Bowes Park author Stephen Cox on his new book and the threat to creative industries from AI

Stephen Cox with his new novel, The Crooked Medium’s Guide to Murder — Stephen Cox with his new novel, *The Crooked Medium’s Guide to Murder*

Four years after my second book, I’m self-publishing my third.

The Crooked Medium’s Guide to Murder comes out on Monday, 1st September, and I’m delighted to get this book out in the world.

London 1881; two women who run a spiritualist scam come to believe that an MP will murder his wife. Can they stop him? It’s a twisting mystery with wry humour where very little is as it seems.

Self-publishing sometimes feels nuts. It certainly takes me out of my comfort zone, in having to make business decisions and take all the risk. However, traditional publishing – where publishers pay authors for their books – is fraught nowadays. Big bets are taken on debut authors, who are then seen as a mistake if their book doesn’t sell.

Once, many authors could modestly grow their career by steadily getting out books. That’s far more difficult. Since I started writing, the income of the average full-time author has halved in real terms, to £7,000 a year.

After a year taking the book around agents and editors, I took the leap to do it myself. Will AI make things easier? The shills for large language models – so-called artificial intelligence (AI) – tell you that you can spit out a ten-volume family saga in five minutes. Why sweat over the right word, or a clever twist? I’m not worried a giant autocorrect machine will write better books than me. I am worried that the book world will be flooded with AI scams, and cookie-cutter books, making mine harder to find.

Abigail Dunn, in Baker Street, wrote the humorous working abroad book, Swallow the Toad: from Britain to Germany. She says: “The software which publishers have started to use checking for AI looks for quirks (like em-dashes) that many human authors like me choose to use. I don’t want to be rejected, falsely accused of having used AI.”

The UK creative industries employ over two million people and generate £124billion – vastly bigger than fishing or farming. The AI companies stole billions of dollars of living artists work to ‘train’ their machines. This government has swallowed their hype. Labour MPs were whipped to oppose a Lords amendment which would make AI companies at least be honest whose work they stole.

Every human society creates. For me, writing is a passion and a purpose. Would you automate loving your parents, your partner or your children? Would you automate enjoying a country walk or being with friends at a football match?

Please join me for an afternoon tea launch of The Crooked Medium’s Guide to Murder at the Winchmore Hill Quaker Meeting House in Church Lane, from 3.30pm on Sunday, 7th September. I’ll defend ‘frivolous’ things like murder mysteries, and we can talk murder, history, publishing and AI.

Find out more about Stephen and his books:
Visit stephencox.co.uk

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