Shownotes

AI, authors and the business of telling stories—with Katherine Pathak

Could AI help a prolific novelist keep up with her own imagination? And how different is an AI continuing a successful series from a ghostwriter—or an author’s family—taking over?

This week I’m joined by crime writer Katherine Pathak, author of the best selling DCI Dani Bevan series, to talk about her new book, Red Red Rose, and what AI might mean for writers, readers and publishing.

We explore the possibilities for producing and abridging audiobooks, adapting novels for the screen, and keeping much-loved characters alive after their creators want to move on. Along the way, we discuss celebrity authors, the appeal of a recognisable human voice, and why fictional characters spend so much time drinking tea and dragging their hands through their hair.

Katherine and I don’t agree on everything—particularly whether readers will always want human authors. But we find plenty of interesting parallels between possible uses of AI and how publishing already works.

In this episode:

• 00:00 Introducing Katherine and Red Red Rose

• 01:40 Human authors in an age of AI

• 03:39 Audiobooks, abridgement and adaptations

• 10:50 When audiobook production becomes a bottleneck

• 12:14 Successful series, reluctant creators and literary successors

• 19:46 Can AI create the next big literary brand?

• 24:39 Do you want AI to copy your voice?

• 25:17 Crime fiction, motives and what AI might learn from our stories

• 31:22 Celebrity authors, ghostwriters and the value of a name

• 35:17 Cups of tea, sighing and the habits that give writers away

• 38:23 Why setting matters—and the appeal of British crime fiction

• 40:24 AI’s role in the work surrounding the writing

Asynchronous & Unreliable: Conversations at the edge of software.

Transcript

Anne (00:00)

Hello and welcome to this week's episode of Asynchronous and Unreliable, a weekly podcast where we discuss the latest ideas and concepts in technology. I'm your host, Anne Currie, co-author of Building Green Software and author of the science fiction panopticon series, which is the more relevant book to the discussion that I'm gonna be having today. Although mostly I talk about technology, sometimes I talk about the applications of technology. And this episode is very much about the applications of technology. And today I have the great pleasure to welcome one of my favourite thriller writers, Katherine Pathak, the very human author behind the best selling Scottish Noir Dani Bevan series, and whose new book, Red Red Rose, comes out soon. So welcome to the show.

Katherine Pathak (00:46)

Thank you for having me.

Anne (00:47)

I did mention on the show that I'd love to have more people coming onto the podcast to announce books, new books. And now I think you're the fourth person who'll be coming onto the podcast to announce a book. So do you want to tell us a little bit about it?

Katherine Pathak (01:02)

Yes, so I've got a new book that's the second book in my third series of detective thrillers. So this one is a spin-off from the DCI Dani Bevan detective series, which has 14 books in it. and D.I. Alice Mann is the detective who felt like the natural successor to Dani.

Anne (01:26)

So you are a ridiculously prolific author. You have written how many books?

Katherine Pathak (01:31)

Think this one will be it's the twenty-third sort of standard detective thriller and that's in thirteen years now.

Anne (01:40)

So the topic that I want to talk to you about, and the reason why I introduced you as a human author, which might seem as a little bit of a redundant description normally, is that AI is completely changing the publishing industry. And in the same way, well, in a totally different way, actually, to the way that it's completely changing the tech industry, the software engineering industry. And I've talked loads in the podcast about the changes to the tech industry. but I'm quite interested in your thoughts on the changes to the publishing industry and the industry of writing novels. writing fiction stuff. Because actually AI is surprisingly good at it in a particular way. What's your thinking on where we are with AI's writing fiction.

Katherine Pathak (02:36)

Well I know because obviously I'm a part of the writing community, a lot of authors are very frightened by it, in the same way that all creatives are frightened by the idea of AI writing creative material. if AI wrote all books from now onwards of course that would be the end of my career and the careers of many others. I can't see that happening in the immediate future. I don't think that the public has an appetite. I might be wrong, but I think there will always be a market for I can see you think I'm wrong, but I think there will always be a market for saying this was written by a human or this is read by a human.

That will create a market, I hope. 

However I can see lots of possibilities from AI. Where I could see it really being helpful is AI text to speech to produce audiobooks. I think that's on its way. I've already signed up to that on Amazon. 

I had a fantastic voice actor who read my first three books on Audible, and he's a lovely guy, very talented, but it's an extremely time consuming process. Huge numbers of person hours are required to read an audiobook. plus audiobooks used to be abridged for putting onto a CD or a tape or whatever. And that meant you're listening, I don't know, max about four hours to a book. Now they are verbatim and in my experience, and I like listening to audiobooks a lot, they're too long. 

You are not meant to listen to all the bits where you say, 'He ran his hand through his hair in frustration'. And 'she said as she scuttled into the room with her', you know, these are all things we do to paint a picture in a novel, but you wouldn't have that on a radio play, or you wouldn't be sitting for six hours to listen to the story. And I think that AI could abridge your book. and that would be a very good use for it. I also think that AI could turn your book into a TV script or a play script because that would take again weeks for you to do yourself and it doesn't require any extra creative input. It's purely about formatting and editing.

Anne (05:39)

So I've read all of your books, and you sent me a pre-released version of Red Red Rose, and I read that and I enjoyed it. I could a hundred percent tell that you wrote it.

I use AI all the time and I love AI. I don't use it in any of my writing though because it has a very distinctive style. Although it is getting much, much better. and so because I can see how much it's getting better, and the rate at which it's getting better, then I'm less sanguine than you that it won't be writing the novels in future, especially as early versions of the GPT model were trained on fan fiction because there's loads of it and it's all generally available with no copyright, which is one of the reasons why AI sounds like it does which is quite like fan fiction.

And fanfiction is actually very, very popular. I don't like fanfiction but a lot of people do. And so what you might be thinking, well no one will want to listen to Chat GPT write novels because it all sounds like fanfiction. A lot of people read fanfiction.

Katherine Pathak (07:28)

I agree. Fifty shades of Grey started out as a Twilight fan fiction.

Anne (07:37)

So fanfiction does sell. And the chatbots basically do produce fan fiction.

But I totally get what you're saying about audiobooks, because they are crazily hard to do. and it's not really the wheelhouse of writers, you know, to be doing that themselves. Especially independent writers. 

One thing that's very interesting is that your really best selling books series, the Dani Bevan series, sold hundreds of thousands of copies. It was a top UK, top world best seller in crime fiction. and you independently published that. You didn't use a publisher to do that. And it's not clear that you would have sold more if you'd had a trad publisher. but one of the things I did get from a trad publisher was that they did outsource that to a company that did an audiobook version. 

And it was quite entertaining listening to the audiobook version because we really couldn't tell. Jon and I, when we're listening to it, we couldn't tell whether it was actually narrated by a person or someone who spoke in a very AI-like way. I found her on LinkedIn and then I chatted to her. And I thought you're real. But as they often do, the products have evolved towards one another. I mean she obviously uses AI for some of the stuff that she's doing. So she's had made her own voice sound more like AI so that she can munge together the AI bits and her bits, which means that you need everybody to sound more like AI.

Katherine Pathak (09:17)

Yes, which is sad, I think. 

I was really privileged to have my audiobook actor, who's a really wonderful Scottish actor, to read those first three books, because it's quite a different experience when an actor reads the book, because I don't have a Scottish accent. I have got Scottish heritage which is why the books are set in Scotland. but to have the book read by a Scottish actor who could do all the characters, it just brought them alive. And we all know that from listening to audiobooks, it's a whole different experience. 

I've listened to ones where the narrator is very good but they are reading a book. And there are other narrators who are performing the book and they are telling you the story, they are immersive. And that's quite a different experience. And will AI be able to do that in five years? Probably. 

And you know, I hate to be talking about this because I know that the audiobook community, the readers, the narrators, the actors, will not be happy about this. and probably think it's a betrayal to say that AI is a welcome addition to this part of the industry. And I completely sympathise with that.

Anne (10:50)

It's interesting because obviously I really like the David Monteith's readings of your books. And he's a really good actor. He does the voices. Frankly, you know, no author should ever attempt the voices. It's not what we're for. Thank goodness I don't have to attempt the voices in my books. That would be disastrous. 

But you've always wanted to get him to do more of your books, and he's always wanted to do more of your books. It's just that he has such a backlog, and you write so many books, and he has such a backlog of other books, and his and your books do very well for him. Your audiobooks sell really well. That whole series sells like hot cakes. but he was a bottleneck, wasn't he? He was the classic bottleneck that can be removed by AI, which is you'd love to get do more books. You've been saying for years you'd want to do more audiobooks. but he can't keep up.

Katherine Pathak (11:50)

And it's the same for me. it would be quite nice if I could say to another me, you continue writing the Dani Bevans while I write the new spin-off and then we'll see how they both do. And that would be very helpful if I felt that might not completely make my role obsolete,

Anne (12:14)

It's interesting you say that because that takes us to a topic which is always a fascinating topic to me. generally a fascinating topic in writing and publishing, which is that some series really take off. Really, really take off. your Dani Bevan series really took off, you know, hundreds of thousands of books sold.

Things like Inspector Rebus, by Ian Rankin. I was just watching the Amazon Prime version of The Jack Reacher series, which I love. They're really good. I've never read the books, I've heard they're very good, but the TV show is good. and a lot of authors, they eventually, like you, you've moved away from your super best-selling series because you just didn't really want to do them anymore. 

Lee Child, the writer of the Jack Reacher series has basically said, you know, I don't want to do these books anymore. But at the same time, I'm aware that you've just hit a giant jackpot by getting a series that people want to read. So he's got his brother to continue. His brother is the chatbot who is attempting to keep the books going. 

I'm a science fiction writer so I'm obviously a giant fan of a writer called Anne McCaffrey who you may or may not have ever heard of. She's a giant of sci-fi she wrote all these books about dragons that have been spun off in loads of copycat you know effectively fan fiction versions. But she eventually well I mean she died but it was still popular and now her son does them.

She did them together with the son for a while. Now the son does them. Because, you know, as Lee Child said, why would you ever stop? 

Once you've got a character or a series, and it's very hard to tell which what is the thing that catches the imagination, you want to be able to keep going, but as a writer, you can often get pretty sick of it. I mean, Agatha Christie is the case of points, isn't she?

Katherine Pathak (14:24)

Arthur Conan Doyle, who hated Sherlock.

Anne (14:30)

Did he hate Sherlock Holmes?

Katherine Pathak (14:32)

Yes, that's why he killed him off. But then public opinion demanded that he had to come back from the dead. So he was forced to bring him back. You've created a monster really, something bigger than yourself. 

And I don't know why he disliked Sherlock, because I owe an awful lot to my Dani Bevan series and I have a lot of affection for it. And one of the reasons I did stop is because I felt that in the early books there was tension because of her relationships, how she was fitting into her role. But then after 14 books, your character has to move on. They have to develop as a character.

And something I really dislike about soap operas is if you have invested your interest in a character, they've moved on, and now things have settled for them, which is how the narrative structure works. at the end you reach equilibrium. Then they had to make it all get unbalanced again in order to write them into a new story. And then for me, I switch off and then I because I know then it isn't real.

And I think the magic of a series is that people think it's real. People know intellectually it's not real, but they feel that character is real. And people believed Sherlock Holmes was real. They went to 221B Baker Street to ask his advice about cases. They wrote letters for decades. and that's the magic.

I am very plot-based. I like novels. I can read a novel with characters I don't like hugely or particularly engaged with if the plot really grips me and I want to know what happens and I'm interested in the issues raised. Plot is huge to me, but I think character is more important when it comes to creating a best-selling series. And I feel like your audience has to believe that the character would still do these things for the book to continue.

Anne (16:57)

It's an interesting one. we mentioned Agatha Christie. So the most popular Agatha Christie character by miles, that she came to absolutely loathe, was Hercuke Poirot. 

Famously, a bit like Arthur Conan Doyle, she killed him. About halfway through the books that she wrote about him. After about 30 years, she wrote the book in which he died. And then she put it in a safe only to be opened after her death and then ploughed on

Katherine Pathak (17:31)

The thing that was interesting was, especially about that book Curtain, so the book she wrote when she killed off Poirot she left to her second husband. She did that a lot. She gave the rights to the Mousetrap to her grandson because she was a business. She was an industry.

When somebody has a big name like Lee Child or Stephen King, you become an industry for more than just yourself. You are supporting other people. Agatha Christie had the amazing foresight to know that her name and her brand had to live on when she was gone.

And she did it by leaving the rights to certain books, certain series. So basically, that's like life insurance. So she released Curtin not long before she herself died, so that her husband would have the royalties from that book when she was gone. And I find that incredible. And to know that your books are going to still be bought in ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred years time, she knew that, and she was right.

Anne (18:53)

Yes, and it's interesting, is it? So you've made a really interesting analogy there. Or there is a really interesting analogy there between getting your brother to take on the series or getting your son to take on the series, all these people who took on the series. 

There are people who've taken on series who I think have actually done an even better job than the original but the family folk almost never do. So if you could train an AI to be that person who then takes that on, effectively you're leaving a better bequest to your family than trying to get them to do it when they are not that person.

Katherine Pathak (19:46)

You'd still have to create the brand first, wouldn't you? So that's okay for those of us who have been able to create a human brand in real life. but once you've opened Pandora's box and AI is writing novels, then in a few generations' time there won't be any new humans to create a new brand. We'll just be using the old ones over and over and over again. 

I suppose the question is, can AI? Because it keeps learning from previous things that it's read and it's kind of duplicating, it's kind of creating something new, has it got the creativity of a human to spark a whole new genre or create something really startlingly different? Can humans do that? I don't know. 

I think a lot of what's available to people now is fairly generic and is based on not varying very much from the template that's been successful in the past. will AI take that away completely? Do we need that human spark to innovate? I'm not sure. You will know more about that than me.

Anne (20:59)

I think it will. I think it'll take it away, no problem. 

I mean the obvious mega brand at the moment, right now, for fiction is still JK Rowling. It's still the Harry Potter series. the Harry Potter series was massively derivative. She did a perfectly reasonable job, but it's derived. 

So I could give you a load of authors who wrote almost the same story before that and she kind of just spliced it all together and did it again. That is totally within the capabilities of AI. So the Harry Potter brand could easily have been generated by AI. And AI is so very good at holding the whole of human knowledge in its so you know in its model, in its head and going, well, let's just jiggle around with that a little bit and splice it together in a different way. I think that it's more than capable of doing a JK Rowling. 

Now the incredible brands right at the beginning of fiction, you know, things like Jane Austen, you know, Pride and Prejudice. I don't really know enough about whether or not she was based on an earlier brand. but at some point someone started this whole thing off.

Katherine Pathak (22:28)

There was a Gothic fiction brand, which she parodied in Northanger Abbey and that sort of started her off, but she took it more seriously. Her books aren't parodies, they're genuine books about relationships and her personal experience. but she was not a brand in her lifetime.

Anne (22:53)

No, that's true.

Katherine Pathak (22:54)

Her books only started selling after her death, and then she became a massive brand. And actually, there weren't a lot at the time. She's a pioneer, really, because there were very few. I think you've got Radcliffe Hall, who wrote some gothic books earlier. You've got Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein, and she was a huge outlier for writing that. You know, obviously, Mary Wollstonecraft was her mother, so she had a kind of role model to push the boundaries. 

But not really until the mid to late 19th century do you get the female novelist having brand recognition. But even then the Brontes didn't write under their own name. And they needed to have patrons like Charles Dickens to promote them and without those patrons they wouldn't have had the success that they did. But the power of their writing in the end was enough to get them a readership. So you've got George Elliot. People really enjoyed her books therefore she became a great novelist.

Anne (24:27)

Yes, that's true.

Katherine Pathak (24:29)

Can AI create a female voice? A male voice? A non-binary voice? I don't know.

Anne (24:39)

Oddly enough I'm the opposite of you. Because I write books on green software, all about how to write code that's more that's aligned with the energy transition, I want the AIs to just be able to take that and run with it and just be me all over the place saying the kind of things that are in the books. 

So I really I spend a lot of time going, read this, read this, read this, you know, replicate me and actually it's not too bad if you talk about green software. It's really pretty good. I'm quite happy with it generally. but you're the opposite, because you don't want it to steal your voice. Well, I do want it to steal my voice.

Katherine Pathak (25:17)

Also you know, dare I say it, AI's had a lot of very bad press this week and you know the sort of apocalyptic predictions about AI. Would I want to be encouraging AI to say, right, okay, for this next book, you're gonna have to think of a really obscure, bizarre way of killing somebody, and you've got to think of you know, a really, really interesting new take on why somebody might want somebody else dead? 

Crime writing, you know, it's the most popular genre in the UK. I looked it up this morning. It's still the most popular genre, crime and thrillers. I don't think it's because we're all psychopaths. I think it's because we enjoy mysteries and we like to know that people will come to justice in the end and we enjoy the excitement of it. but you know, we have a conscience, don't we? We have a sense of what's right and wrong. Not all people do. I mean, we have had cases in the news recently of authors who have written books about how to kill your husband and then have gone out and killed their husband.

So if we tell an AI to start learning about how to kill people and why people might do that,  then what will they ultimately come up with?

Anne (26:44)

My guest on a podcast a few episodes ago [ed Yanqing Cheng] was talking about the incredible amounts of effort that the AI companies, I mean, they are all they could do with doing a bit better at their DevOps and sandboxing their tests and doing that stuff, but they do put a lot of effort into reinforcement learning around don't murder people.

Don't murder people for this reason. Actually I would consider my books to be part of the reinforcement learning on, you know, there are other ways than killing people. Killing people is not the right thing to do. but so I want them to copy my books, be my main character. Whereas you want them to not copy your books.

Katherine Pathak (27:36)

Absolutely. I mean I read a lot of crime thrillers and I write them and a lot of people kill people who have slighted them in some way, in a completely disproportionate manner.

And there'd be no crime fiction if this didn't happen. But we don't want AI to think that's an everyday occurrence or that's the way that you respond to somebody having done something to you in the past that you didn't like.

Anne (28:04)

There's a thriller writer that we both like, actually haven't read in a few years, Minette Walters. and I remember something that she said in one of her books, look, don't worry about motive, because in real life, there's no such thing as motive. Most people, no matter what happens, are not going to kill anybody.

So the fact that there's a motive only applies if you're a psychopath. For ordinary people, there is no motive that would, you know, other than if you don't kill this innocent person, the whole world will blow up. That's not going to happen in real life. So that's not a motive you really need to worry about. And it would be pretty apparent if that was the motive. Other than that, why do people think about motive? Well, I guess it's because actually there are psychopaths out there.

As Minette Walters would say, there has to be something wrong with you to kill somebody. But if you do kill somebody, the motive that you would consider to be valid to kill that person is completely incomprehensible to anybody who is not going to kill people, which is the vast majority of people. it is one of the strange dirty secrets of crime novels that doesn't really make any sense.

Katherine Pathak (29:28)

No, well it's often very banal. 

People enjoy reading true crime and if you do look at real cases, genuine cases, it's often that somebody has killed somebody because they made too much noise. You know, they were a bad neighbour or they just wanted to get rid of their husband or get rid of their wife because they wanted to run off somebody else.

And the overkill, literally, to achieve that is mind boggling to the rest of us, but appeared to make sense to them.

Anne (30:05)

So actually the motive doesn't matter. It's iding the person who is that kind of person.

Katherine Pathak (30:13)

with my other hat on as a teacher who's had safeguarding training, we are always told to trust our gut. And usually you know very quickly. You can assess somebody and whether they're really going to be a good person to be around vulnerable people quite quickly. but it's interesting because I think children are very good judges of character. They can judge people; perhaps because they haven't yet got the layers of social conditioning placed upon them. And they can tell when somebody is not very genuine, is not very warm. I find that really fascinating and something I probably haven't looked at enough in my books, but I'm sure other people have looked at that more closely in their writing. But I do find that interesting

And you could also say the same about animals, you know. People say, "my dog doesn't like somebody". To be honest, our dog doesn't like anybody who comes in our house, so that's that doesn't apply. 

Anne (31:16)

Ha ha ha.

Katherine Pathak (31:17)

I was thinking this morning about what makes a bestseller. And something that we didn't talk about was the celebrity writer because I think at the moment that's the direction that publishing is going in. Certainly traditional publishing is selling books by people who are already a brand in another area. and that is how they are getting their initial sales for those books. 

Obviously Richard Osman is a case in point. And I know people who really enjoy his books. Obviously he got his idea from Agatha Christie. She had her Tuesday Murder Club and he had his Thursday Murder Club. So AI could most certainly have got that idea and then based a book series upon it.

But what they wouldn't have was the celebrity name that went with it. And then all the interviews that he could do on TV programmes because of all his connections and the fact that he's already well known in the UK. 

At the moment, there are two areas that authors are getting upset about. One of them is AI, and the other is celebrity authors.

Anne (32:43)

I suspect that Richard Osman did actually write his own stuff. Do you think he used a ghostwriter? 

Katherine Pathak (32:51)

I think he wrote his own books, I think he did, definitely.

Anne (32:55)

But loads of celebrity authors do actually use a ghostwriter. So is that really any difference to using an AI?

Katherine Pathak (33:01)

No, because we don't know who that ghostwriter is, do we? We don't know anything about them. I think that's no different than using AI and putting a celebrity name on it because all they're doing is inputting their ideas, they're inputting their plot, and then they're saying off you go and write it. Well that's AI is as far as I could see it.

Anne (33:30)

That's a very good point. I hadn't thought about that. You're coming up with a lot of tweaks around AI use in the publishing industry that I hadn't thought about at all. Basically, you know, somebody slaving away, some nameless person or even team of people slaving away in the dark room, ghost writing the books of the famous because, let's face it, it's very time consuming to write a book. and not very many people have the skill to do it. It's a skill. It takes years to learn that skill. And it's not unreasonable to say, well, if you're a singer or pop star, then you're not gonna spend three years learning how to write a book and then write the book. 

Katherine Pathak (34:18)

I mean I think it must be very difficult because if I was a famous person and I had written the book, I would be wanting to say at all times, I wrote this. I actually wrote this book. It's not ghostwritten. 

But they must be told by their publishers they can't say that because then it suggests that a lot of the books that are written by celebrities are not written by them. 

But obviously for a very long time you will have to say this is an AI novel if you are a traditional publisher. If you can download it from somewhere all bets are off. But if you are a traditional publisher you are going to have to say this was produced by AI. And there will be a lot of consumers for a lot of years who will avoid that.

Anne (35:06)

I will say none of my books were written by AI. I painfully wrote them all. And I know you painfully wrote yours because I recognise your writing.

Katherine Pathak (35:17)

I've been rereading some of the old Dani Bevans to remind myself of the characters and what they do and what they say. and it helps you to write the new series. But I'm always chuckling at the repeated sort of phrases that I tend to use. A friend of mine said an awful lot of people bring in trays of cups of tea in your books, and rereading them I thought if somebody else drags their hand through their hair in frustration, then you know, nobody's gonna have any hair left. 

We have our phrases, we don't realise we've used them and that we've repeated them, but they intersperse our books. And if we can pick that up, AI would pick that up in a second. Your filler phrases to explain what's happening and to not pad out but to create a context around your dialogue because you can't just have two people speaking. There has to be something else going on in the room while that's happening.

Anne (36:23)

They have to take a sip on their cup of tea or do something. Pace up and down. I have a lot of pacing up and down.

Katherine Pathak (36:33)

Pacing up and down or taking a deep breath. I think a lot of my characters are pretty much hyperventilating during the dialogue scenes.

Anne (36:45)

Mine are always sighing. I sighed.

Katherine Pathak (36:50)

Sighing heavily and grimacing

Anne (36:53)

My characters do grimace a lot. And quite often you think, what does grimacing even mean? So I have an American reader who pointed out that in the UK when you say you frown that means you're like concentrating you frown in concentration you wrinkle your brow. But in America if you say you frown what that means is that you're, you know, "Turn that frown upside down" it means that your mouth is going down. You're sad if you're frowning. So you have to bear that in mind when you're writing, because my characters are always frowning in concentration. But in America, it doesn't make any sense.

Katherine Pathak (37:37)

Absolutely. Mine are always frowning. And their brow is crinkling and that kind of thing.

I've always had a lot of readers in America for my books and I think that American readers really like British crime fiction. so I expect they've got used to it. From reading all the British crime fiction that they read, along with all the cups of tea with sugar that get drunk in these books. like we do when we read an American book. You know, we get used to the phrases don't we? It's part of the enjoyment.

Anne (38:23)

That's true. I mean it's definitely something I never really appreciated.  One of the reasons why I mean you there're loads of reasons why your books are massively best selling, they're very good. But a major reason is that they sell a lot in America. And there are lots of people in America who buy books.

Katherine Pathak (38:44)

Yes.

And who read on Kindle and enjoy reading books set in Scotland and Ireland. And possibly Wales as well, because there's a lot of Welsh crime fiction that has really expanded in recent years. certainly since I've been writing, I read a lot of Irish crime fiction, which I really enjoy. I think the setting is very significant to the success. 

My books set in Essex, I'd say they're steady sellers, which is a different category that I would not turn my nose up at whatsoever. and people do enjoy the settings, but somebody reading these books in the United States is not quite so familiar with the River Blackwater or the you know the Battle of Malden. It's not Cornwall, is it, or Yorkshire or but it's somewhere that I know very well. Better than I know Scotland. And it is true that you should write about the places that you know, because you will write better, you'll have greater insight. And it might be somewhere that you want people to know a bit more about. Maybe you want to be a little bit more original. I mean, lots of people write books set in Scotland, but not so many are writing about the east coast of Essex. 

Anne (40:24)

So that's been a really interesting conversation, Katherine. We've learned an interesting thing I wasn't really expecting, which is, maybe AI has not got to the point, but it may well do, of writing all the fiction for us. but there are choke points that artists are definitely experiencing at the moment, like producing audiobooks, that actually it could really be quite helpful at doing. 

Maybe it wouldn't be as good as having a human actor do it. But as you say, I mean you would you have been a human actor who likes doing your books and wants to do your books and you're still what is it? It's like 10 years you've been waiting for him to do another one. It's just that those choke points are not supportable.

You think it's about writing, but there are loads of examples of things which are utterly and directly analogous: ghost writers, getting your friends and family to take over your successfully running series, the silent person who continues the thing and tries to make it in your voice as much as humanly possible. 

Katherine Pathak (41:46)

Well there's a of blurred lines there.

Anne (41:50)

that's a really really useful thing I've not thought of at all before. So thank you very much for coming in and talking about AI in the publishing industry for doing things that are not just writing books or even not primarily writing books. so thank you very much indeed.

Katherine Pathak (42:08)

Pleasure.

Anne (42:09)

And thank you to our listeners and viewers of Asynchronous and Unreliable. I hope you enjoyed this episode. There was a little bit different on the usage of AI, the uses of AI, in industries that are not just the software engineering industry. So thank you very much and I will see you again on next week's episode of Asynchronous and Unreliable.