Here’s a number that should worry you more than any AI headline this year: revenue per human-only book fell 17 percent between 2023 and 2025, in a market where AI-generated books mostly failed.
Researchers at Stony Brook, Columbia, and the University of Michigan just tracked 14,419 self-published novels sold on Amazon. AI-flagged books made up 20 percent of the catalog. They earned only 11 percent of the revenue. Individually, most of them flopped.
But quarterly book sales still grew 19-fold, while total revenue grew less than 9-fold. The flood didn’t win on quality. It won by claiming shelf space and bestseller slots that human authors used to hold.
I call this dilution, and it’s a different threat than displacement. Displacement means something better takes your job. Dilution means enough mediocre substitutes flood in that your return shrinks, even though you’re still the best one on the shelf.
The clue to what protects you sits inside the same data. Inside Kindle Unlimited, where readers pull from a shared pool and no author owns the relationship, humans lost the most ground. In Fantasy and Horror, where readers return for a specific author or world, revenue per human book rose 35 percent. Same flood, opposite outcome.
Here’s what I’d put in front of your leadership team:
- Start by owning your audience. Build direct channels to your customers so discovery never runs entirely through a shared pool a competitor can flood.
- Then make your humanity visible. Show customers what’s actually human and verified in what you deliver, because that trust is becoming the scarcest currency in a saturated market.
- Finally, watch your exposure. Get honest about how cheaply a good-enough version of your product could now be made, and how much of your demand still flows through a platform you don’t control.
This Week
Before your next planning session, ask one question about your own market: how cheaply could a good-enough version of what you sell be produced today? Then trace how much of your demand reaches you through a shared feed, a marketplace ranking, or a recommendation engine you don’t control.
Where does most of your revenue actually come from right now, a channel you own, or one you’re renting?
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