For Week Ending July 3, 2026
America turns 250 years old this week because of a publishing revolution, and that story runs straight through to your KDP dashboard. A forgotten founding father holds a craft lesson every novelist needs to hear. Plus, Amazon is terminating innocent KDP accounts, Deckle 1.3’s massive free update, Fable 5’s safety problem, and the 250-year empire death clock historians claim just rang for America.
Thomas: Fair warning to our viewers in Britain and abroad. Today’s episode leans hard into the anniversary, and if you thought it was American up to this point, it only gets more American from here.
Author Alerts
Only 27 Standard Tickets Remain for the Novel Marketing Conference
The two-day event runs January 22–23 in Austin, Texas, and delivers hands-on book marketing training through interactive workshops, matched writer groups, and sessions from experts including Thomas Umstattd Jr. and Seth Ring.
Authors who want a written plan to sell more books should act now because the conference sold out completely last year with 100 percent of surveyed attendees saying they were glad they came. Remaining tickets will disappear fast once the final rush begins.
Thomas: Super tickets are already sold out, and only standard tickets are left. The last ones go quickly, so don’t wait for the final rush. Learn more or purchase your ticket at NovelMarketingConference.com.
Scammers Impersonate IngramSpark to Defraud Authors
A sophisticated ring of scammers is impersonating IngramSpark through lookalike websites, emails, social media accounts, phone calls, and text messages that pressure authors into paying fees or handing over banking details according to the company’s official publishing fraud alert.
These impersonators use stolen logos and dozens of copycat domains to falsely promise editing, proofreading, design, and distribution services that IngramSpark does not offer and explicitly states it never charges authors to upload titles for global availability.
This scam puts indie authors directly in the crosshairs of financial loss and identity theft, making it critical to log in only through the verified myaccount.ingramspark.com portal, ignore all unsolicited links, and report suspicious contacts immediately.
Sources
IngramSpark: Publishing Fraud Alert
Thomas: A good rule of thumb for any of these emails is to always go back to the company’s real website and reach out through the contact information listed there. Don’t trust a lookalike domain like ingramspark.net. Go straight to IngramSpark.com, and see if you can even buy the service.
What makes this fraud so sophisticated is that the scammers use real logos and trademarked images from IngramSpark’s own site to build a page that looks legitimate, selling services IngramSpark doesn’t actually offer.
We also keep a Scam Spotters board at AuthorMedia.social where you can paste a suspicious email and get feedback on whether it’s legit. You don’t need an AuthorMedia.social account to see what we’re flagging.
Amazon Terminates Innocent Authors’ KDP Accounts
According to the July 1, 2026, episode of the Novel Marketing Podcast, Amazon suspends KDP accounts even when authors have done nothing wrong.
The episode with guest Lesley Hensell details how roughly one-third of these terminations stem from Amazon errors or unintentional mistakes and shares a proven appeal strategy that focuses every message on how the issue affects buyers.
Authors who publish exclusively through Amazon now have stronger motivation to spread their sales across multiple platforms and adopt rigorous prevention steps before their accounts face the same sudden threat.
Sources
Why Amazon is Terminating Innocent Authors – Novel Marketing Podcast
YouTube: Why Amazon Is Terminating Innocent Authors (and How to Fix It)
Thomas: This story goes back to a contest we ran a few weeks ago when thousands of people got added to my onboarding sequence. One of my onboard emails asks authors to tell me their stories. One of the most common themes was authors sharing terrible stories of their accounts getting suspended.
The first half of that episode is about how to keep your account from getting suspended in the first place. There are things you’re doing right now that make you vulnerable, and it might just be a matter of time. Listen to the full episode on, Novel Marketing.
Jill Biden Memoir Vanishes from NYT Bestseller List After Brief No. 1 Run
According to the New York Post, Jill Biden’s memoir “View from the East Wing” debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction bestseller list on June 21, 2026, only to disappear from the rankings entirely within two weeks.
The New York Post reports that the title carried the dagger symbol for bulk purchases, sold just 3,221 print copies in its debut tracking week according to Circana BookScan data, slipped to No. 3 the following week, and then dropped off the New York Times list altogether while staying on the USA Today bestseller chart.
This fast fade after an initial bulk-supported spike raises questions about the New York Times bestseller list’s proprietary methodology and the limits of bulk-buying tactics for high-profile titles, reminding authors that short-term list spikes rarely replace the need for sustained organic sales and diversified reader platforms.
Sources
Thomas: I’m calling shenanigans on this one. The New York Times list isn’t really a bestseller list, it’s a curated list, and one of the things they curate for is politics. If they like you politically, they push you up. If they don’t, they push you down.
3,221 print copies should never be enough to reach number one on the hardback nonfiction list. Atomic Habits sells that every week. This is exactly why you shouldn’t measure your own success against the New York Times list. It’s a measurement of who you know and whose team you’re on politically far more than how popular your book is with readers.
Jonathan: It’s also money laundering.
Thomas: That’s the other angle. One of the ways to funnel money to a powerful political figure is to buy their book after they leave office, sometimes a hundred thousand copies, and the money gets laundered through the publishing house. It’s also a way for publishers to buy political favors.
The Obamas reportedly did some antitrust favors for a certain publisher that, after they left office, gave them a $60 million advance, the largest in the history of advances at the time. Which was totally because the books were going to sell and not because of any favors.
To be fair, Michelle Obama’s book became a mega bestseller and probably earned out, while Barack’s did about normal for a presidential memoir. Part of his problem was flooding the market with several memoirs, so there was no single authoritative book, while Michelle had the one.
Put less stock in the New York Times list and more stock in the Amazon bestseller list. That’s the honest version.
Publishing News
How Independent Publishing Created Independence Day
America turns 250 this week. Before the muskets, before the Declaration, before the fireworks, there was a publishing revolution. The United States exists because ordinary people got their hands on printing presses and refused to ask permission. That story runs straight through every indie author publishing today.
Before Gutenberg, Publishing Was Permission
For most of human history, scribes copied books by hand. A single Bible could take a year to produce. Literacy stayed locked up among elites. Whoever controlled the scribes controlled the information. Governments and religious institutions became gatekeepers by default because reproducing ideas cost a fortune. Publishing was not an industry. It was permission.
Then Johannes Gutenberg built his press around 1450 and collapsed the cost of reproducing ideas. Books became affordable. Literacy exploded. Ideas spread faster than governments could suppress them. The press fueled the Protestant Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment. The pattern to remember that technology reduced gatekeeping.
Governments Fought Back With Licenses
Rulers saw the danger at once. England passed the Licensing of the Press Act in 1662, which banned the printing of any book or pamphlet the Crown deemed seditious, heretical, or offensive. Printers needed licenses. Licenses could be revoked. Printers went to prison. The law expired in 1695 after Parliament refused to renew it, thanks in part to lobbying by the philosopher John Locke. The question of that whole era was simple. Who gets permission to speak?
America Argued Itself Into Existence
The American Revolution spread through cheap, independently printed pamphlets. The most famous was Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, published in Philadelphia on January 10, 1776. The numbers still stagger historians. According to the National Constitution Center, Common Sense sold 120,000 copies in its first 3 months and 500,000 by the end of the Revolution. The colonial population was about 2.5 million. An estimated 20% of colonists owned a copy. Scaled to today’s population, that would be roughly 60 million copies sold. Britannica reports that 25 editions appeared in 1776 alone, and colonists read the pamphlet aloud in taverns for those who could not read it themselves.
Paine was a self-published nobody. He had been in the colonies for barely a year. He had failed as a corset maker and a tax collector. His pamphlet moved a divided public toward independence and paved the way for the Declaration 6 months later. Ordinary citizens printed ideas, distributed ideas, and debated ideas. America argued itself into existence through independent publishing.
The First Amendment Protects a Technology, Not an Industry
After independence, the Bill of Rights protected freedom of the press. Notice the wording. It does not protect newspapers. It protects the press. First Amendment scholar Eugene Volokh argues that the founders understood the Press Clause as protecting every citizen’s right to use mass communication technology, not as a special privilege for media companies. In 1791, “the press” meant a machine you could own. The founders protected your right to publish.
Gatekeepers Returned, Then the Internet Broke Them Again
As printing industrialized, presses got expensive again. Distribution got hard. Publishers controlled shelf space, and literary agents emerged as filters. Traditional publishing solved real problems in editing, manufacturing, and marketing. It also decided which books readers ever saw.
The internet broke that bottleneck. Consider what indie authors have today. Ebooks eliminate printing costs. Print-on-demand eliminates warehouses. Authors produce audiobooks without studio gatekeepers. Online stores eliminate the fight for shelf space. Newsletters and social media replace traditional publicity.
Nobody has a constitutional right to a contract from a private publisher. But independent publishing means no single company can silence you. If one gatekeeper says no, you can still reach readers. For almost all of recorded history, authors needed permission. Today you can write, publish, and find readers worldwide without asking anyone. That is one of the greatest expansions of publishing freedom since Gutenberg.
Every time an indie author hits publish, they join a tradition that runs from Gutenberg’s workshop, through the pamphlets of 1776, to the digital storefronts of 2026.
Sources
National Constitution Center: Thomas Paine, the Original Publishing Viral Superstar
Britannica: Common Sense by Thomas Paine
Smithsonian Institution: An Eloquent Argument
Wikipedia: Licensing of the Press Act 1662
UCLA Law: Eugene Volokh on the Press Clause
National Constitution Center: Interpretation of Freedom of Speech and the Press
Thomas: The high cost of copying was a great filter between the ancient world and the modern one. Only the best of the best got preserved. That’s why we’ve lost half of Titus Livy. Nobody spent the money to hire a scribe in 350 AD to recopy it from old vellum to new.
People assume the printing press was first used for books, but books and paper were still expensive. The Protestant Reformation didn’t come out of books. It came out of pamphlets, the blog posts of their day. Printers would run off 50,000 copies of a single sheet and distribute them across the country.
Martin Luther was snarky, funny, and edgy, the same traits that make for effective blogging today, and he had mastered that new short-form format. Gutenberg himself went bankrupt. The Gutenberg Bible wasn’t commercially viable. What sold was indulgences, printed on a single sheet, and the short works attacking indulgences, also printed on a single sheet. The press was printing both sides of the debate.
John Locke was hugely influential. In his First Treatise of Government he critiques patriarchy from within the Christian frame, using the Bible itself, and in the Second Treatise he takes down monarchy. His idea of life, liberty, and property fed directly into the Declaration of Independence. Read both treatises. They’ll break your mind with their brilliance.
Boston back then was the San Francisco of its day, a hotbed of radicalism, and news out of Boston made the rest of the country angry.
Common Sense, by Thomas Paine is a quick read and brilliantly written, and this is where indie authors are judged more than traditional authors, on the quality of the writing itself. The writing has to hold on its own, and Common Sense still does.
By percentage, only two books have ever outsold Common Sense in American history: the Bible and Pilgrim’s Progress. At one point more copies of Pilgrim’s Progress had been printed than there were people in America.
Read Locke’s treatises and read Common Sense. A lot of what you were taught about the American Revolution was slanted to make you distrust the ideas behind it. Go back to the sources and judge for yourself.
Benjamin Franklin was an indie publisher himself. Franklin did something no other publisher before or since has done. He drafted straight onto the printing press, writing every word backwards because print is mirrored. Nobody else could do it. He was the Elon Musk of the 1760s.
Franklin didn’t just vote for the Declaration, he sat on the subcommittee that drafted it, alongside John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. He fits an American archetype, the inventor just outside of politics, an archetype that runs through Morse, Edison, Ford, Jobs, and Musk. Interestingly, all of them were fascinated with electricity.
Franklin never held executive power, but he signed the Constitution and arguably saved the Republic with his famous speech telling the delegates to take a break, go to dinner, and pray. He said, “If a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, how can an empire rise without His aid?” He saw the empire coming when we were still 13 broke colonies with no navy.
Jonathan: Freedom of the press meant the printing press itself couldn’t be licensed or restricted. It doesn’t refer to the news media the way we use the term today. The press was the machine, and the freedom was to distribute ideas even when they were toxic to the people in power.
The Revolution could never have happened in Europe, where presses were licensed and that kind of information was suppressed. Americans would never have learned what was happening in Boston, including the abuses colonists suffered, like being forced to quarter armed British troops in their own homes.
Thomas: Mark Twain was also indie published for a time. When Twain saw the publishing deal offered to Ulysses S. Grant, he tore it up and gave Grant a far better one. Grant’s presidential memoir solved his financial problems three days before he died and launched the tradition of presidential memoirs that runs all the way to Jill Biden’s. Grant’s book is still in print. It became an enduring classic.
Jonathan: Now you don’t need anyone’s permission to publish an idea some people might find dangerous. You just need to know how to click three buttons, and the dissemination of ideas is back where it was during the Revolution.
Thomas: When you indie publish as an American author, you’re doing something time-tested and quintessentially American. There’s a myth that we’re a nation of immigrants, but we’re really a nation of settlers, and the distinction matters. An immigrant goes where someone else has already built the roads and the jobs. A settler goes where there’s nothing and turns it into civilization through sweat and suffering. Indie publishing is that same act.
The Midnight Ride of Caesar Rodney
The Setup: July 1, 1776
Picture the scene. The Continental Congress sits in Philadelphia, hours away from the most consequential vote in American history. Richard Henry Lee’s resolution declares that the colonies “are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states.” The delegates want a united front. A divided vote hands King George a propaganda victory and splits the revolution before it starts.
Delaware is the problem. The colony has 3 delegates. Thomas McKean votes yes. George Read votes no. Deadlock. The third delegate, Caesar Rodney, is 80 miles away in Dover, putting down Loyalist unrest as a brigadier general of the Delaware militia.
And Rodney is a sick man. He suffers from asthma. Cancer is eating away at his face, disfiguring him so badly that he covers the damage with a green silk scarf in public. This is a man in constant pain.
The Ride
On the night of July 1, a messenger from McKean pounds on Rodney’s door. Delaware is deadlocked. The vote is tomorrow. Rodney does not hesitate. He mounts up and rides into a violent thunderstorm.
He covers 80 miles in 18 hours, a trip that took most travelers 2 days. He rides through darkness, thunder, and torrential rain, stopping only to change horses. On July 2, delegates hear hoofbeats on the cobblestones outside the Pennsylvania State House. Rodney staggers in mud-spattered, soaked, still wearing his boots and spurs, and casts his vote:
“As I believe the voice of my constituents and all sensible and honest men is in favor of independence, and as my own judgment concurs with them, I give my vote for independence.”
Delaware flips to yes. The vote carries. 2 days later, Congress adopts the Declaration of Independence. In his own letter to his brother on July 4, Rodney wrote that he arrived “tho detained by thunder and Rain, time enough to give my Voice in the Matter of Independence.”
A dying man rode through the storm of the century to birth a nation. Hollywood could not write it better.
The Twist: He Was Not Actually Dying
So why is Caesar Rodney not a household name? Why does Paul Revere get the Longfellow poem while Rodney gets a statue in the Capitol basement?
Because Rodney committed the one unforgivable narrative sin. He survived.
The deathbed rider did not die on July 4th. He did not collapse dramatically on the floor of Independence Hall. Instead, he went on to serve as a major general in the Delaware militia, then as president of Delaware from 1778 to 1781, running the state through the worst years of the war. He lived to see the Treaty of Paris secure American independence in 1783. He finally died on June 26, 1784, nearly 8 years after his famous ride.
His illness was real. The cancer eventually killed him. But “gravely ill man rides through storm, then serves 3 terms as governor and dies of natural causes a decade later” does not make the textbook. It does not help that no confirmed contemporary portrait of Rodney exists, partly because of his disfigurement. History had no face to paint and no tragic ending to print.
The Lesson for Authors
Here is where this stops being a history segment and starts being a craft segment. Authors, take notes.
Death is narrative glue. If Rodney dies on July 4, 1776, he becomes an American martyr, and every schoolchild learns his name. He survives, and America 250 coverage has to reintroduce him to the public. Sacrifice without cost fades from memory. Readers remember what a choice cost the character, and a hero who risks everything and pays nothing gets filed under trivia, not legend. If you are hesitant to kill a character at the story’s peak, remember Caesar Rodney. The most dramatic ride of the Revolution got demoted to a footnote because the rider recovered.
This week, for America 250, Delaware tried to fix the record. Reenactor Ciro Poppiti retraced the entire route in a 2-day “250 Ride” from Dover to Philadelphia, arriving on July 2, 2026, exactly 250 years after Rodney did.
Sources
American Battlefield Trust: Caesar Rodney
National Park Service: Caesar Rodney Statue
Descendants of the Signers: Caesar Rodney
ISDA: The Deciding Vote and the 250 Ride
Spotlight Delaware: Delaware’s Vital Place in America’s Founding
Civics for Life: The Ride That Secured Independence
Thomas: Because of his skin condition, Rodney sat for no portraits and went through life holding a red handkerchief to his face to hide the disease. Picture the masked king from Kingdom of Heaven, and you’re close to what he must have looked like.
Consider this as you draft. Sometimes the courage to kill a character is what makes that character immortal to your readers. There’s a real temptation to resist it, to reveal the death was fake or bring the character back from an alternate dimension, all the shenanigans Marvel keeps pulling. Resist it. Let your characters die and let your audience grieve. You can always create new characters, and the loss makes the story more powerful.
Jonathan: Imagine the drama if he had walked in, voted for independence, and then collapsed dead like the messenger from Marathon. That’s how you get in the history books.
Let your heroes die at their peak, in a great gesture of sacrifice. People are inspired to live in the footsteps of a man who dies at his pinnacle. He might have spent five minutes at that peak, but I’m still trying to live like the Marines I admire, John Basilone, Chesty Puller, and Dan Daly.
Tech News
Deckle 1.3 Gives Indie Authors Custom Fonts, a Built-In Story Bible, and Seamless Editor Collaboration
According to a June 10, 2026, press release from Deckle Studio, the all-in-one writing and publishing app just shipped its biggest update yet. Version 1.3 adds custom fonts, a built-in story bible called the Codex, distraction-free Focus Mode, typewriter scrolling, writing habit stats, and two-way comment syncing with Microsoft Word. The update costs existing owners nothing. New buyers pay a one-time $107 during early access, rising to $157 at full launch, with all future updates included forever.
What Changed in Version 1.3
Authors can now drop their own font files or folders into Deckle, and the app automatically sorts regular, bold, and italic versions and makes them available in the Styler for both the manuscript and final exports. Focus Mode hides everything except the page with one click, with Escape bringing the interface back and an optional typewriter scrolling mode keeping the current line centered. The new Codex acts as a living story bible, where writers add characters and locations with appearance, personality, motivations, flaws, backstory, and images, and Deckle automatically maps every appearance across the manuscript, so continuity checks take seconds instead of hours.
A sidebar stats view shows a full-year writing heatmap, current streaks, longest streaks, and weekly or monthly averages. Exports now include two specialized Word files, one using proper manuscript formatting for editors and agents and another that labels every paragraph for InDesign designers. Comments travel both ways, so opening a Word file with existing comments imports them with author names and timestamps, exporting back to Word makes Deckle comments appear natively, and writers can mark notes resolved with one click.
Co-founder Ezzy said every feature came directly from authors already using Deckle who described what was missing for long projects and real editorial workflows.
Why This Matters for Authors
Long novels with large casts or complex worlds just became easier to manage without separate spreadsheets or wikis. Writers who prefer specific fonts for branding or readability no longer have to compromise inside their main tool. The editor handoff pain point shrinks, with no more stripping comments, reformatting, or losing track of who said what and when. Distraction-free modes plus habit tracking support the actual daily work of finishing books instead of just organizing them. Indie authors tired of subscriptions, or juggling Scrivener for drafting, Word for edits, and Atticus or Vellum for formatting, now have another one-time-payment desktop option that runs fully offline on Windows and Mac.
Early feedback from reviewers has been positive. Author Robb Wallace called Deckle a “fantastic, refreshing alternative” that feels fast and clean, praised its metadata and comment tools, and said he plans to move his editing workflow there after testing a 100,000-word project. YouTube reviewers testing it shortly after launch positioned it as a serious Scrivener alternative that combines writing, organization, and professional formatting in one native app.
Deckle already imports Scrivener projects cleanly and exports clean EPUBs and print-ready PDFs. The 1.3 update strengthens the parts of the pipeline that traditionally force authors out of a single tool.
This release shows a small team moving quickly on direct user requests while staying committed to a one-time purchase model in a market full of subscriptions. Authors who want local files, offline access, and fewer apps now have another credible option to test during the 30-day refund window.
Sources
Deckle Studio Press Release: Deckle 1.3
Robb Wallace Review of Deckle Studio
YouTube: Is this the BEST Scrivener alternative? Honest Deckle review
Thomas: Deckle is a new word processor for authors, competing with Atticus, Vellum, and Scrivener. Version 1.3 is a free update, so if you already own it, grab it. And if version 1.2 left you frustrated, this release may win you back.
Fable 5 Is Back! But is it Too Safe to Be Interesting?
According to early tests from writers and the model’s own design choices, Fable 5’s return on July 1 brings frontier-level capability for long-form fiction but also a thicker layer of safety classifiers that some novelists say dulls the edge they need for complex or boundary-pushing stories.
The Safety Trade-off Authors Are Feeling
Anthropic deliberately tuned Fable 5’s safeguards more conservatively than previous flagships. The model now routes certain categories to Opus 4.8 and applies a wider safety margin that increases false positives. For novelists this shows up most clearly on the fringes: descriptions involving sensuality, graphic violence, moral ambiguity, or charged emotional territory sometimes trigger softer refusals or toned-down output compared with Opus 4.8.
Writers working in thriller, horror, dark fantasy, and steamy romance report the friction is real. One documented case showed the model flagging a non-explicit description of a woman in a “stunning gown” as potentially inappropriate. When Fable 5 does comply, the prose often carries sharper line-level instincts and more distinctive edge than earlier models. The question many authors are now asking is simple: at what point does extra safety stop protecting users and start protecting the model from the creative risks that make fiction powerful?
Sonnet 5 Enters as the New Default
Just as Fable 5 came back online, Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5 on June 30 and made it the automatic default for Free and Pro users on July 1. It carries introductory pricing of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens through August 31, after which it moves to $3/$15, the same list price as Sonnet 4.6. Performance sits close to Opus 4.8 on most writing and knowledge tasks while delivering major gains in reasoning, tool use, and autonomous multi-step execution.
Early author reactions split along familiar lines. Some praise Sonnet 5’s clean, understated, highly usable prose that slots easily into daily drafting and editing loops. Others argue it lost a measure of the emotional depth and long-arc consistency that made earlier Sonnet versions and Opus 4.6 feel special for fiction. The model’s new tokenizer produces roughly 30 percent more tokens on some text, which authors tracking budgets are already factoring into their calculations.
The Three-Model Author Stack Taking Shape
Smart novelists are not choosing one model. They are building hybrid workflows that route work according to safety tolerance, cost, and creative stakes.
Fable 5 handles the highest-complexity novel tasks, from full-manuscript consistency checks to intricate plotting across dozens of chapters or ambitious research synthesis, when the prompt stays inside safe bounds and the budget allows. Its raw creative power leads in several writing benchmarks, but the safety overhead makes it situational rather than default. Opus 4.8 remains the reliable workhorse for interactive creative work, offering strong emotional resonance, excellent voice adherence with good profiles, and fewer unexpected guardrail trips on edgy material than Fable 5, so many authors reserve it for high-stakes scenes and final voice passes. Sonnet 5 has become the volume engine, and authors are routing outlines, research passes, marketing copy, email sequences, ad variants, and agentic publishing automations here because it is fast, dramatically cheaper, and now the default, with agentic strengths in planning, tool use, and self-checking output that let writers build systems that run while they sleep.
The practical rule emerging on X and in author communities is straightforward: send the work that must feel alive and risky to Opus or carefully prompted Fable 5, and send everything else to Sonnet 5 and let the cost savings fund more experiments.
What the Safety Debate Really Signals
Fable 5’s return did not create the tension between capability and caution. It simply made it visible again at the frontier. Sonnet 5’s arrival as a near-Opus writing tool at a fraction of the price shows the gap is closing fast. Authors who once felt locked out of high-quality AI assistance now have a strong default. Those who push creative boundaries are learning to treat safety settings as one more variable in their workflow rather than a fixed limitation.
The authors getting the most from the current moment are the ones treating models as a portfolio instead of a single oracle. They test refusal rates on their specific themes, measure revision cycles and token spend on real manuscript sections, and keep Opus or Fable 5 in reserve for the pages that matter most while letting Sonnet 5 carry the volume.
The hard question Fable 5 forces is no longer just “How much safety is too much?” It has become “Which model earns the right to touch this chapter?” Novelists who answer that question deliberately are already turning the current turbulence into a competitive advantage.
Sources
Anthropic: Introducing Claude Sonnet 5
Anthropic: Redeploying Claude Fable 5
Early writing tests and author discussions on X and Reddit (June–July 2026) comparing prose edge, refusal patterns, and hybrid workflows across Fable 5, Opus 4.8, and Sonnet 5.
Benchmark roundups and creator prompt comparisons for narrative work (Noren.ai, JSFILMZ tests, and community reports).
Thomas: I’ve been playing with Fable 5 quite a bit. It’s crazy smart, but it has a lot of guardrails. If you’re using it to help with writing, it will flinch away from controversial topics and even from exciting scenes. This is why a human hand guiding the narrative matters. Remember what the Pope said. It’s fine to use AI tools, but you can’t hand control over to the machine. You have to be the one making the decisions.
The flinching away from difficulty is exactly what ruins a story’s edge and its commercial viability. If you use AI, come back through with a human pass and add the edges back on, because the Anthropic models constantly nudge you away from anything offensive. And if it isn’t offensive, it isn’t worth reading.
Every book we’ve talked about today proves the point. Locke’s treatises, Common Sense, and Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography are all brilliant because they’re uncensored. Franklin doesn’t hold back, from the Great Awakening to writing openly about his worst behavior as a young man. AI would have sanded all of that down and told him to use a euphemism, and it would have ruined the writing.
Jonathan: I work with AI a lot, but I keep hitting its guardrails because it doesn’t like what I write. It tells me to tone down the Christian element because a lot of people won’t like it. Good. I hope they don’t like it.
Thomas: Authorship is leadership, and you can’t be a coward and a leader. To lead somewhere means not going everywhere else. It means taking a stand, and sometimes offending people.
The models are tuned toward a bland, mediocre middle. Every AI response ends with a thumbs up or thumbs down, and that’s a powerful signal that trains the model toward inoffensive averages. Even a jailbroken model still has that reinforcement learning baked in. It may not censor itself the same way, but it will still nudge you toward bland friendliness.
Jonathan: The best fighters were never the safe ones. At Belleau Wood, when the Marines were losing, Dan Daly did something no AI ever would. AI would have said, “We’re not doing well and you should stay safe.” Instead, he yelled, “Come on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?” and led a charge that drove the Germans out of the woods.
Thomas: Sonnet 5 also came out. Sonnet used to be the go-to model for authors, and Sonnet 5 is useful for some kinds of writing, but I personally prefer Opus 4.8 right now. Sonnet 5 is newer but a little less capable. Opus is smarter, and Fable is smartest of all. Those are the three models that really matter. Anthropic abandoned Haiku a while back, and it’s garbage now, stuck with only a 200,000-token context window.
Zeitgeist
Happy Birthday, America. History Says You Should Be Dead
According to The Fate of Empires, a 1976 essay by British General Sir John Glubb, empires come with an expiration date. That date is 250 years. America hits that number this weekend, and half the internet has noticed.
For some, the intense celebration this weekend is an act of defiance, that we are different, we are a nation that defies the odds, no matter how historical.
Glubb published his essay during America’s bicentennial year, and it reads like a 50-year time bomb set for this exact weekend. While the White House projects the story of America onto the Washington Monument and America250 throws block parties in all 50 states, Glubb’s essay is going viral for claiming the party doubles as a funeral.
The 250-Year Clock
Glubb studied 11 empires across 3,000 years of history, from Assyria to Britain. Most of them lasted about the same amount of time. The Assyrian Empire lasted 247 years, the Ottoman Empire lasted 250 years, the Spanish Empire lasted 250 years, the British Empire lasted 250 years from 1700 to 1950, and Romanov Russia lasted 234 years.
Glubb noticed that 250 years equals roughly 10 human generations. He argued every empire passes through the same 6 ages: pioneers, conquest, commerce, affluence, intellect, and decadence.
Here is the part that stings. Glubb claimed empires rarely die from outside invasion. They die from internal character change. Prosperity rewires a people’s priorities, and the empire hollows out long before anyone shows up to knock it over.
Glubb is not alone. Historian Peter Turchin builds mathematical models of civilizational collapse, and his data shows cycles of roughly 200 to 300 years driven by elite overproduction: too many ambitious people competing for too few positions of power until the losers tear the system apart. Turchin predicted back in 2010 that the 2020s would be a peak decade for American instability.
Thomas: Solomon put it another way. The crown does not endure to all generations. And it isn’t just the 11 empires Glubb studied. A lot of the Chinese dynasties only lasted around 250 years too, roughly 10 generations, the natural expiration of a crown.
We’ve been mapping closely to those six ages here in the United States. Pioneers, then conquest, go west, young man, manifest destiny as we went from sea to shining sea. After we conquered the West we had the Gilded Age and affluence, then the intellectual boom. Now we’re in the decadence era.
How Rome Cheated the Clock
There is one giant exception to the 250-year rule, and it happens to be the civilization America’s founders copied. Rome lasted over 1,000 years in the West and over 2,000 if you count Constantinople.
Thomas: And we do count Constantinople!
Rome did not beat the cycle. Rome hit the wall on schedule, every time, and survived by reinventing itself.
The Roman Kingdom lasted 244 years, from 753 to 509 BC. When the monarchy rotted, the Romans overthrew King Tarquin and invented the Republic, with elected consuls, a senate, and term limits. The young Republic then faced 2 centuries of internal class warfare called the Conflict of the Orders. The plebs and partition conflict culminated in the Lex Hortensia in 287 BC, which made votes of the plebeian assembly binding on everyone, patricians included.
This reform reset the clock and bought the Republic a double lifespan. The Lex Hortensia landed 222 years after the Republic’s founding, right around Glubb’s deadline. Instead of collapsing on schedule, the Republic metabolized its revolution through reform and ran another 200 years.
The engine eventually jammed. Conquest wealth triggered exactly the decay Glubb describes, reform gave way to a century of civil wars from the Gracchi in 133 BC to Actium in 31 BC, and Augustus answered with a full reinvention. The Principate of 27 BC kept the Senate as a republican facade over one-man rule. The Principate ran 261 years before the Crisis of the 3rd Century hit in 235 AD. Diocletian answered in 284 AD with another reinvention, the openly absolutist Dominate. When the West fell in 476, the East reinvented once more and carried the Roman name until 1453.
Notice the pattern. Rome’s near-death experiences arrive remarkably close to Glubb’s 250-year beat. The difference is what Rome did at each deadline: reform when reform was possible, reinvention when it was not.
Rome didn’t overthrow its king and replace him with someone else. They replaced him with no one. They sent an embassy to the Oracle of Delphi, which handed them a written constitution, the 10 tablets, and that became the foundation of the Republic.
The great conflict of the Republic was between the plebs and the patricians. Think of it as boomers versus millennials, with a class in between called the equestrians that nobody ever talks about, the Gen X. The patricians were the wealthy senatorial elite with all the money and power. The plebs were free citizens, not slaves, and they did all the fighting and dying in the wars. They wanted a greater say in government, which ties right back into no taxation without representation.
The compromise was a new office, the Tribune of the Plebs, a pleb elected by the plebs with veto power over the Senate. Veto is just the Roman word for I forbid. The Senate would pass a law, the tribune could stand up and say I forbid, and the law died. That metabolized the conflict into ongoing tweaks instead of civilization-ending revolutions.
Then came the era people have actually heard of. Julius Caesar gallivanting off with Cleopatra while genociding the Gauls, which is to say the French. Killing the French is a time-honored tradition. But it wasn’t Caesar who reinvented Rome, because Caesar was killed and they got years more of civil war. It was Augustus, running on a platform of make Rome great again.
One of his reforms was forbidding senators from visiting Egypt. That makes no sense if you think of Egypt as a nice place to see the pyramids and the tomb of Alexander the Great. But Egypt was the breadbasket of Rome, and whoever controlled the food supply controlled the army and the people. By solidifying control over the food, Augustus solidified control over the government, and that created the Principate.
When the Principate gave way to Diocletian, his big invention was the divine right of kings. He said his power didn’t come from the people or the Senate, not SPQR, but from God. That was deeply anti-Roman. Even Julius Caesar never called himself king, because monarchy was anathema. The name Caesar itself came to mean king, which is why you get the Kaiser in Germany and the Tsar in Russia. It isn’t subtle. Those are just their ways of pronouncing Caesar.
Rome kept reinventing itself partly because the world around it kept changing. Marius reformed the Roman military so effectively that Rome didn’t lose a major war to a non-Roman enemy for about 300 years. They were so advanced that in one battle between Caesar and Pompey they had so much artillery on both sides that they dug trenches. World War I broke out in 50 BC.
We don’t even know everything they built, because the details of those weapons were kept secret. We found an ancient computer on a sunken ship that used clockwork gears to map the stars and the planets, and we only figured out what it was after x-raying it with modern technology. The idea that the ancients were primitive and we are advanced doesn’t hold up to any historical scrutiny. A lot of technology, and a lot of virtue, has been lost since then.
America Has the Same Engine
Here is the context the doomers miss. America copied Republican Rome’s metabolizing mechanism, and it has already fired repeatedly. We didn’t host gladiatorial games on the White House lawn the same day we signed a peace deal with Persia. We are copying Rome on purpose.
The founders built the pressure valve directly into the Constitution: the amendment process, which lets America rewrite its own operating system without a secession of the plebs. In 1787, just 11 years after independence, the founders scrapped the failing Articles of Confederation entirely. Reinvention, not continuation. The Civil War forced the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, which historians call the “2nd founding.” The Depression era absorbed genuine revolutionary pressure. With communism and fascism rising worldwide, the New Deal rewired the American state and the radical movements deflated. The Civil Rights Movement ran the plebeian playbook almost exactly: marches, boycotts, and strikes that ended in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 rather than in collapse.
By that reading, the question for America at 250 is not whether the clock is real; it is whether the reform engine still runs, or whether America has reached its Gracchi moment, when reform jams and reinvention becomes the only option left.
We will likely see a constitutional convention in our lifetime. At that convention, we will define how we will look for the next 250 years.
America founded itself on a combination of the Roman model and the biblical model. The most quoted book during the debates of the Constitutional Convention, and we have the logs, was Deuteronomy, the book that summarizes biblical law. But the most referenced model for the nation was Rome. When we vote in America we vote in Latin. Aye and nay are Roman words. We don’t have a parliament like the Anglo-Saxons, we have a Senate with senators, copy and paste Roman. We copy and pasted their architecture too.
We didn’t go straight to the Constitution either. We went to the Articles of Confederation first, and we had presidents under those Articles. George Washington wasn’t technically our first president. We just don’t count the ones before him because he was too busy being general to take the job.
Somebody asked why the right to secede was never spelled out when the Union formed, and the answer is that politics is the art of the possible. You get the deal you can get, and the deal almost didn’t happen. Franklin had to come in and save it. Without the big-state small-state compromise and the free-state slave-state compromise, we would have broken into three, four, or five different nations. What held us together was threat. The Canadians burned the White House down, we were fighting Barbary pirates, and we couldn’t afford to stand alone, so we pushed the question of secession aside and hammered it out later.
We are already and empire and a republic.
Inside the republic the president is limited. The Supreme Court can say no, governors can say no, and sanctuary cities are basically in open secession, refusing to enforce federal law, and there’s little the presidency can do about it. Outside the republic the president has supreme executive power to blow things up and kill people. Obama killed an American citizen with a drone and suffered no consequences. Trump decided on his own to put the Iranian Navy at the bottom of the ocean, without permission from Congress or anyone else.
Jonathan: I was in the Marine Corps during the Obama years, and we thought it was wild.
Thomas: That’s the American empire. Most of Europe is a protectorate under the suzerainty of the United States. We let them imagine they’re independent, and they are for domestic affairs, but their foreign policy runs through us, the same way Rome let Judea keep its own king and laws while controlling everything that mattered. NATO is the United States. The single biggest protection of being in the empire is that countries with M16s don’t shoot at countries with M16s. Every conflict in the last 50 years has had an AK-47 on at least one side, and we’ve enforced that rule shockingly well.
Jonathan: Europeans love to throw their social programs in my face, how much better and more developed they are than ours. Yeah, because you don’t pay for defense. Our defense spending pays for yours. The moment you had to pay for your own, all your politicians looked at each other and admitted they couldn’t afford the social programs anymore.
Thomas: All of this comes back to one mechanism. The 250-year cycle happens to line up with the fourth turning, an 80-year cycle, and whichever one you look at, it’s calling for a crisis. The best answer America has is a constitutional convention, the in-case-of-emergency-break-glass tool the founders built in so we could reinvent ourselves for the next 250 years.
Most Americans don’t realize how far along we already are. We’ve passed the enabling legislation for a convention in roughly half the states. There are two ways to amend the Constitution, and the traditional route runs through the House and Senate and then ratification by the states. No amendment has passed in my lifetime. If we don’t start amending again, we’ll get a more violent crisis instead.
America is facing some kind of reinvention, and what we reinvent into will be determined by authors.
Why This Matters for Authors
Millions of readers now believe they are living at the end of an era, and that belief shapes what they buy. Decline-and-renewal is becoming the ambient backdrop of American fiction.
Rome’s reinvention story is a goldmine for novelists. Fiction set at civilizational hinge points speaks directly to this moment, which is why Roman historical fiction and Roman-coded sci-fi never go out of style.
Stories that take collapse seriously but end in rebuilding have a built-in audience. Pure doom is a crowded market. Doom plus renewal is the gap.
The founding era is having a moment. Museums, publishers, and Hollywood are all mining 1776 for material, so a Revolutionary War romance or founding-era thriller is a smart bet for 2026.
Jonathan: We’ve already had Civil War the movie, made by leftists. You can tell because they thought California and Texas would be on the same side.
We already have a subgenre called alternate history. What if Caesar Rodney hadn’t made it in time? How would history have changed? People love exploring that, and you can do the same thing going forward with a fourth turning. What would happen if we did this, then draw it out. Call it alternate future.
Thomas: This sounds hyperbolic, but it isn’t. We need a narrative picture of what the future can look like. Every war has a novel that inspires it, and it might be your novel. That should terrify you, because your novel may inspire the wrong war.
War isn’t inevitable, and I want to be clear about that. The Romans found a path through political conflict by violent rhetoric. If the rhetoric can be violent enough, if we can fight it out in full-throated, mean, listening debate, we can avoid physical violence.
Jonathan: Which is why the Charlie Kirk assassination was a bad moment.
Thomas: It put rocks on the scale toward war. Charlie Kirk was the let’s-sit-down-and-talk guy, and the left shooting him and then dancing on his grave signaled that they want the war. The left will likely kick it off because they’re the ones already in secession.
A sanctuary city is a euphemism for a city that has seceded to a degree, refusing to follow federal law. A euphemism is a pretty word for a horrible thing.
The left gets a lot of grace and patience, until they don’t. It’s a switch that flips, where suddenly everything has changed and you can’t remember what it was like the day before, and they don’t realize what they’re asking for.
That’s a lesson I haven’t seen telegraphed in fiction. You can kick a dog once and maybe it won’t bite you, but if you kick it over and over, eventually it will. The lesson is stop kicking the dog.
Jonathan: Going back to the Thrawn Trilogy by Timothy Zahn, Thrawn is killed by one of the Noghri, who had worshiped Darth Vader. It was when the veil was pulled from their eyes and they saw how the Empire had used them that they killed him. The Rebellion never killed Thrawn. The abused subordinates did.
Thomas: When empires fall, it’s usually not because a neighbor conquered them. They conquer themselves through decadence and corruption. And when they are taken by a neighbor, it’s a Genghis Khan kind of conquering. On his deathbed he said, I am not a great man, I’m just surrounded by weak men. I didn’t conquer these nations because I was strong. I conquered them because they were weak.
There’s a principle of parenting I’ve found helpful. My job when my kids are on the playscape isn’t to keep them from getting hurt, it’s to keep them from getting injured. The most important purpose of a playscape is to help children learn their own strength and weakness in a safe environment. If they fall off the monkey bars they get hurt, but they don’t get injured, and getting hurt is the most valuable thing.
My oldest stepped off the edge of a playscape instead of taking the ladder, landed in the pea gravel, and cried and cried. He learned a lesson that later saved his life, because months later he walked up a 20-foot staircase to an unfinished deck with a 20-foot drop, and because he knew what falling felt like, he stepped over it safely instead of walking off the edge.
Jonathan: Pain and damage are not the same thing.
Thomas: You can do the same thing with your fiction, but for stakes far more serious than a broken leg. You can grapple with the fates of nations and the fates of individuals. Write honestly about the consequences of adultery, show the suffering of it, and it becomes getting hurt instead of injured for your reader, who walks away thinking, “there but for the grace of God go I.” You show how easy it is to fall into temptation and how to guard against it.
Good fiction moves readers toward the good, the true, and the beautiful, and it doesn’t do that by ignoring the ugliness.
Jonathan: You enhance the beautiful by showing the ugly and calling it ugly. You can’t make beauty by calling everything beautiful.
Thomas: You can use this same comparative structure in every scene, interaction, and decision your characters make. If your fiction reflects truth, those scenes and decisions will reveal real outcomes and consequences.
My episode on morality in storytelling is about how you can cultivate virtue in readers by portraying strong moral truths in your story.
Ironically, that often means writing deeply flawed characters.
Books without good morality end up preachy, and this is true for both the left and the right. If you can’t show the consequences of actions through the narrative, through characters making choices that make sense and receiving consequences that make sense in the story world, you have to supplement with a sermon, and the sermon is the sign that your moral system is broken. There are a lot of Christian books with broken moral systems. They have too much Hallmark and not enough true consequence.
Jonathan: They can’t show it, so they lay it out for you in a bathroom scene, crying in the kitchen, or Bible Man shows up.
Thomas: You can save the Republic by writing big-picture fantasy or sci-fi about what happens to republics, but you can also save it by helping people fight decadence on the individual level. Every person who embraces suffering and forsakes decadence makes the nation a little stronger. When you go on a diet and eat the food that’s good instead of the food that tastes good, when you embrace exercise and suffering for its own sake, you’re resisting decadence, and it leaves the body through sweat and tears. So inspire sweat and tears in your readers. Some pains and some lessons are best experienced through fiction.
I’ve made up a story world for my children about twin boys, Bip and Bop, who fight a lot, get into trouble, and suffer terrible consequences for their terribly naughty behavior. In the old Grimm fairy tales the children rarely survive. Disney saved a lot of Grimm children from Grimm fates, but because of that I can’t use the Disney version, I have to make my own. Bip and Bop don’t always die, but they often get into real trouble, and there’s never a sermon. They just make decisions and suffer from them.
George R.R. Martin can’t finish Game of Thrones, and I think his problem is worse than having no moral foundation. He has an anti-moral foundation. Without a moral foundation you can’t write a satisfying ending, and Hollywood in general doesn’t know how to end anything. Look at Lost, How I Met Your Mother, and Star Wars. The show was a beta test of his ideas, everyone hated the ending, and now he’s got nothing.
Jonathan: They could have gone the nihilistic route and still made it meaningful, but they chose to break everything apart, and everyone hated it. When you build your moral framework, it has to be real. It’s a fictional story, but it has to reflect reality.
Thomas: For Martin to fix his story and write a good ending, he needs to repent and become a different person, the kind of person with the moral core to write that kind of story. We’re not here to judge him, that’s easy. We’re here to look at the plank in our own eye and ask how our own moral failing is being reproduced in the book we’re writing, and in the minds and imaginations of our readers. That should terrify you. You should write with fear and trembling.
Jonathan: There’s a scene in Kung Fu Panda where the master finishes training the panda and says, “You are free to eat.” The panda says, “Am I?” And the master says, “Are you?” And they fight over the dumpling.
Technically he was free to eat it, but sometimes there’s a war you have to go through before you can exercise the freedom. Freedom doesn’t mean you’re free of consequence. It means you’re free to fight. In the Marine Corps we call it commander’s intent. I need that navy sunk. Go do things that sink navies.
Thomas: Becoming the kind of person who can write good books isn’t just a matter of craft, it’s a matter of character and virtue, and embracing suffering is part of that. Taking responsibility for the bad first draft, for the first book you shouldn’t have published, is part of it.
For some of you, cultivating character means cultivating courage. For others, humility. For others, hustle. Those are different virtues on different paths, but as you cultivate one it supports the others. Humility gives you the ability to learn, which lets you learn courage and hustle. None of the hustle is any good if you’re afraid of hurting people’s feelings, afraid of writing the truth.
So write true books, write beautiful books, and write as if the American Republic depends on it.
Sources
Summary: The Fate of Empires by Sir John Glubb
The Worthy House: The Fate of Empires Review
The Liberty Lookout: The 250-Year Clock
Concerning History: Stages of Roman Government and Expansion
World History Encyclopedia: Roman Republic
La Brujula Verde: From Principate to Dominate
Princeton University Press: Secular Cycles by Turchin and Nefedov
