Spines is a new startup that hopes to steal lots of vanity press money by charging hopeful authors to have their books edited, formatted, all by AI.
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Qale (aka Qale)
Nov 26 '24, 14:30
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Spines – which recently secured $16m in seed funding, according to a profile of the company in the Bookseller – says that authors will retain 100% of their royalties. Co-founder Yehuda Niv, who previously ran a publisher and publishing services business in Israel, claimed that the company “isn’t self-publishing” or a vanity publisher but a “publishing platform”.
“Regardless of how they present their platform they ARE a vanity publisher,” said Deidre J Owen, co-founder of “independent micropublisher” Mannison Press.
Independent publisher Canongate said “these dingbats … don’t care about writing or books”, in a Bluesky post. Spines is charging “hopeful would-be authors to automate the process of flinging their book out into the world, with the least possible attention, care or craft”.
“We would warn authors to think extremely carefully before committing to any author-contribute contract” involving a writer paying for their work to be published, said Anna Ganley, chief executive of the UK’s largest trade union for writers, illustrators and translators, the Society of Authors.
“It is very unlikely to deliver on what an author is hoping they might achieve, it is most unlikely to be their best route to publication, and if it also relies on AI systems there are concerns about the lack of originality and quality of the service being offered – even if there are guarantees (which we suspect are unlikely) that the AI system in question was not developed by using unlawfully scraped copyright content,” she added.
Spines says it will reduce the time it takes to publish a book to two to three weeks. Last week, Microsoft announced it is launching a book imprint which likewise aims to print books faster than traditional publishers. Earlier this month, it was revealed that HarperCollins had reached an agreement with Microsoft to allow some of its titles to be used to train AI models, with the permission of authors.
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