Ep 28: Will AI Write Good Novels? With Bestselling Human Crime Writer Katherine Pathak

It's interesting you say that because that takes us back to a topic which is 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 danny bevan series really took off you know hundreds of thousands books sold things like inspector rebus by ian rankin that i was just reading watching the amazon prime version of the jack reacher which i love they're really good they're i don't i've never read the books i've heard they're very good but the tv show is good And a lot of those folk, they eventually, like you, you've moved away from your super best-selling one because actually you just got, you know, I didn't really want to do this 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 it's almost impossible.

You've just like hit a giant jackpot by getting a series that people want to read.

He's got his brother.

His brother is the chatbot who is attempting to keep the books going.

I'm a science fiction writer.

I'm obviously a giant fan of Anne McCaffrey, who you may or may not have ever heard of.

She was a giant.

of sci-fi.

She wrote all these books that were about dragons that have been spun off and loads of copycat, effectively fan fiction versions of that that are not fan fiction.

But she eventually, well, I mean, she died, but it was still popular.

And now her son does them.

So she did them together with the son for a while.

Now her son does them.

Because 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 what is the thing that catches the imagination, you want to be able to keep it.

But as a writer, you can often get pretty sick of it.

Agatha Christie is the case in both, isn't

it?

And Arthur Conan Doyle,

who hated Sherlock.

Did he hate Sherlock Holmes? Yes.

That's why he killed him off.

Oh, that's true.