Festoon Publishing is happy to announce that we now have access to a worldwide book publishing organization that has access to various countries including Europe, America, England, Canada, New Zealand and of course Australia.

What this means is that books will become available to the buyer at a cheaper cost, whether it be a book store or an individual purchaser. The present system of having to stock books at the publisher’s address and then having to post them to addresses all around the world will be replaced with a Print-On-Demand (POD) system where the books are printed in the country that the purchaser lives in. This will result in the removal of double-handling and double postage costs.

This new strategy was as a direct result of my attendance at the Christian Book Seller’s Association of Australia conference in late August this year. This association was of great benefit to those (like myself) who were looking at ways and means of distributing books to buyers at a reduced cost and making it a more efficient process. The many delegates who attended were most willing to help others and to share their knowledge from the experiences that they had learned themselves.

One of the subjects talked about was the importance of book presentation. For most authors, it is the content of their book that has the highest priority in their mind, but as evidence from the book sellers has proven, it is not the content of a book that sells a book – it’s the cover! Now this isn’t to say that the contents is unimportant, it is just the fact that if you want your book to stand out from the others, you have to make a considerable investment in time and money into the appearance of the cover. This is where Artificial Intelligence (AI) is gaining ground in the book publishing industry, for instance, AI generated the image shown above with the words: “beautiful young woman playing chess in a flower garden” entered into the text frame. The process was completed in less than a minute. How is it that a graphic artist can compete in such a market?

It has become a worrying trend that such images generated by AI has not only become acceptable to the younger generation, but has become the preferred style of image! It seems as though people like unreality more than the real, and as the literary industry is governed by finance (as is every other industry), I see the genuine artistic creative talent disappearing in favour of an AI generated artificial world of pure make-believe.

Long live the genuine genius of the human talent in a challenging world where we now live in direct competition with robotic “intelligence.”