The Neglected Author as Tail-Preserving Labor: A Coupling Hypothesis on Recognition Bias, Tail-Renewal Value, and the AI-Era Decoupling of Uptake from Consecration Document code: EA-RPT-01 Version: v1

'The Neglected Author as Tail-Preserving Labor' proposes a structural rather than romantic account of literary neglect. Some works preserve or introduce high-variance forms that later contribute to a field's renewal, while contemporary recognition systems — both human and AI — systematically under-value such works because they optimize for central-tendency content. The paper introduces the coupling hypothesis: in pre-AI literary history, uptake and consecration were coupled (you couldn't be widely read without eventually being recognized); in the AI era, this coupling breaks — a work can be massively processed by training systems without its author receiving any consecration.