At her Substack cartoonist Alex Hallatt writes about the BENEFITS of Artificial Intelligence:
Earlier on in my career, I worked with a couple of publishers and I know cartoonists who worked with some really good ones. They would develop and edit your book, guiding you to make it the best work possible. Then they would contact media outlets for reviews and publicity, and get your book into brick-and-mortar bookstores, ensuring prominent display for at least the first few weeks after launch. The bigger the publisher, the more they would do. You didn’t even need to have a name for yourself, as long as the work was good enough and something they felt they could sell.
All that has changed since social media took our collective attention. You need to have an audience before a publisher will take you on. They won’t find an audience for you, and they won’t do much of the marketing either.
If you’re providing a good book with a unique selling point and an audience, what is a traditional publisher giving you for the huge percentage they take when they sell your book? Essentially, a little marketing and editing. If you want your book to be a success you can’t do without either, but that doesn’t mean you need a publisher.
This is where AI comes in.
I don’t ever want AI to do the creative stuff that I enjoy [emphasis added]. But it can take over what I’m no good at and what publishers used to do for me…
Alex’s Cartooning in the Age of AI #5: We Don’t Need a Publisher – We Do Need Help