Eureka 428: Could AI attract more talent to book-editing?

0:15You're listening to Eureka on Monocle Radio, brought to you by the team behind the entrepreneurs, the show all about inspiring people, innovative companies and fresh ideas in global business. I'm Tom Edwards. Meru Gokhale is the founder of Editrix, an AI-powered editing tool designed to make high-quality book editing more accessible and affordable by handling the duller parts of the editorial process. With two decades in publishing, including as editor-in-chief at Penguin Random House, Gokhale's worked with literary giants like Salman Rushdie and Paolo Coelho. During that time, she witnessed firsthand how the shortage of skilled editors can hold writers back.

0:53But can AI really help more than it harms? For many, automated editing raises concerns about tech replacing human craft and instinct. So could a tool like Editrix actually revitalize the editing profession by making it more appealing to a new generation of editors? And how do you launch a tech business with no tech background at all? Well, here is Meru with more on how the journey began.

1:25So I've been an editor and publisher for 20 years. First at Penguin, then Random House, and then the merged part, Penguin Random House. I have not been very restless in what I do at work. I'm an extremely cautious person who doesn't like to move around. So I've just had a very long career, 20 years working with other people on their books. And that's been a real privilege because it's made me into the ultimate generalist in a way. One of the things I noticed was that people like me who started out becoming editors, we learned from senior editors by sitting next to them. And they would teach us line editing, developmental editing and things like that.

2:04But it typically takes a long time for someone to learn how to be an editor and time, experience, education. But in the last five or seven years, I noticed that I didn't really see a lot of young people coming into this profession. And I found it was getting harder and harder to hire young editors. And the number of people who wanted to write books kept going up and up and up. And the number of people who wanted to edit them, there's nobody new joining the profession. And I was trying to understand why that is. The reason is that, first of all, senior editors and junior editors no longer sit next to each other.

2:41And also, I think in today's world, nobody wants to do a profession that essentially means you're invisible. And being an editor is all about being invisible, that you should not do it if you want your voice to be heard. So it's just generally not a very attractive profession for most people now, and it's very poorly paid. So how I ended up doing this and coming to this idea is having been an editor myself, having done this very work that I'm trying to automate manually for 20 years, I felt that there were some parts of it which could benefit from AI. And I initially thought that would be proofreading and copy editing, very, very granular tasks which take a huge amount of time.

3:22And so I started out thinking that what if I was able to build something that would be a tool which editors like me could use to speed up some aspects of the editing process.

3:38There are three levels of editing. The first is developmental editing. So if you're writing fiction, non-fiction, whatever, there is a big structural edit that happens at the very beginning. So if it's a novel, that could mean saying, you know, the plot is weak or your ending doesn't make sense or your characters aren't plausible or this part is boring. And that usually happens at a very early stage. The reality is it doesn't really happen anymore. There are not that many developmental editors left. So I was thinking I would work on the next stage, which is copy editing, where you work in a very detailed, fine way at a line level.

4:18So a copy editor would typically say something like, well, your character has green eyes in chapter one and they've turned blue in chapter six. Or, you know, she's called ma here, mum there, and something else there. So consistency, redundancy, fine-tuning, chiseling. And then there's proofreading, which happens at the very end, which is to make sure that your work is publication-ready. These are the three stages. So I had this idea that the last two stages could be handled really well by AI. So I started out doing that, but I was really surprised that things like developmental editing, the part which human editors do extremely well, actually were handled very well by AI, which was not what I was expecting because I thought, you know, that is the realm of human editors.

5:04But there's not that many of them anymore. When I started doing it, I realized, wow, this thing can handle end-to-end editing. Now, the first question which I asked myself and other people asked me was, well, isn't this going to replace humans? And I always say to this that I must be the only person in AI who's not going to replace humans because nobody's joining my profession. Very, very few people are joining and I hope this will attract more people to join editing, want to be an editor, where you're taking a lot of the mundane drudgery out of it. And I would love a new generation of editors to come and bring good taste, editorial instinct, and things like that and bring that to the edit and let the software handle some of the more mundane parts.

5:49And so it's kind of like having an editor working alongside with you who can guide you. And then the learning curve becomes a lot easier. So essentially what I did was I did this work of being an editor, a developmental editor, a proofreader, a copy editor. I've done all of these jobs. And I used that experience to create a software called Editrix.ai where editors, authors, if you're an academic writer, if you work in a think tank or any kind of long form writing, if you want to take your original work and give it professional grade editorial treatment, you can do that in a much more accessible and affordable way than is currently available to you.

6:31and you know mostly experienced editors tend to be living in London or New York and they can typically handle maybe two books a month so I was really happy by the reactions that I got from publishers around the world where they don't even have editors there are a lot of people who can benefit from the editorial feedback at this level which currently would not have been available to them

7:03I'm not a techie at all. I'm an editor. But what I realized early on is, so imagine, think of it this way. Coders talk to computers in code. That's the language. The thing about AI is that you can talk to a machine in English, essentially. And editors are very, very good at doing that. An editor can use language super precisely. And in fact, I think they make the best prompt engineers in the world. So I had no experience at all. And so it was quite a hard sell for me to figure out how I'm going to do this. I did it by following tech pros on Twitter and learning from them. I zeroed in on somebody whose work I really liked.

7:46So I cold called the guy. And I was like, please, will you build my product? I have no money and no experience. but I know exactly what I want to do. And he was a young guy and he took me very seriously and he translated almost like a ghostwriter would. He took my vision and translated it into editrix which is what people are using today. And the AI part I did myself. So he built the website, he built and made it work. And in terms of getting the AI part to work in the way that it did, I did that through trial and error. So that was the process. My user reactions have been amazing. People have called the product addictive.

8:24One user who said to me that she has a crush on the product. It's like having an intelligent partner. So I would just like people to try it with an open mind and see what happens. I would really like just to keep it simple. I've approached this venture in the way I did with book marketing. There's the holy grail of book marketing is word of mouth publicity. So I really so far how it's worked for me is people use it. They tell other people about it, just like they do with a book. And that's been my approach so far.

9:04That was Meru Gokhale, the founder of Editrix. And you can learn more about the business by heading to editrix.ai. And that's all for this episode of Eureka. We'll be back at the same time next week. Do look out for the entrepreneurs, available every Wednesday. My thanks to Georgina Godwin for the reporting in this episode and thanks to Eureka's producer Laura Kramer and audio editor Jack Dewars. Listen again and find out more by heading to monocle.com. If you'd like to contact the team, email Laura on lrk at monocle.com. I'm Tom Edwards. Goodbye and thanks for listening to Eureka.