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Dead Winter's Night (Formally Bright Eyes)
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I suspect that there are AI book scams going around... I first became aware of it when I came across an urban fantasy author who was giving his books away for free/low prices on kindle, simply because there were way too many books where he was doing this with. A second thing that made me suspicious was the copyright year - these were very close together and there were more than 10 books in total (it takes years to
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that many books, especially with the length of them and I've not seen such proliferation in a series outside of those Sweet Valley High books from the 80's/90's, but they were 200 pages long each, and these are 400 pages.) Third - I tried looking him up on Fantastic Fiction and there was no entry for him.
Today, I came across a set of pagan books advertised on Instagram that claimed to be a best seller on Amazon, but again, with a very low price tag. I looked the author up on Amazon to see if I could take a look at the copyright year of each of the books... On Amazon, there was no such author listed. I tried to see if there was any reference to the author on the internet since you can usually find a blog, wikipedia
entry or something similar but no luck there (some authors choose not to sell through Amazon and some book publishers don't, either.) Again, no such luck... Either the books don't exist and you won't receive a copy, the books do exist and it's written by AI, or they are books by real authors that have had their work stolen. Beware of low price/free books.
I continue to buy real books from real bricks and mortar bookstores, so this isn't an issue I've personally dealt with. However, I've seen a lot of advertising recently about how to use AI to pump out novels and make lots of money. It potentially serves someone's bank balance, but it certainly doesn't serve the cause of reading or readers.
I usually buy books from authors that I know I like (most of it years before this AI nonsense started), but a lot become out of print, you can't order from the bookshop because it's not released here, the bookshop doesn't carry it, or if it's second hand, is way over priced. The local Oxfam sells books at inflated prices now and the font size used can be a problem - I had to give up on the Seven Kennings Trilogy
because the font was too small, so kindle is useful because I can change the font sizes. If it wasn't for that, I would prefer print books. There has always been bad books around, but it seems to becoming more common.