‘ This technology isn’t going to go away. We need to figure out what role it has.’
George Walkley is a legend in the publishing world. Over the last three decades, and particularly at Hachette, he has not only witnessed but helped shape the digital transformation of the industry, and these days he’s focused on how publishers respond to the challenges and opportunities of AI.
While the book itself has proved remarkably resilient as a technology, technology has transformed the ways in which they are written, discovered, read and published. What are the ethical and practical considerations of AI for publishers, authors and readers? And what does all that mean for George himself as he writes and considers how to publish his OWN book?
Essential listening for anyone curious about where publishing is going, and the implications for authors, plus top tips on building an audience through writing an unmissable newsletter.
George’s newsletter: https://www.georgewalkley.com/newsletter/
George on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgewalkley/
Alison on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/the-alison-jones/
The 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge: www.proposalchallenge.com
Alison Jones: We are here today with George Walkley, who is a strategy consultant, an expert in publishing and AI, he’s got extensive senior executive experience in the publishing and media space, including 15 years at Hachette, and he’s worked with the Independent Publishers Guild, the IPG, to develop the first independent CPD accredited training course on generative AI, specifically designed for the publishing industry.
It is excellent, I’ve done it.
And he writes a brilliant weekly newsletter. I know it’s brilliant because I get it. And he’s a regular speaker, panelist, and chair at conferences, book fairs and corporate events.
He is in fact a bit of a publishing legend. So welcome to the podcast, George. It’s great to have you here.
George Walkley: Great to be here, Alison. Thank you for the invitation.
Alison Jones: And I want to talk to you particularly about AI today, as you know, and I thought it’d be really nice just to sort of meander towards that with a bit of a kind of retrospective on, oh my goodness, there’s been a lot of change in publishing over the last 20 years, hasn’t there?
George Walkley: Goodness me. Yes.
Alison Jones: We are veterans of this.
George Walkley: So this is year 28 in the industry for me and it’s changed. It’s changed a huge amount.
I mean, I came in originally as a bookseller in the late 1990s and the whole landscape looked different. Amazon hadn’t launched in the UK. Supermarkets were… sort of sold some books, but it wasn’t a big part of what they did. We had multiple chain booksellers on the high street, and you know, over the time that I’ve been in the industry, we’ve seen a complete consolidation of the retail landscape in Waterstones in the UK and Barnes and Noble in the US. We effectively have, you know, the last bookseller standing in terms of chains. We’ve seen a sort of shrinking and hopefully now a sort of growing again of the independent sector. The internet’s come along in terms of delivery of physical books, but also eBooks, audio books, podcasts and now AI.
I mean, my goodness, it’s a lot of change, isn’t it?
Alison Jones: It’s almost unrecognizable. And yet I think that the traditional book trade is still, I mean, I think people who focus on Amazon, particularly, sort of forget that there is still this really important book chain behind it. I mean, yes, there’s only one big trade bookseller on the high street left because Waterstones is Blackwells and you know, and in fact, Borders as well.
But there’s also the public library market. There’s the academic library market. There’s still this really strong trade, not really strong, but there is still an infrastructure there beyond Amazon. And what’s really interesting to me is, is how that has adapted, how the middle players, again, you’ve got this consolidation with wholesalers and so on, because there just isn’t enough industry to support it.
And how, so for example, academic publishing is responding with open access and straight to, you know, repositories in institutional libraries. So, across the whole spectrum of publishing, there’s been this outpouring of sort of panic-fuelled innovation, if you know what I mean.
George Walkley: Yes, and it’s really important to say that, you know, however much we talk about change, the majority of books sold are still sold in a legacy physical format, which would be recognizable to someone from a previous century. In fact, if you compare books with any other mass media format, books are the oldest form of mass media.
We could take, if we had a time machine and we could go and grab a Roman citizen from say, 400 CE and bring them back here, they’d be pretty flabbergasted, I think, at most things. But the book would be recognizable to them as a Codex.
You know, that idea of you know, obviously it sort of goes from something that’s handwritten to something that’s printed with Gutenberg and subsequently, but this is something that has lasted a really long time and it’s lasted a really long time for a reason. Books make sense, they’re a great format. There’s a recent Bain study on publishing that I know you’ve read and has been the subject of a lot of discussion in recent weeks, which references a lovely Stephen King line that a book is a uniquely portable form of magic, and I think it’s important we don’t lose sight of that with all of the technological change.
Alison Jones: Yes, it is astonishing, isn’t it, that that technology has been so durable, and I know when I was, you know, working in digital publishing, I had a confident bet with our production manager that by 2013, I think I said, you know, half our revenue would be digital. And it just, it just didn’t work like that.
It’s that the print has been incredibly resilient and much more profitable.
George Walkley: Yes, and I think it’s interesting. Well I think it’s interesting because you sort of need to, you can sort of look at publishing as a whole and it’s not actually a very, looking at publishing as a whole and saying, okay, oh, it’s 25% ebook is probably not very meaningful. You need to really look at different sorts of publishing.
So, you know, you can look at art publishing still massively physical. You can look at genre fiction, probably indexing far more on the digital side. You can look at some academic resources, which are now overwhelmingly digital. You can look at other areas where print is resilient. So it feels like it’s, publishing as a whole is a sort of agglomeration of different markets, all with their own dynamics, and that’s part of what makes the industry such fun.
Alison Jones: Absolutely, yes.
So, on a scale of one to 10, I feel, you know, you and I have both sort of been in publishing long enough to feel like we’ve sort of lurched from crisis to crisis. I’m a little bit older than you, and I remember the whole kind of aftermath of the netbook agreement going and how this was the end of it all and, you know, was the book was dead.
And then Amazon came along and then self-publishing came along and then open access came along and now AI has come along. Are we looking, do you think, at another storm that we’ll weather and adapt to? Or are we looking at something that is fundamentally an existential threat to the industry?
George Walkley: I think…
Alison Jones: …we’ll be quoting you on this in 10 years time, George, you know that, don’t you?
George Walkley: Yes, of course. But it’s really, I think the first thing that we sort of need to do is we need to unbundle reading and the book from the publishing industry as a construct because I think those are sort of two sort of separate things. Reading and the book I’m fundamentally quite bullish about in the long term because, you know, it has held up as a format. It makes sense and we’ve seen lots of really interesting things in recent years.
You refer to self-publishing, which I think is a really interesting example. Print on demand is an absolute gift. You know, in objective terms, the capital barriers to entry for starting a publisher have never been lower. It’s never been easier for an author to get their work out into the world. Getting it discovered, that’s a whole other thing, which we can probably come back to.
So long term, I think the book, the book absolutely has a place, the publishing industry as it’s currently constructed, I think is more interesting because there, there are some structural challenges.
There’s been a lot of, there’s been a lot of consolidation. Here in the UK there’s been a lot of discussion in recent weeks from small independent publishers just about their survivability at the moment. Looking at their cost base, looking at some of the headwinds that they face.
So I think if we then look at AI in that context what is it actually, what is it actually doing? And I think there’s really sort of three things that I think are particularly interesting at the moment. First of all, AI is sort of reducing the cost of producing content to zero. Or as close to zero as you can get. There’s a podcast startup in Los Angeles that’s producing about two and a half thousand hours of podcasts a week, which are planned, written, spoken and distributed through AI tools.
They need fewer than 20 listeners for each episode to break even on advertising. And, it’s a great model. Now, it breaks the signal to noise ratio for everyone else, but that’s, that’s an…
Alison Jones: …that’s not their problem.
George Walkley: No, absolutely not.
So, on the one hand, you’ve got this cost of content that’s sort of really going down so anyone can produce something. At the same time, people need more help making sense of things. How do you find the right book or podcast or consumer product in a world where there’s just more of everything? And all of the evidence we see is that AI is becoming more embedded within purchasing decisions and within the purchase process. There’s recent Adobe data that shows I think about a third of consumers in the UK and about a half of consumers in the US are using AI tools for product discovery and purchasing.
Open AI is going sort of a stage further and is really building purchasing into the flow. So you can ask Chat GPT a question, it’ll recommend a product and you can buy it from within chat GPT if it’s sold by particular merchants. So we’ve got content…
Alison Jones: …all sorts questions about transparency within that, to be fair and,
George Walkley: …a hundred percent. But at a top level, we’ve got content creation, content discovery.
The third area that AI is going to have an impact is in terms of how existing content has been used to train these models. And this has really been where the industry’s been very focused for the last couple of years.
Now, let’s just start with an acknowledgement that it seems pretty clear on the evidence today that almost every LLM has used copyrighted content without permission to train models. You know, I think whether or not it is legal and there are debates about that, particularly in US Law at the moment, it seems pretty unethical.
But, the challenge is that at some point we have to take a pragmatic view. This technology isn’t going to go away. We need to figure out what role it has. And just my slight worry sometimes is that so much of the discussion is about what’s happened already, that not enough of the discussion in publishing is about where this is going and how it can be useful to us.
And, you know, if I was an author, if I was a publisher, I’d be very focused on these questions of, okay, how is AI being used within the process? Not necessarily to write a book, but to assist the publishing process. And then how does AI help me get this out into the world and be visible? And, I think those things should be considered just as much as the sort of the backward looking conversation on copyright.
Alison Jones: Yes and this is something that came through I think very strongly in your training, which I really sort of took away from that, is that it is very easy when people talk about AI and publishing to focus on content, content generation, content appropriation, all that kind of stuff. And actually, the transformative potential is at the backend, isn’t it?
It’s about how you optimize your processes and analyze how your campaigns are performing and decide what’s coming down the line that you can commission for. These are the areas that publishers need to be looking at for AI, and it’s nothing to do with generating content at the drop of a hat. It’s actually to do with helping you generate more organic content better.
George Walkley: Well, that’s certainly my experience. In terms of my own writing, I’ve experimented with every major LLM. I cannot find one that is close enough to my voice or what I would regard as good writing. So for my newsletter, every week, every word that you read has been written by me, tinkered with by me, worried about by me until it finally goes out on a Friday morning.
However, where does AI come into the process? Well, first of all, there are really good research tools that help me gather information, find interesting things, make sense of the world. Then at the other end of the process when a newsletter’s gone out. I get a huge amount of data back, which is really valuable to me. And AI is an enormous boon to me in helping to analyze that, looking at what’s working, giving me suggestions for future weeks.
So it’s an amazing co-pilot for me. I mean, you know, stepping back from the writing, I run a very small business, three of us, and genuinely, I think the impact of AI is, it feels like we’ve got four or five people in terms of output with about three on payroll, and that’s an enormous help.
And so for any publisher that is sort of looking at its P and L and wondering how to make things work, AI really should be part of that conversation in my view.
Alison Jones: Hmm and that’s not about replacing people, that’s about augmenting people, isn’t it? It’s about doing things that you couldn’t do before.
George Walkley: Absolutely, because step back and look at what AI actually achieves. I think in a normal week AI probably saves me personally five or six hours on tasks that, you know, I would otherwise have had to do. There’s a whole lot that it can’t do. It can’t replace me because it can’t have a call with my accountant. It can’t yet do my VAT return. It can’t have a conversation with a client to really understand their needs. It can help me with some of the backend processes. So what I say to people in the training, I know you’ve heard this before, but you know, AI is a hand, not a brain. It’s going to help you with tasks, not with roles.
And I think if you approach it in that way, that’s a sort of good mental model for how it can be helpful.
Alison Jones: It’s such a resonant and helpful phrase that, and I think it has particular resonance when we come to writing because we write with our hands and our brain. And I think that writing has a kind of almost uniquely complex relationship to AI because you want to use it as a tool, but many people fear that their own writing isn’t good enough. They fear that their craft isn’t strong enough, and when you can just turn to AI and get it to do it like that, and it’s so fast and it looks so polished and plausible. That’s really tempting, isn’t it?
George Walkley: I think it can be, yes. And it’s important to remember what AI is and isn’t. Ultimately, this is about probabilities, for any given input it is giving you what it believes to be a probable output. So it tends to cluster around the average. It gives you a very polished, average output.
And, I think it’s very interesting. One of the reasons that I think a lot of professional writers are worried about AI is that actually these are people who are at the top of their game in terms of writing. What I think and I absolutely understand their concern, what I think is sometimes missed is that, you know, the great mass of people in the population don’t have that facility with the written word. There are lots of people who, for any number of reasons, struggle with writing and actually for them, AI can be really helpful in just, you know, just getting to the mean average is an improvement and that’s a great and helpful thing for them.
You know, of course, if you are a great prose stylist then AI isn’t really going to compete with you because it can’t, it can’t come up with something that’s fundamentally new, but it can be really helpful for those other people.
Alison Jones: It can, and taking issue slightly with that, we are focusing particularly on performance here, on the output. Don’t you think there’s something about writing that’s cognitive, that is like as you write, you uncover what it is that you think and how can you own the output if you haven’t gone through that process?
George Walkley: I think that’s absolutely right. John Wilshire, who is a consultant and friend of mine, has this lovely expression, cognitive debt which is a little bit like the concept of technical debt in development. Cognitive debt is that if, you know, you keep making these shortcuts to thinking you don’t go through that thought process.
Do you actually end up with an output that looks superficially polished, but you don’t really instinctively understand how you arrived at that, and you can come back to it later on and find that actually you just don’t understand it at all? I think that is a very real risk. I mean, I guess what I would say is that we need to, again, we need to disaggregate writing, what are we talking about with writing?
I write all kinds of things. I write very, very banal internal emails that will be read by two people, where often, you know, a very quick answer is the right one. I write my newsletter, which takes an inordinate amount of time because I want to get it right. I want there to be a rhythm and a structure and some kind of through line in the newsletter. So it’s not just 10 disparate things, but there’s some kind of structure that people can follow.
That takes a lot more time. There’s no way I would use AI there because I just don’t think it can give as good a result. And, in my own writing, long form writing, more often than not, I’m actually starting writing by hand, actually on a remarkable tablet rather than a keyboard or with AI.
I find that actually having that act of putting something on a page is really helpful to me. And it’s also for some reason, I don’t know if it’s a sort of kinaesthetic thing or what, but it is really helpful for my recall. Once I’ve actually written something down by hand, I can remember it’s so much more than the massive text on a screen.
Do you find that?
Alison Jones: Absolutely. And there’s really good neuroscience behind that. There’s some really interesting research. Yes, I’ll send you the link. I think it was Harvard did some great research on that, and that’s so interesting that you start with the pen and the hand because kinesthetically, you are right, there is a different sort of level of engagement and a different creative process going on, and it feels more provisional.
I really do actually want to talk to you about your writing now because as you say, you’ve been writing forever in some ways, but I know that you’re now writing a book and I’m really interested sort of now you’ve shifted to the other end, the business end of the manuscript. What are you noticing after a career in publishing?
George Walkley: Well, it’s been a really interesting experience. I decided sort of, I guess around this time last year, that I was doing a lot of work around AI and within my own business, it was particularly useful for strategy, for some of the research, for making sense of data, not for the final conclusion, not for making decisions, which I think are essentially human things.
But, it was really helpful to me and so I thought, I wonder if there is an opportunity to do a book looking at how AI helps with the strategy process. So, not about how to have a strategy for AI, but how to use AI for your strategy.
And it’s been a really interesting process. I mean, I’m going to sort of acknowledge with all humility that I sort of did a, you know, produced an outline and some sample material and got very, very enthusiastic about it. And I have a very good and patient literary agent who looked at it and gave some very good feedback and we put it out to various publishers on submission. And it was really interesting that really very little interest in it.
And I think for me it was a really useful reminder that however well you know the industry, however well you know your topic, what you really have to have is a product that a publisher feels confident in given the market. And, you know, looking back at that proposal now with you know, 10 months of hindsight, there’s so much I would change in it now.
And so we got quite a lot of feedback from publishers on it. Interestingly this was probably a case where being in the industry was a hindrance rather than a help because lots of people sent very sort of lovely, kind feedback that was well-meaning, but not necessarily very helpful. Oh, we love it, but it’s not quite right for us. Well, there isn’t very much I can do with that.
One piece of feedback was really helpful, which came from a publisher I won’t name, who I didn’t know particularly well, who sent some really brutal feedback, and my first reaction on getting it last February was to call this person all sorts of names and I’m not sure I’d want to share a cup of coffee with them now, but looking back in retrospect, it turns out that was the most useful advice I got because you know, the things that that person disliked were all things that I could work on. And so that’s been really, that was really helpful to me. And so since then I’ve just been working on the manuscript myself.
Open question about how exactly it is published when it’s done. But I thought rather than sort of, you know, continue with the process, it’s better just to get something onto paper. I’m a great believer that done is better than perfect. Once something’s finished, I can then spend time to polish it. I can look at it and figure out how to get it out into the world.
Alison Jones: By that time market might have caught up with you, George.
George Walkley: Well, I don’t know. Or I have to shift a deal with a market that exists then. One of the big problems with, certainly with traditional publishing is timescales, right? Because you know, I was sort of talking to people in the spring who were saying, well, you know, if we were going to do this, this would probably be some point in, you know, later on in 2026, 2027.
With a mainstream publisher, you get all kinds of advantages. They do a brilliant job in so many ways, particularly in that traditional book market you referred to at the top of the podcast. But you are fitting into a schedule with lots of other books and lots of moving parts. One of the things that’s very appealing about self-publishing is being able to run your own timescale and just say, well, I’ll publish it when I’m ready.
So that’s certainly a factor in my thinking about it.
Alison Jones: I think it’s a particular problem for books on AI because, you know, it’s interesting at Frankfurt, you know, our kind of rights agents are, translating foreign language publishers are what have you got on AI? What’s coming on AI? But of course you know, we are publishing books as fast as we can, but it’s still at least nine to 12 months because of the dictates of the sales and marketing timeline of the traditional book trade.
And of course for a translator, it’s going to be later again. So there’s this sort of, difficult situation where you want the books tomorrow, but you can’t get them out into the book trade and for another year, I don’t know how we get around that.
George Walkley: Yes, it’s really challenging and you know, I think for any author there’s this really interesting choice of, how are you going to take your book to market? There really is no sort of optimal way of doing this, and you kind of need to figure out what’s most important to you and what you have.
You know, it’s a classic strategy discussion really, understanding your capabilities, understanding your goals, and being able to take it forward. You know, if actually what you want is to see your book on a shelf at WH Smith at the airport. Are they still called WH Smith in airports?
Alison Jones: They are at the airports. Yes.
George Walkley: Yes, great.
Or if you want to see it in Waterstones or Barnes and Noble then yes, you are going to have to lock into that traditional model most likely, and that’s going to mean moving more slowly. On the other hand, you could, you know, if you’ve got your own channel, if you’ve got an audience you can talk to, you could self-publish and just put it out into the world very, very quickly. But then there are those trade offs in terms of where it is.
I don’t think anyone has really invented sort of the perfect model that straddles all of this yet.
Alison Jones: Well, I think we come close, but I would say that wouldn’t I, George?
George Walkley: I think, look, you’re very, very good. But I mean, you’ve just said again, sort of the nine to 12 month thing. Okay. You know?
Absolutely perfect. Let’s stipulate what perfect would look like for an author. Publishing within two or three months of submission, access to all channels around the world, including retail. Well, of course that’s fanciful from the start because as we all know, the reality is the big retailers don’t buy that quickly unless it’s a very rare book that they…
Alison Jones: six months ahead of publication, you need to be, the reps are presenting and we need to present to the reps and we need the cover and, yes….
George Walkley: a hundred percent. So, you know, from the outset, you know, just, do you want to be fast or do you want to be wide in your distribution, is the immediate trade off.
Alison Jones: Yes. I’m going to ask you the question I ask all my guests, and I’m really fascinated to hear your response actually. If somebody’s listening to this, they’re at the start of their journey, particularly writing nonfiction or business books or self-development, what’s the one thing that you’d want them to take away to understand?
George Walkley: Wherever you are in this process, however far you are along, I think, to me, the number one foundational thing that everyone should have is an email list. It’s just this, for me, it’s just the fundamental building block because every other promotional channel you have is controlled by somebody else. X, Twitter as was, Blue Sky, not quite so much, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, all of these are great channels, but if you build an audience there you are fundamentally building someone else’s ability to monetize your access to that audience rather than actually owning it.
Outsourcing absolutely everything to a publisher can work really well and many publishers do brilliant, brilliant jobs. But, if you then move away from that publisher, do you lose access to an audience that they control? It seems to me that an email list is just the simplest, closest, most valuable thing you can have. Unless, unless the underlying technology changes fundamentally, nobody can really govern my access to that audience.
I have an ability to talk to them as long as I’m providing them with value. And as long as they don’t churn away, unsubscribe, I have a relationship with those people. And an email list, whether it’s 200 people or 2000 or 20,000, is something that is always going to be of value to you.
Alison Jones: Yes, that’s such a great point. And of course, the quid pro quo is, as you say, you have to be delivering value. There has to be a reason for people to be on that list, but it gives you access and it gives you engagement and a sense of trust, doesn’t it?
George Walkley: Yes, but as a writer, it goes both ways because as a writer, it’s about making a promise to your audience that you have to keep every week. And if you take that seriously, if you are keeping your audience in mind every week, if you are keeping, well, I say every week, it could be whatever cadence you commit to, but if you say that on a weekly or fortnightly or monthly basis, I’m going to sit down and think about this audience and say something that I think is meaningful and valuable to them, that’s really helpful because it keeps them in your own mind. It gives you a discipline and a structure that you are working toward.
I know that every week, by the end of the week, I’ve written another 1200 words or so for that audience, and as a research tool, it’s the most wonderful thing in the world because every Saturday I can look at the analytics from the previous day and I can see what has worked, what do people respond to?
I often have this experience of writing about something and thinking, this is going to be really interesting, you know, people are going to really respond well to it and it bombs and I mean, that happens more often than I can say. And then conversely, there’ll be something that I put in there, and it’s maybe not the thing that’s interested me most that week, but that’s the thing that everyone clicks on and it’s just a light bulb moment for me. Ah, that’s, I need to adjust my mental model. That’s more important than I thought it was.
And so again, just this ability just to try things on a tiny scale and see what resonates
Alison Jones: Micro experiments.
George Walkley: enormously powerful for authors.
Alison Jones: Yes. Brilliant. And also George, recommend us a book will you?
George Walkley: Recommend you a book. Okay, I’m going to, so I read almost overwhelmingly nonfiction. I just find that there’s so much there that’s interesting. But with your audience, particularly the book, the sort of my first, my last, my everything is probably Strategy by Lawrence Freedman, which is, it’s a history of an idea.
It’s an idea that’s very important to me and it looks at strategy in all of its senses and in every domain, the military, politics, business. And I just find whenever I look at it, whenever I go back to it to refer to, there’s something there that’s valuable.
Alison Jones: Do you know I met Lawrence Freedman. He was at Kings, wasn’t he? And it was when I was at Palgrave, we were talking about strategy, what a nice guy, and what a brain. It’s a great recommendation.
George Walkley: And if you’ve not come across it, he and his son Sam, do a joint substack now where they do political analysis of the world which is called, I believe Comment is Freed.
Alison Jones: Brilliant. I am going to go and check that out immediately. Thank you. What a great recommendation.
George, if people want to find out more about you, more about the work you do, more about your newsletter because it’s a great model, where should they go?
George Walkley: www.georgewalkley.com/newsletter is the best place to start.
Alison Jones: Fantastic. Well, I’ll put that link up on the show notes @extraordinarybusinessbooks.com. Thank you for your time today. I knew I was going to enjoy talking to you. It’s been an absolute blast. I feel like I want to keep, there’s more things I kept thinking, well, I should talk to him about that, but we’re going to have to end it there.
But thank you for your time. That’s been hugely, hugely useful.
George Walkley: It’s been a pleasure. Thank you.
