use familiar tropes

They promise everything a reader expects. They just don’t deliver it.

3. Fake or Manipulated Reviews

Some Junk Books are supported by:

• Review farms
• Bot-generated feedback
• Coordinated rating boosts

Not all—but enough to distort perception.

4. Series Illusions

You’ll often see:

• “Book 1 of 12”
• Rapid release schedules
• Identical branding across multiple titles

This creates the illusion of an established author. In reality, it’s often a content pipeline.

How Do Readers Identify a Junk Book?

This is the part that matters most. Because readers are noticing.

Quietly. Gradually. Increasingly.

Here’s what gives these books away:

1. The Voice Feels… Off

It’s hard to describe until you’ve felt it.

The sentences are correct.
The grammar is clean.
The structure is sound.

There’s no pulse. No sweat.

No risk.
No tension that feels earned.
No sense that a human sat there, wrestling with the words.

2. Repetition and Circular Thinking

Junk Books often:

• Repeat ideas
• Rephrase the same sentence multiple times
• Stall instead of progressing

It’s as though the text is searching for meaning—but never quite finding it.

3. Emotional Flatness

Characters exist. But they don’t live.

They don’t surprise you.
They don’t contradict themselves.
They don’t carry history in the way real people do.

Because they don’t have history.

4. Odd Specificity Gaps

Details are either:

• Overly generic (“a large city,” “a nice house”)
• Or strangely inconsistent

A human writer anchors a story in lived detail. Junk Books often hover above it and rarely land.

5. Rapid Author Output

This is one of the biggest tells.

If an author has:

• Dozens of books released in a very short time
• Writes for wildly different genres
• Little personal presence

It’s worth pausing.

Not all prolific authors are artificial. But all artificial pipelines are prolific.

Known Examples of Junk Books

Naming specific titles is difficult—and legally messy—so I won’t. Besides, the landscape shifts constantly. AI improves from cycle to cycle. But patterns have emerged across platforms:

• AI-generated travel guides filled with outdated or incorrect information
• Low-effort “how-to” books padded with generic advice
• Romance or thriller titles that mimic popular tropes without depth
• Public domain rewrites rebranded as original works

There have also been widely reported cases of:

• Mushroom foraging books containing dangerous misinformation
• Children’s books with nonsensical or contradictory narratives

These aren’t just poor-quality. They can be misleading—or even harmful.

Why This Matters

This isn’t about purity. It’s about trust. When a reader buys a book, they assume:

• A human mind shaped the story
• A human eye refined the language
• A human hand decided what stays and what goes

That assumption is now under pressure. If readers begin to doubt that baseline, the entire indie ecosystem suffers.

Good writers get lost in the noise.
Readers become hesitant.
Platforms lose credibility.

This is exactly what Draft2Digital (and I assume all other platforms) is trying to prevent.

What Can Be Done?

There is no single solution. But there are meaningful steps—some already underway.

1. Platform-Level Friction

Fees like those introduced by Draft2Digital:

• Discourage mass account creation
• Slow down automated pipelines
• Force a level of commitment

It won’t stop everything, but it raises the cost of abusing trust.

2. Stronger Verification

Human review, identity checks, and pattern detection:

• Help identify suspicious activity
• Filter out low-effort uploads
• Protect catalogue integrity

3. Reader Awareness

This is the most powerful tool.

Once readers know what to look for, Junk Books become easier to spot.

And when they’re not purchased, they disappear (hopefully).

4. Author Transparency

Real authors need to:

• Show up
• Speak clearly
• Demonstrate presence in multiple ways

Not as a marketing trick—but as proof of existence—proof of life.

A Personal Note to Readers of SEETHINGS

If you’ve read my work, you already know something about how it’s built.

The discomfort.
The tension.
The moral ambiguity.

None of that comes quickly. None of it is generated in a single pass. Every chapter of SEETHINGS has been:

• Written
• Rewritten
• Questioned
• Reworked

Sometimes obsessively. Frequently painfully. Because that’s what it takes to create something that feels real.

It’s not perfect—but human. And that matters.

The Future of Reading

We’re not going back. AI-generated content isn’t a passing phase. It’s a permanent layer in the publishing world.

But it doesn’t have to dominate.

If anything, it may sharpen the distinction between:

• AI Content
• And human craft

Between:

• Output
• And authorship

The question isn’t whether Junk Books will exist. They will.

The question is whether we learn to recognise them—and choose better or differently. Because every time we click “Buy,” we’re not just purchasing a book. We’re voting for the kind of stories we want to exist.

–Michael (Dark fiction. Author of SEETHINGS (the first book), free for a limited time)