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I was a snob about AI in publishing. I'll just say it. When companies started popping up in late 2022 promising to use AI to write books, I had the same reaction I once had to self publishing when I was still in the traditional world: I want nothing to do with these people. Dan Curran has made me reconsider—some of it, anyway. Not because he convinced me AI can match what a skilled ghost writer or developmental editor does (I don't think it can, at least not yet) but what he’s building at
Chapters may be as interesting as the manuscript.
Dan spent a decade running a company that interviewed scientists and PhDs for technical writing. When ChatGPT launched, he didn't use AI to replace writers. He used it to organize, deduplicate and structure the words that were already coming out of real people's mouths—recorded in conversations, timestamped and attributed, so every sentence traces back to the person who said it. The result is a manuscript in 90 days. Chapters has started over 100 of them in 16 months with a team of 14 people, and they charge $25,000—or as low as $18,000 on a payment plan—to do what a ghost writer charges $60,000 to $150,000 for.
But what I really wanted to talk about is what Dan's actually building, which is not a book company. He calls it a "living library"—a vault of authenticated IP that can generate Substacks, LinkedIn posts, speeches, white papers and documentary frameworks from the same corpus. And he's timestamping and chaining custody of every piece of it, so that when the large language models come scraping for new knowledge, authors can prove what they said, when they said it and demand to be paid for it. Can a 90-day AI-organized manuscript compete with a book that's been through months of human developmental editing? I have my doubts. But that's arguing about the wrong part.
We also get into why about half of Chapters' clients come from publishers who offer them as an alternative to a $150,000 ghost writer, why Dan thinks 90% of digital content will be synthetic by next year and his case for why the publishing industry needs to "widen the aperture." Plus where Dan sees authorship itself going when AI can authenticate content faster than any human can, which is one of the strangest questions driving this whole season.
In this episode:
- Why I was a snob about AI publishing and why I'm now willing to listen—even if I'm not fully converted
- How Chapters turns 12 weeks of recorded conversations into a 50,000-to-80,000-word manuscript without AI writing a single sentence
- The "chain of custody" system that timestamps every idea—and why Dan thinks authors will eventually get paid when LLMs scrape their IP
- Why about half of Chapters' clients come from publishers who offer them as an alternative to a $60,000-to-$150,000 ghost writer
- Dan's case for why publishing needs to "widen the aperture"—and where I think he's right and where I'm still skeptical
- What he means by a "living library"—and why it might matter more than the book
Want to know more about my company? Legacy Launch Pad Publishing is a boutique hybrid publisher for entrepreneurs and established founders. We help clients create books that build authority, attract opportunities and grow businesses. More info 👉
https://www.legacylaunchpadpub.com
And if you just want to know more about me, 👉 www.annadavid.com
Remember, if there's anyone in your life whose wisdom you deeply admire, or who you know could be considered an authority in their field if they were better known, share this show with them.
What is Behind the Book Cover?
You've heard the book publishing podcasts that give you tips for selling a lot of books and the ones that only interview world-famous authors. Now it's time for a book publishing show that reveals what actually goes on behind the cover.
Hosted by New York Times bestselling author Anna David, Behind the Book Cover features interviews with traditionally published authors, independently published entrepreneurs who have used their books too seven figures to their bottom line to build their businesses and more.
Anna David has had books published by HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster and is the founder of Legacy Launch Pad, David is the founder of Legacy Launch Pad Publishing, a leading hybrid book publisher for entrepreneurs. In other words, she knows both sides—and isn't afraid to share it.
Come find out what traditional publishers don't want you to know.