The strategic asset for publishers in 2026 isn’t their ability to print books; it’s their judgment.
Part 6 of the ‘Quiver, Don’t Quake’ Book of the Year Series
TNPS note: This series of reviews of Quiver don’t Quake summarises the gist of Nadim Sadek‘s arguments and attempts to take that debate forward. It is not meant as a summary reference to the original to save folk from reading it, but a supplementary to develop the ideas further.
Originally I called Quiver don’t Quake the most important book publishers would read this decade, but every time I return to it I find more to explore. This series began as a handful of tangential essays reviewing the book, that I expected to have wrapped up by early February at latest.
That said, I live on GMT – Gambian Maybe Time – so any schedule is only as good as the last guestimate. The only thing hurried here is how fast the beach bumsters can talk a tourist out of their holiday money.
So days roll into one another, weeks casually pass by without anyone noticing, and before you know it it will be December, so the only guarantee I’m making on this series is that it won’t become Story of The Year 2027 due to incompletion.
By now I’m just so glad I called it the Story of the Year, not Story of the Month.
Part 6 was originally intended to be a look at Sadek’s perspectives on AI and education, a topic especially close to my heart, but as I re-read Quiver don’t Quake over Easter I realised I’d just skimmed the surface of the possibilities Sadek’s book offered for further exploration of AI’s impact on publishing and the creative world beyond, and indeed the real world beyond that.
I’ll get back to education soon enough, but first let’s got for a ride down a RODE of Sadek’s choosing. The classic dream vs effort conundrum (there are many variations) applied to AI, creativity and the publishing industry.
The RODE Revolution: Why the Easiest Time in History to Create Is Also the Best Time to Be a Publisher
There is a question that has been quietly terrifying publishing professionals for the past two years, one that gets asked in hushed tones at industry conferences and shouted anonymously in LinkedIn comments: if anyone can now produce a professional-quality book, what exactly are publishers for?
It is not an unreasonable question. The tools available to a first-time author in 2025 would have seemed miraculous a decade ago. Or even three or four years ago, by when the idea was out there but the technical finesse still distant.
AI can help develop a concept, structure a narrative, smooth prose, suggest covers, write jacket copy, and generate marketing materials. How well it can do that depends on what side of the fence you are.
AI-advocates like myself will say it’s doing pretty damn good already, thank you very much, and will only get better. The Luddite Fringe (or what’s left of it – most have come to realise AI is not so bad after all, and those that haven’t have joined the Flat Earth Society) – will repeat what they were saying in November 2022 when ChatGPT launched. Asserting AI is beyond useless, no-one will ever use it or want its products, and by the way we will all be made redundant next week as it does our jobs better than we can and no-one can tell the difference. (Except Hachette editors armed with the new and improved New York Times patented AI-detector, with its money-back guarantee to be correct at least occasionally).
The reality, of course, is that the barriers that once made publishing gatekeeping necessary – barriers of craft, capital, and distribution – have been eroding for years (self-publishing, anybody?), and AI has accelerated that erosion dramatically. The slush pile, once an unpleasantly-named metaphor for unrealised ambition, is becoming a flood.
Nothing new there, actually. Ask any agent old enough to remember when typewriters took over from hand-written manuscripts. When word-processors took over from typewriters. When email submissions took over from expensive package delivery by snail-mail.
New tech, same old The Sky Is Falling reaction.
TNPS Note: I used my human editorial value to ask Gemini to create the above image. It took three minutes, including a second run. My description. My concept creativity. Gemini did the donkey work. But no, no illustrators lost their job through my thoughtless action. I don’t have a budget for illustrations.
When AI came along (or rather, became publicly accessible) the instinctive response from much of the industry has been defensive: first Luddite denial (nobody wants it!), then rejection (not good enough! AI will never…), then slowly realisation that the argument had been lost, so now it’s all about tighter submission policies, louder assertions of human editorial value, and quiet, perfunctory lobbying against AI-generated content for the sake of appearances and the occasional click-bait headline.
All of whish is understandable, but insufficient. Because the defensive response misreads what is actually happening.
Nadim Sadek, whose book Quiver, Don’t Quake makes the most rigorous case yet for AI as creative collaborator rather than creative replacement, offers a conceptual tool that reframes the entire conversation. He calls it RODE: the Ratio of Dream to Effort.
I don’t know if the term RODE is Sadek’s own creation, but the broad idea is not new, and you may have encountered its under phrases like the gap between imagination and reality, the 80/20 Rule, the Rule of Thirds, the 120% Effort Rule or maybe the Dreamer-Doer Ratio, among many possible variations.
As an author and educator I live with this every day (it starts with dreaming about the electric staying on long enough to complete this sentence), so Sadek’s arguments resonated deeply. I’ll stick here with Sadek’s framing as RODE – the ratio of dream to effort – because it’s Sadek’s book that fuels this essay, and because as an overly-enthusiastic maths teacher I have so many tangential thoughts whenever I see something as crass as the rule of thirds, 80/20 rules or, ahem, the 120% rule.
The Weight of the Gap
Throughout most of human history, the gap between what a person could imagine and what they could actually produce was crushing. RODE – the ratio of creative dream to the effort required to realise it – has historically been devastatingly low. A novelist might spend a decade acquiring the craft to match the story in their head. A musician might practice for twenty years before their fingers can execute what their inner ear already hears. An aspiring publisher without capital had no path at all. Enormous quantities of human creative potential were simply never realised because the “units of effort” required were too high.
Every major democratising technology has been a RODE improvement. The printing press and desktop publishing didn’t make people more imaginative – they simply made it easier to translate imagination into reality. Each time, gatekeepers predicted a collapse in quality. Each time, they were wrong. Quality stratified; more creation meant more noise, sure, but it also made the “signal” more valuable.
This was not just personally frustrating. It was, Sadek argues, a civilisational constraint. Enormous quantities of human creative potential were simply never realised. The dream existed; the effort required to close the gap did not.
Every major democratising technology in history has been, at its core, a RODE improvement. The printing press didn’t make people more imaginative – it made it vastly easier to translate imagination into distributed text. Desktop publishing didn’t teach people design – it removed the specialist intermediaries between an idea and a printed page. The internet didn’t give people things to say – it gave them somewhere to say them without permission (and let’s admit it – that’s what hurts the most!).
Each of these transitions triggered the same response from incumbent gatekeepers: this will destroy quality. Each time, the prediction was wrong in the same way. Quality did not collapse. It stratified. More creation meant more noise, certainly, but it also meant more signal – and it made the ability to distinguish between the two more valuable, not less.
The AI Inflection: From Effort to Emancipation
What AI represents is a RODE improvement of a different order. It isn’t incremental; it is transformational. By reducing the effort required to manifest a dream, AI allows the RODE to skyrocket. We are moving toward a world where the gap between dream and execution barely exists.
This is what Sadek calls “Collaborative Creativity.” AI isn’t just a tool; it’s a “Vision Partner” that helps us understand our own creative impulses more deeply. Sadek introduces a beautiful concept here: the Panthropic. When we use AI, we aren’t just talking to a machine; we are in dialogue with the distilled essence of all human knowledge and culture. It is a communion with the “eight billion hearts” that came before us.
As I’ve noted in previous reviews where the Panthropic came up, much as I love the idea, the reality is only a tiny fraction of human knowledge and experience has been hoovered up so far, and much of that contentiously. But the notion is worth savouring.
Regardless, what AI represents is a RODE improvement of a different order. It isn’t incremental; it is absolutely transformational. By reducing the effort required to manifest a dream, AI allows the RODE to skyrocket. We are moving toward a world where the gap between dream and execution barely exists.
Yes, of course there are still the day-to-day physical constraints to hold us back. Almost everyone has to sleep, shower, shit, shave, snack and socialise (delete as appropriate and choose your own running order), and all in a measly 24 hours (what was God thinking!). But to repeat, the gap between dream and execution is not merely narrowing. It barely exists any more.
This is what makes the current moment genuinely unprecedented, and what makes the publishing industry’s defensive stance so strategically dangerous. The question is not whether AI will change the ratio of dream to effort. It already has. The question is what that change means for everyone in the creative ecosystem.
The Curatorial Premium in 2026
But here’s the paradox: when RODE improves dramatically, attention becomes the new scarcity. In 2026, we see this clearly.
Here just to stress, this is not about shorter attention spans per se. To the extent that that may be happening in young children given free access to smartphones, that argument has legs, and is something I’ll come back to in the education essay, but for the current adult generations, including the much-maligned Gen Z, this is not so much attention scarcity as attention fragmentation.
We have to stand out as a key fragment. But that can be easier than we might expect.
Here’s the thing: When execution becomes frictionless, the bottleneck shifts to discovery, trust, and curation.
The thing publishers have always actually sold is credibility transfer. In a high-RODE world, where the landscape is flooded with “passable” content, a book published by a respected house routinely carries a vital signal: someone who knows what they are doing believed in this.
The key strategic asset for publishers in 2026 isn’t their ability to print books; it’s their judgment. Value has migrated toward taste and accumulated cultural authority. These things cannot be automated because they are relational – built on earned trust between a publisher and a community.
This is not perhaps the most comforting message delivered to a frightened industry. But it is a structural argument with historical evidence behind it.
Here’s the reality: More music was produced after recorded sound became cheap to distribute – and the ability to identify and champion genuinely exceptional artists became more commercially valuable, not less.
More images were produced after digital photography removed the cost of film – and the skilled eye that could select, edit, and sequence them commanded a higher premium.
The curatorial premium.
Okay, the Shy Girl/Hachette debacle may have undermined that one somewhat. For a deep dive into that thorny episode, check out the TNPS Analysis post. But it was an aberration, not the norm.
The signal has long been worth something to readers navigating a vast and uneven landscape. In a high-RODE world, where that landscape becomes exponentially vaster and more uneven, the signal potentially becomes worth considerably more.
This is the curatorial premium writ large, and it is the strategic asset that publishers should be investing in right now rather than defending walls that are already coming down. The question for every publishing house in 2025 is not “how do we stop AI?” but “how do we make our curation more visible, more trusted, and more essential?”
(Memo to Hachette. Not that way!)
This applies equally to self-publishers and small presses as to corporate fellows. Essentially, it means reconceiving the publisher-reader relationship.
It means being explicit about editorial standards rather than treating them as internal processes invisible to the market.
It means building communities of readers who trust a list rather than just buying individual titles.
It means, in short, doing more vigorously what publishers have always nominally done – and doing it in full view.
The Author Equation
The RODE revolution changes the calculus for authors in ways that are not straightforwardly threatening.
The writer who spent three years on a debut novel no longer faces a choice between traditional publishing’s long odds and self-publishing’s likely invisibility. AI-assisted tools have improved the quality ceiling of independent publishing dramatically, while reducing its cost and complexity. RODE has improved for authors too, and many are taking advantage of that.
But here the same paradox applies. When it becomes easier to produce a book, the value of a book being noticed increases. An author who can now write and produce at twice the speed is still competing for the same reader attention. More content from more authors makes discoverability, not production, the critical constraint.
Which is why the publisher-as-curator proposition retains its logic even as the production case for traditional publishing weakens. An author working with a reputable publisher is buying discoverability and credibility transfer – not formatting and printing, which were never really the point unless bricks & mortar shelf-space was your goal. In a high-RODE world, discoverability and credibility transfer are worth at least as much as they ever were.
Arguments to the contrary take us back to Luddite-Land and https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/tnps-2025-story-year-part-6-rode-revolution-why-time-create-mark-rydef/?trackingId=I2pm9FMvSCqFsmWY1Srn5w%3D%3Dself-serving denial.
I’m reminded of the Benedictine abbot Johannes Trithemius and his 1492 treatise De laude scriptorum manualium, which authoritatively asserted that this new-fangled printing nonsense would, per Wikipedia (anyone remember that? It’s still here, and still being used even by AI-advocates like me!) “make monks intellectually lazy, that paper books were less durable than parchment manuscripts, and that hand-copying sacred text was a spiritual discipline that mechanical reproduction could not replace.”
Déjà vu!
The Shape of What Comes Next
Sadek is not naive about the disruption happening and still to come. He acknowledges that the transition is real, that roles will change, that some of what publishing has historically done will be automated away. The RODE framework is not a reassurance that nothing need change – it is an argument about where value migrates when the barriers to creation fall.
Value migrates toward judgment. Toward taste. Toward the accumulated cultural authority that tells a reader: this is worth your time. These are things that cannot be automated, because they are relational – they are built between a publisher, editor and author and a community of readers over years and decades of earned trust.
The printing press did not end the book. It ended the manuscript culture that had controlled text for centuries, and it created something better. Far better.
Desktop publishing did not end professional design. It ended the monopoly of specialist typesetters and created a larger, more diverse design culture.
AI will not end publishing. It will end the version of publishing that justified itself primarily through control of scarce production resources.
What replaces it – if publishers are willing – is something potentially more interesting: an industry that justifies itself through the quality of its judgment, the depth of its reader relationships, and the clarity of its curatorial voice.
The RODE revolution makes creation easy. It makes trusted creation rarer and more valuable than ever.
Sadek nailed it. This is not a threat to publishing. It is publishing’s strongest argument for its own continued existence – if the industry can bring itself to make it.
Topical Developments Since Summer 2025
Living in The Gambia, where being punctual means at least being in the shower and thinking about what clothes to wear by when your appointment is due to start, it’s easy to lose track of time, as mentioned above. But AI runs on a very different clock.
Sadek’s book manages to be topical in April 2026 despite endless AI developments since publication. Here just to mention a handful of progressions that we need to keep in mind as I wind down this essay.
The Human-Only Premium: While Sadek predicted AI-free might become a badge of honour, by 2026, we are seeing the rise of Proof of Human Insight certifications.
The burden of proof has indeed shifted from defending AI use to demonstrating the uniquely human contribution. This has merit, sure, but risks being undermined by various bodies that are, for a fee, offering validation badges and certificates along the lines of Totally Human or Untouched By Robot Hands, or equally meaningless assurances that will likely cause as much harm as good.
Of course, these are all self-certified – in other words, no-one knows if true or not. Which means that anyone can say what they like, and those with more cash then sense will pay someone to record their claim of human authenticity with zero means or intent of checking its veracity. That’s an essay all of it own.
The Agentic Shift: Since the book’s publication, the move from Chatbots to Autonomous Agents has accelerated. In 2026, publishers aren’t just curating books, they are curating the data-sets and agent-personalities that represent their authors voice. God help us!
Regulatory Stability: While there are any number of legal cases still to be resolved, the 2026 reality is that many jurisdictions have moved from banning AI to transparency mandates, which aligns with Sadek’s suggestion of citing Author Contributions alongside Systems Used.
Which gives me the perfect note to end on, reminding everyone that to fully understand what Nadim Sadek’s perspective, you need to go read his book, not just these reviews.
For me, Quiver don’t Quake is the gift that keeps on giving. So many opportunities to explore the AI scene arise from Sadek’s book precisely because it is so wide-ranging (way beyond just book-publishing) and elegantly put together.
But with review number six under my belt, let me just remind all reading this that there is no commercial arrangement between TNPS and Sadek or his publisher to produce these reviews. For better or worse, they are my reflections on Sadek’s book and views, and it is a testament to the value of that book that I’m still here doing this in April.
TNPS of course does not carry advertising or affiliate links, which is why I am bound not to link to this book myself. But it does carry my strongest personal recommendation. Everyone in any and every creative industry should read this book. Twice.
Watch out for Review Part 7 when the West African electricity and internet gods are next in a good mood. I’ll try make it before 2027.
This post first appeared in the TNPS LinkedIn Analysis Newsletter.
