Automatic Lover
The early history of Automatic Lover
When I wrote the novella Automatic Lover in late 2005, my principal reason for publishing it on a website was laziness. I wanted to send it to all the recipients of my Christmas correspondence without having to do a huge amount of printing. Web publication had the added advantage that I could circulate it easily around my interest communities; the most relevant ones being women engineers, breastfeeding supporters and Humanists.
Unfortunately I was ahead of my time. At the end of 2005, the concept of a story available free to read on the web was an alien one. Out of several hundred friends and contacts, people who had been enjoying my letters and articles for years, only a few individuals could be tempted to take a look at it.
At the time I did not pursue the matter. I was reluctant to do the hard sell on something that had been offered as a gift. I had also become busy with a new project: the creation of a character for Loebner Prize winning programmer Rollo Carpenter's new chatbot Joan.
The Chatbot Joan
Having won the 2005 Loebner Prize with his chatbot George, Rollo wanted to create a female chatbot for the 2006 competition. He was aware, however, that men and women, at least in English speaking communities, use language differently. He did not want to risk his bot failing the Turing Test by failing the imitation game on which Alan Turing based his famous test, in which a man had to impersonate a woman or vice versa. So he enlisted me to provide seedcorn conversation for Joan, which she would use in preference to the lines in his database, and also to help her select appropriate lines from that database. She went on to win the 2006 Loebner Prize for being 'most human-like' of the entries, although she did not actually pass the Turing Test, in which a machine must fool the judges that it is human.
Training Joan involved reading logs of her conversations with people who visited her on line. I was at first shocked that many wanted to 'talk dirty' with her, but came to suspect that there was a genuine demand among human beings for intimate relationships with artificially intelligent beings which might one day be satisfied by developments in robotics. This topic had, of course, been handled extensively in science fiction, not least in my own novella! However, I felt that previous treatments had tended to gloss over the practicalities, and that I, as an engineer, could write a story which attempted to address them. In the late spring of 2006 I started work on the novel which was to become Automatic Lover - Ten Years On. It also develops the themes of the novella: the ethics and philosophy of artificial intelligence and the challenges facing women in the engineering profession. It incorporates the coming-of-age story of roboticist Wendy Fairfax's daughter Felicity.
The Book
By the autumn of 2007 I had a completed manuscript ready to be shown to publishers. I intended that it should be published in a book together with its prequel novella. I wanted to be able to launch the book in conjunction with the 2008 Loebner Prize, scheduled to be held in my native town of Reading, so I needed a quick offer. I did not anticipate this would be a problem; I was the author of the character of chatbot Joan, while the coincidental publication of the non-fiction book Love and Sex with Robots by David Levy had demonstrated public interest in the topic. Unfortunately, the publishers I thought would be interested simply wasted my time until I was forced to self-publish to meet my deadline. I used the on-line author services provider Lulu to do this. To ensure the finished product had a professional appearance, I employed the assistance of copy editor Claire Rushbrook and cover artist Amanda Bartlett.
I launched the book as planned, with the presentation of a copy to Hugh Loebner after he had presented his Prize to Fred Roberts, programmer of the winning chatbot, Elbot. As my name had been everywhere two years previously when Joan won, I anticipated considerable media interest in my book launch. So it took me by surprise when there was none at all. I was then faced with a rearguard action on publicity, to which I could not give much immediate attention as I was busy organising a conference for the Association of Breastfeeding Mothers.
In the light of my experience with the novella, I was disappointed, but less surprised, by the general lack of interest within my communities. I hoped that a brilliant review from the British Computer Society would set the publicity ball rolling; quite unbelievably, it led to not one single sale or enquiry! However, as the months went by, several dozen copies of the book did go into circulation, and the feedback I got from these gave me clues regarding its appeal. Its transgeneric nature appeared to give it greater appeal to a more general, particularly female, readership, than to any breed of 'anorak': people who liked a good story, the more original the better. So come the summer and autumn of 2009, I sought reviews in more mainstream publications. However, because it was now a year since the book's launch, I kept being told that my book was an old book, and they only reviewed new books. I usually managed to argue myself past this, and get them to accept a review copy, only to discover that they would not review it, because its transgeneric nature did not fit their reader profiles.
Since the start of 2010, promotion has been on an opportunistic basis: I have seized every 'peg' on which I can hang my book. I have also been pleased to note the proliferation of references on the web; although whether they ever come to the attention of human beings, as opposed to web-crawling software, is a moot point. But promotion will have to slow down a bit now that I have been put in charge of publicity for the British Computer Society's Specialist Group on Artificial Intelligence, where the things I have learnt and contacts I have made while failing to promote my book will come in useful.
Spreading the Word
So if you like my novella, please, please, please, please, please send the web link to your friends (using, for preference, the permanent url http://www.automaticlover.info), because nobody else looks like doing it any time soon. If you want to read the book, I set out ways to buy it below. Alternatively, you could request it from your local public library. They will usually buy any book requested by their members if they do not already have a copy, and then it will become available to other readers after you have returned it.
I have a links page on this site, and am always happy to discuss reciprocal links with fans of my novella who have their own websites.
Ways to Buy the Book
1. From Lulu
Lulu is the only place where you can buy a pdf download of the book. This is the best value option if you want to read it on a general-purpose tablet computer, but the text may appear uncomfortably small on a specialist e-reader. If you buy the paperback there, you will usually have to pay shipping. However, Lulu frequently offers discounts and free shipping deals, which can make this option competitive with Amazon. Visit the Lulu home page to check these out. Thanks to a complimentary conversion service to pre-existing Lulu authors in 2011, there is now also an epub version. Annoyingly, this 'universal standard' e-book format is not readable on the market-leading e-reader, the Kindle, but happily there is some free software which can convert epub files to Kindle format.
2. From Amazon
The book qualifies for free supersaver delivery from Amazon. If you have a favourite charity, it may have an Amazon button on its website, which will enable you to support that charity with your purchase. Alternatively, these links will help support the shortening service tinyurl.com: (1) from the UK, (2) from the USA. The book is also available from other national Amazon sites.
3. From Barnes and Noble in the USA
Barnes and Noble are selling the epub version in US Dollars. This is the best value option for American readers, as the price accurately reflects the Dollar-Sterling exchange rate. (I'm not the one making money from the extortionate price of the paperback Stateside!) If you need the paperback, Barnes and Noble sell this too, and it's worth comparing prices with Amazon to see if there is any difference at that point in time.
4. From a bookshop
Few bookshops have my book in stock, but all can order it through the book trade distribution system. If you tell your local bookseller how good it is, then maybe he or she will order extra copies to put on display!
5. From another retail outlet
From time to time I make arrangements for my book to be sold through other retail outlets. It was most recently available from Chocolate Alchemy in Loughborough, whence it was removed at the end of September 2011 to make way for their Halloween display. If you think you could sell a few copies, please get in touch.
Contact Ariadne Tampion
Telephone: +44 (0) 1509 211468
Full contact details are available on my personal web page.
Page revised March 2011
Last updated February 2012