Paul Bradley Carr: On the Tech Industry vs. the Publishing Industry
In this interview, author Paul Bradley Carr discusses how the true horrors of the tech industry helped inspire his debut thriller, The Confessions.
Paul Bradley Carr is a journalist and author. He has written three memoirs about his adventures in and around Silicon Valley. He was the Silicon Valley columnist for The Guardian, senior editor at TechCrunch, cofounder of PandoDaily, and founder and editor-in-chief of the infamous NSFWCORP in Las Vegas. His writing has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, HuffPost, National Geographic, and much more. He lives in Palm Springs with his family and is the co-owner of The Best Bookstore in Palm Springs. Find out more at PaulBradleyCarr.com, and follow him on Instagram.
In this interview, Paul discusses how the true horrors of the tech industry helped inspire his debut thriller, The Confessions, his advice for other writers, and more.
Name: Paul Bradley Carr
Literary agent: Marilia Savvides (The Plot Agency)
Book title: The Confessions
Publisher: Atria / Simon & Schuster
Release date: July 22, 2025
Genre/category: Thriller
Elevator pitch: When a newly sentient AI sends letters to millions of people confessing their most unforgivable sins, a female CEO and a former nun must join forces to stop humanity from tearing itself apart—if their own dark secrets don’t kill them first.
What prompted you to write this book?
I spent two decades working as a journalist in Silicon Valley, covering the worst behavior of tech billionaires—so I know this world very, very well. That said, I was tired of endless stories where an AI somehow gains consciousness and decides to wipe out humanity (yawn). Instead, I wondered what might happen if the first emotion ever felt by a computer wasn’t anger… but crushing guilt. How might it try to make things right, and—this being a thriller—how could that go very, very badly for the world? The character of Maud, a bookselling former nun who had taught the algorithm to be empathetic, arrived on the page fully formed. A few days later, I found Kaitlan, a qualified executive who had been handed a poison chalice by a deeply sexist industry (but who also may or may not have done something unforgivable in response), and I was off to the races.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
The Confessions started out as a short story, written because I had recently opened a bookstore in Palm Springs and had no time to write anything longer. I wrote that version in about two weeks and showed it my agent, Marilia, who gently ordered me to turn it into a full-length novel. A couple of months into that process, Sean DeLone at Atria read some early pages and made a pre-empt offer for the book. I delivered the full manuscript six months later. So, the entire process from idea to finished manuscript took about a year, but really it was three lunatic work-bursts: two weeks, two months, and six months—in between serving customers at the bookstore.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
The biggest surprise came from this being the first book I’ve written since becoming a bookseller. As authors we (hopefully) hear a lot of enthusiasm from editors and publishers about our books and their plans for marketing and selling them into eager bookstores. But until I actually opened one of those stores, I had no idea how insanely crowded the market is, and how difficult it is to convince a bookseller to take a chance on a debut novel no matter how interesting the concept, or how good the blurbs are. We have maybe an hour or two with our sales reps, three or four times a year, to hear about everything they’re excited about. And even if we love a book and order a pile of copies it’s terrifying how many things can go wrong between the publisher warehouse and bookstore shelves.
To be clear: This is not a criticism of the process—compared to the tech industry, the publishing industry is a dream. I just mean it’s been good and healthy to realize that my book, this thing I’ve worked so hard on and put so much sweat and love into, exists alongside millions of other books that are just as important.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
I’m constantly surprised at Silicon Valley’s ability to be worse in reality than my thriller writer imagination. I showed an early draft of the novel to Roger McNamee (author of Zucked) who was one of Mark Zuckerberg’s early investors and mentors. He sent me back an email listing all the ways I had made my fictional techies and corporate lawyers way too reasonable and moral than the real ones. In fiction, your characters have to behave in believable, human ways. In Silicon Valley, not so much.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
A thrill. First and foremost, The Confessions is a thriller—with a dash of old-school murder mystery—and hopefully it’s a page-turner. If readers find themselves stopping at the end of each chapter to think deep thoughts about morality or artificial intelligence, then I’ve probably screwed up the plot or the pacing. That said, I’ll be OK if a few days after finishing the novel those same readers suddenly have a full-blown panic attack when they realize that everything in the story is either already true, or very easily could be. I have that panic attack at least twice a day.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
If you ever find your ego getting out of control, open a bookstore and watch customers picking up novels that you know are incredible, then putting them down 10 seconds later with a dismissive sigh because the first line didn’t grab them or the cover doesn’t quite work. (If you think making the sausage is bad, you definitely don’t want to watch it being sold.) More practically, don’t believe the nonsense that you need to spend hours every day in an ergonomic chair or construct your fantasy writing cabin to finish your novel. Most of The Confessions was typed between customers, my laptop perched on a stack of Simon and Schuster boxes, during a 110-degree Palm Springs summer.
