The Author Does Not Exist

by Variable Rush

It started years ago, around 2010 or 2011.

I was a big fan of Final Fantasy XI.  I played Yugdaba on the Valefor server.  At some point I discovered there were a series of novels based on the game, but they were only available in Japanese, French, and German.  There were no plans for an English release.

I had a German-to-English dictionary and thought I could read at least one of the books by translating each word individually.  It was the summer, school wouldn't start for another few months, so I bought a German language edition from, you guessed it, Amazon.

In the few days before the book arrived, I thought of Google Translate.

Could it translate faster and make more sense than me translating using a book?  To test this idea, I found a German language fairy tale on Project Gutenberg - a German translation of a Japanese fairy tale, as luck would have it - and translated it using a combination of the dictionary, Google Translate, and a friend online who knew German and English.  It worked.  Within a couple of days, I had created a translation of a short story that had never been translated to English before, if Google was to be believed.

When the Final Fantasy XI book came in, I set to work on it right away.  I felt great about my translation.  I eventually contacted Square Enix's marketing department (I didn't know where else to go) regarding them paying me to translate the whole series.  They said no.

I next made a mistake.  I translated the entire book of fairy tales and sold it on Amazon.  This was a mistake in that some of the fairy tales had never been translated to English.  My selling the lot on Amazon counted as them being published, so I was unable to monetize the translations further by having them published in literary magazines.

I translated several more books this way.  I also discovered Babelcube.  Babelcube is a site that connects authors to translators.  I signed up as both a translator and a writer.  Several of my translations were translated to other languages by other people, and I myself translated several works to English from German using my tried-and-true method.

That was it for a long time.  The intervening decade has been a strange decade for me.  I got married, lost close family members, moved, changed professions, went back to college, moved again, and so much more.

So for most of this time, I added nothing to my translation empire.  Each month I would be sent a royalty check from Amazon for ten or 20 dollars.  Most of the sales were from a translation of an erotic fiction novel written by the same man who wrote Bambi.  Yes, that Bambi.

Since one erotic fiction novel was about 80 percent of the money I was making in royalties, I sometimes thought how to increase the amount I received, figuring that if I increased the amount of stories I was selling that I could increase the 20 percent on the other side.

I tried using a site like Fiverr to pay people five dollars to write more erotic fiction, but after hiring two people who then sent me the exact same story, I stopped using the site.

During the summer of 2019, I came across a site called "Talk to Transformer."

It was a demo of using an AI to write text.  Fast-forward two years and I find that demo has become something called InferKit.  I tried it out.  You can just press "generate text" and it will write off the cuff or you can feed it key words to make it write in a particular direction.  So for my first pieces, I filled it with the kinds of keywords you would expect to find in a piece of erotica.

Those early pieces I made with InferKit are more, "wham bam, thank you ma'am" than the more nuanced, somewhat story-focused pieces I would later create with it.  Granted, editing still has to be completed on each output.  Sometimes characters change genders or do things that are impossible or say things that do not sound right or get hung up on a word or phrase (yesterday I had to edit the phrase "all of the colors" out at least a few dozen times as one of the characters in this LGBT story the program generated had a vibrator that contained a light that changed color).  Each work comes to 2,000 to 5,000 words.

These new AI-written books make money for me in three ways:

1. Each costs a reader $0.99, so I get $0.35 on each one.
2. They're all in the Kindle Unlimited program, so for each 100 pages read, I get somewhere around $0.04 (more books equals more pages).
3. They each contain a sample of the original German-to-English erotica book to entice the reader to purchase that book at $2.99 and, of that, I get $2.

Since starting this new venture, I have not broken $40 per month in sales, but it's getting there.

I recently broke $30 for the first time.  I have opted to, so far, only publish so-called vanilla erotica. I have not moved into Chuck Tingle-esque territory or anything more risque.  The AI gets confused very easily at this stage.

I have two author names going right now for the erotica.

I have one with a male name, for those stories that are told from a male perspective, and a female name for the female perspective stories.  The pictures for the authors came from a site that makes AI-created faces of people that do not exist.  Those names are Samantha Cherry (so named because I don't know a Samantha, yes, I laughed too much at that) and Benedict Urlaub (Urlaub is the German word for vacation, what I hoped my foray into erotic publishing would net me).  I have toyed around with the idea of "writing" other genres.

The InferKit program I have been using has been extremely fascinating.

I can see how in the future it and programs like it will constitute the equivalent of duct tape in books, that an author who can't write action scenes or love scenes will use it to piece aspects of their stories together.  And yes, I know that by using a program I am technically what is known as a "script kiddie."

But as the ninth of the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition states: "Opportunity plus instinct equals profit."