Thomas: Welcome to Author Update! We have a major policy shift. Amazon KDP has confirmed that Kindle Unlimited books can be offered to public libraries. We covered this earlier, and now we have confirmation.
We will also discuss what the TikTok deal from this morning means for authors, and a massive cultural zeitgeist shift unfolding right now.
Jonathan: Sorry, guys. I’m Jonathan Sugar Jr. Our first story is that KDP has confirmed that KU books can be in public libraries. This isn’t in their main TOS yet. It rolled out quietly in August of 2025 and was reflected on September 3.
Their main terms of service document does not yet include explicit language on this library exception. Apparently when Thomas checked it today, the page glitched.
Thomas: There was no terms of service page. It wasn’t a 404. It had the heading and the rest of the page didn’t load. I don’t know what’s up with Amazon’s TOS, but it doesn’t matter. The help documentation on their site confirms that if you’re exclusive to Kindle Unlimited, you can now sell your ebook to public libraries.
This opens up a new revenue stream for independent authors. It’s great news.
Jonathan: I have books in KU and I want them in libraries. How would you suggest I do that?
KDP Select Change: KU eBooks in Public Libraries
Thomas: Amazon won’t do it for you. If you want to be in KU and also in libraries, you need to go through an aggregator. The big ones are Draft2Digital, Smashwords, PublishDrive, and OverDrive. If I had to pick one, I’d probably go straight to OverDrive. All of these can help with distribution into libraries.
Getting libraries to select your book is another topic, but the short answer is: ask your readers to request the book. That’s 80 percent of it. The other 20 percent is a whole episode, which I already recorded. If you skipped it because you thought it didn’t apply, it applies. If you skipped it because you think it’s old, libraries change slowly. Many still use the Dewey Decimal system even though better systems have existed for decades. So my seven-year-old episode is fine. I will update it at some point.
Don’t worry about the age of that episode. The main thing that needed an update was the KU piece, and we just updated it.
Feel free to share your thoughts on Draft2Digital, Smashwords, PublishDrive, OverDrive, or others. If you’ve tried them, let us know what you liked or didn’t like. This is helpful. You can also share on Author Media Social.
You can expect between one and four dollars per borrow. This can be solid revenue, and there’s no reason not to try to get your books into libraries now that you can.
Jonathan: The ones I want to see experiment with this are authors in children’s, middle grade, and YA markets. Homeschool communities rely heavily on libraries. If they couldn’t get your book before because it was in KU, now they can borrow it. I’d love to see what data comes back if authors push these audiences to request it at the library.
Thomas: You could always get your physical book into a library. This news is for ebooks. I don’t know how many young adults read ebooks, though I could see getting my daughter a Kindle as she learns to read. Filling it with free public domain books would be a good play for me as a homeschool dad.
Kickstarter News
We have some Kickstarter news.
Jonathan: Yes. I’m launching a Kickstarter tomorrow for my Shades of Black Origins series. There’s a link in the show notes. Thomas is always adding Patron Toolbox tools, so I’m plugging my stuff.
You can also follow the Kickstarter and get the emails. If you don’t know how to run your own campaign, follow mine to see how an author does it. You can back it for a dollar and you’ll get all the update emails. Treat that as a tracking system for when you run your own.
Another good one to follow is the American Paladin Kickstarter with Larry Choa, which has a much higher production value.
Thomas: Jonathan’s is easier to copy because he’s running his campaign himself, whereas Larry has a team. One of the big tips if you’re considering Kickstarter is to back a dozen or two dozen other campaigns for a dollar. You get access to the backer communications and you can watch the fun. It also helps the campaigns because the more backers a project has, the more Kickstarter promotes it internally.
Check it out. There’s a link in the description. Follow it to be notified. It would be great if it could fund right away. That’s good for momentum.
Jonathan: That would be great for me. In terms of benefit to all of you, the more Kickstarters you back, the better you look. Your profile shows how many you’ve created and backed, but not how much money you spent. If you back 73 projects, people think you’re generous. That’s my recommendation.
TikTok Deal Update
Jonathan: News on TikTok. Many of you rely on it. The TikTok deal is in its final stages. There was a call this morning between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping covering TikTok, plus trade, fentanyl, Russia, and Ukraine.
Trump posted on Truth Social. He said the call was very productive. He announced that Xi approved a deal to keep TikTok running in the US and framed it as a win that averts the ban that had not yet been enforced.
China’s official readout via state media was more reserved. It emphasized business negotiations under market rules and Chinese law and didn’t explicitly confirm approval.
Key points: ByteDance, TikTok’s parent, is divesting majority control of US operations to American investors. There will be a new standalone app using licensed technology from ByteDance. The US would receive a very substantial fee as part of the arrangement. In return, Trump extended the divestiture deadline to December 19, 2025. So TikTok is not dying in the US yet.
Thomas: As we’ve predicted, rumors of TikTok’s demise are greatly overstated. I don’t recommend using it as an author. It is very addictive and potentially bad for your mental health. But if you’re good at it, you can spread your books.
The better strategy for authors is not to try to become a BookTokker yourself, which is very difficult, but to pay BookTokkers to talk about your book. A few hundred dollars here and there can generate a lot of buzz.
Jonathan: Right. Take advantage of other people’s work on these platforms.
Thomas: It’s much cheaper to get a real job and pay mid-tier people on BookTok or Bookstagram than to try to become a BookTokker yourself. The top few make a lot of money. Everyone else makes almost nothing and is happy to get a hundred bucks to do a TikTok video for your book. That may be a good investment. Research and finding the right people is key.
I also saw some buzz that TikTok may be returning to India. Prime Minister Modi met with China and is making friends with them, which is a big shift. India and China have gone to war in recent years. Their soldiers killed each other with sticks on the Tibetan plateau to avoid escalating to firearms. It’s a wild story. Both sides claimed victory. You can read about it on Wikipedia.
Clarifying the KDP Select Library Exception
Jonathan: Before we move on, a clarification. Some people in the comments are saying you can’t upload to OverDrive if you’re in KDP Select. That’s why this is news. KDP Select’s terms have changed. Before, if you were in KDP Select and KU, you couldn’t go anywhere else, including libraries. Now it looks like the terms are changing, which is a big deal.
Thomas: That’s part of why I recommend OverDrive. OverDrive focuses on libraries. The other tools are primarily used for going wide. You will not be able to use PublishDrive to check any of the other boxes. We need to be clear. Just because Amazon carved out an exception for public libraries does not mean you can put your book on Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, or other stores. This is a small exclusion for libraries only.
Jonathan: Just libraries. To be safest, I’d go with OverDrive.
A Cultural Zeitgeist Shift
Thomas: We were talking before we went live about how interesting this year is to start Author Update. From a zeitgeist and cultural perspective, and books resonating with readers, the last 12 months have been some of the most pivotal in my lifetime and certainly in my publishing career.
Most years the culture changes slowly. You only notice it in hindsight. Other times it changes dramatically and suddenly.
If you buy into pendulum theory, connected with Strauss and Howe’s Fourth Turnings, pendulum theory predicted that in 2023 the pendulum would reach its apex and start moving the other way. I think they were close. Many cultural trends are reversing. We’re in a fourth turning. These are the dark times, the bad times that make strong men. Negative events hit harder than they do in other eras.
People are asking, why is this affecting me so much? Why am I so grieved over the death of a man I didn’t know? I saw people in our community asking why Charlie Kirk’s death was such a big deal and why it is changing society.
Obviously, his death hit the right very hard. We wept and prayed and held vigils. I was at one last night. Many of us prayed harder and cried more than we have in a long time.
But the cultural change didn’t come from the right’s grief. It came from the reaction of the left to the assassination. People on the left were celebrating. Normal people find speaking ill of the dead revolting. They think it’s bad luck. Normal people find lying about what someone said revolting. They find blaming the victim for his own killing revolting. They find celebrating a murder revolting.
This isn’t the first event like this that the left has celebrated. Recent examples people saw their own friends applaud on social media:
- An Antifa terror cell attacked an ICE base and shot a government worker in the throat.
- Two Israeli diplomatic staffers were shot to death at a Jewish event in Washington, DC.
- Tesla showrooms were burned.
- The UnitedHealthcare CEO was assassinated.
- Tesla cars were burned. In Austin, so many were burned that Tesla owners put stickers on their cars denouncing Elon Musk to signal to friends not to burn their car.
Jonathan: And if you didn’t like your neighbor, you put the opposite bumper sticker on his car.
Thomas: A Catholic school was shot up by a trans shooter. Governor Josh Shapiro’s house was set on fire for being insufficiently pro-Palestine. And Charlie Kirk was martyred while engaging in peaceful dialogue on a college campus.
All of that was in the last 12 months. This was the last straw. People are tired of hearing “violence on both sides” when their friends on the right did not need to put stickers on their Ford F-150s over disagreements about DEI. No one was firebombing Ford dealerships. The both-sides argument doesn’t fly.
Yes, there is violence everywhere, but the maniacal celebration of it is coming from the left, and those celebrating are being coddled, while people on the right who notice are criticized for not being “balanced.”
We got a lot of criticism from last week’s episode, which I thought was fair and balanced. I went back and listened to it. I stand by a hundred percent of what I said.
We had our biggest single day of unsubscribes on our newsletter, and our first day of negative YouTube growth. Like and subscribe if you’re still here. We’re glad you are.
For years, media figures have punched to the right and coddled the left. It became so normal we barely noticed. People were more hostile to the folks to their right than to those to their left. When Gina Carano alluded to this in a post on X, she was fired from Disney for her views. No one in Hollywood spoke up for her because she was to the right.
Now, when people punch to the right, everything looks different. They look like villains dancing on Charlie Kirk’s grave, or lying about what he said. Videos of Charlie Kirk are prolific. You can get a sense of his heart, kindness, charity, and love for debate.
A good example is Jimmy Kimmel. He blamed MAGA for Charlie Kirk’s killing, a classic punch-right tactic. The reaction this time was as if he had said something overtly racist. Advertisers threatened to pull out. Some local affiliates refused to air his show. The FCC talked about getting involved. The show already had poor ratings. Disney pulled the plug and reportedly used the morality clause to cancel his contract cheaply.
Just months ago, Kimmel celebrated the assassin of the UnitedHealthcare CEO. That segment is still online. He did an entire bit about how attractive the murderer was and how his staff was in love with him. He got away with that because it was before. This is after. The culture has shifted.
Now if you speak ill of Charlie Kirk or both-sides his murder, the normies turn on you. The right turning on you is expected, but normies did too.
A YouTuber called Shoe on Head, an atheist and Bernie Sanders populist, posted a video horrified at the reaction of her friends on the left. She played clip after clip of people celebrating, laughing, and calling for more violence. You could see it shake her worldview.
I suspect millions of mutes, blocks, and unfriends happened. People have had enough.
Another example: Stephen King. A film adaptation opened last weekend. It bombed. If you adjust for inflation, it was his lowest opening in 35 years. For comparison, It opened in 2017 at 123 million dollars. The Long Walk opened to a mere 11 million dollars. That’s the vibe shift.
Media Fallout and Market Signals
Jonathan: People who watched the movie enjoyed it, but many didn’t go see it because of the broader vibe they were feeling.
Thomas: Exactly. There’s an ick factor. People in the middle now see the left’s toxicity as toxic.
If you’re on the left, I have advice on how to navigate this as an author. When I was in college, my housemate’s mother died of cancer. A group of us, the Sons of Thunder, went to the funeral. His parents were Cambodian refugees. His mom, I think, was Shinto. The funeral was foreign to me. I didn’t understand anything I was seeing, but I kept my mouth closed. I didn’t criticize. I knew my friend was grieving. Everyone was grieving.
A little decency goes a long way. You may want political points and worry about the pendulum, but pendulums swing back and forth. Sometimes you just let people grieve. This is genuine sadness. I was at a vigil last night. People are sad and scared. Show decency. Let the news cycle wash over you. Turn off your phone. Write your book.
It’s really important to check in with your Timothy, because many people took a step to the right over the last week. People on the right decided to become even more firm in their views.
How Authors Should Respond Right Now
Jonathan: Your audience might have changed. This happened all the time in the military. Events happen and everything shifts. You need to check in with your target audience to see how they’re changing.
In martial arts, we call it keeping a hand on your opponent so you can feel how he’s moving. Do that with your readers right now. If you were writing one way before and you keep writing like Jimmy Kimmel before, you may not realize your audience shifted because you didn’t put a hand on them.
Listen to what they’re saying. Don’t just sort people into Camp A or Camp B. Hear why they feel the way they do. Are they shocked by the celebrations? Do they think those are the crazies, not them? Or are they asking, are we the bad guys? If they are rethinking things, you need to keep a hand on them to figure out how to maneuver in this new environment. You could be moving through a space that has become hostile to what you were saying.
Thomas: Or perhaps not hostile, but your series was selling and suddenly sales dropped and you’re not sure why. Keeping in touch with your Timothy is always good, but it’s vital in seasons of dramatic change. Not everyone is responding the same way or moving in the same direction. Your target audience may have moved farther left and you need to move with them. As a marketer, serve your reader. Give them what they want. You must know what that is.
If you’re wondering whether leftists are welcome in the Author Media community, absolutely. If you come in peace, you are welcome.
Jonathan: I’ve got lefts and rights for everybody.
Thomas: Jonathan hates you all the same. I love you all the same.
Jonathan: No lives matter.
Thomas: If you come in to punch right and coddle left, you’ll get a cold reception. If that’s you, don’t despair. The pendulum will swing again. It never stays left or right forever, and it always overcorrects. That keeps culture in motion and writing interesting. Writing a book that resonates in 2024 is a little different from one that resonates in 2025.
I recently reread the first Dresden Files book. That series maps the zeitgeist well. The books come out in the current year and the vibe changes across time. If you want an enduringly bestselling series, you must adapt the way Jim Butcher did. Now you must adapt from 2025 to 2026.
Jonathan: We covered this in our Mary Poppins Grimbright discussion. Context matters. If you’re writing a story that endures and maps to 2025, write for the turning of 2025. Write the heroes people need now. If you’re making a movie, timing is harder. You have to map your release to where you think culture will be. The author’s talent is reading how culture is moving and meeting readers six months in the future.
Thomas: Ena made a great point. If moving farther left or right is against your values, consider serving a different audience. Maybe older people are now more like you than your peers. Or younger people. The age and gender graphs are more split between left and right than ever recorded.
Cancel Culture 2.0 and Corporate Control
Thomas: For folks on the left who are concerned about cancel culture, you shouldn’t have unsubscribed last week. I have episodes to help you.
There’s a troubling trend in corporate America. Corporations expect to control employee political speech 24/7. This used to be a government-employee issue. It makes sense if you wear a uniform. But corporations doing it is different. It looks like the conversion of free citizens into peasants. We don’t call them peasants. We call them employees.
Employees now rent and subscribe rather than own. Your great-grandparents owned everything. Many things in your life now are only licensed. Even your phone. Employees don’t have freedom of speech. Your employer expects to control your speech and keep you inside their Overton window.
There’s an expectation of being on call 24/7. Your boss can text you about TPS reports at 7 p.m. or ping you on vacation. A big piece of this peonage is lifelong college debt. People feel like they must be employees because they can’t afford to be anything else.
Workplaces now control many people’s friends and social life. The workplace has values and almost religious tenets. For some, it fills the role of religion. That gives your workplace unlimited control over your personal life. It’s not a job. It’s a calling or even a “family,” which is the most toxic language. If a company tells me we’re a family, no you’re not. I can’t fire my child. I can’t fire my mother.
This shift began with the Industrial Revolution. Some people say, my company isn’t so bad. That’s like saying my feudal lord isn’t as bad as the others. He could oppress me more than he does. Sure, but he could die, and his son could be worse. There’s nothing you can do.
If you’re concerned, listen to my episodes on cancel culture. A more fundamental question is how to get your freedom back.
Four Steps to Regain Your Freedom
Thomas: First, keep your kids out of college. College is the path to peonage. College debt is the worst debt. It is not dischargeable in bankruptcy. Many people carry it for life.
Marco Rubio still had student loans when he was a sitting United States Senator. Being a senator was not enough to get him out of debt. What got him out was running for president and writing a New York Times bestseller. That’s how hard it is. Parents are pressuring their children into debt peonage they may never escape.
If you are in debt, start cutting expenses. Move into a trailer at the edge of town if you have to. Sell everything but the kids. Spend what little money you’re not putting against debt on Dave Ramsey books and put them into practice.
If you’re retired, help your children get out of debt.
Go to church. That unlocks health insurance alternatives. There is a whole world of them, and a whole episode on that. Church also helps you build a community outside of work. Your work wants to be your religion. If you want to replace it, you need a real one.
Consider starting a business or working for a small business. My rule of thumb: once a business is big enough to have a full-time HR person, it’s too big.
Follow those four steps. They are difficult, but if you do, you gain freedom to speak. You can even speak broadly. I was recently targeted for cancellation. Because I built a cancel-proof platform and owned everything, they were mostly unsuccessful. I got pushed off one blog. That’s it. No one noticed because I owned everything.
If you’re renting, you don’t have power. If you own, you do.
Jonathan: A couple thoughts. Kids and college. It became automatic. Apply to college. Apply for the loan. A kid who’s never done this signs up for ninety-five thousand dollars of debt. They don’t have to think about it until after college. It’s like being born into wage slavery.
Colleges aren’t at risk for whether you get a good job. They get their money anyway, so they can jack up prices. Every student just gets a loan. This is a problem. We have a terrible debt culture. It creates slaves. Once you have that debt, you can’t stop working. You can’t backpack through Europe. You can’t start a business. Are you going to get another loan for your business? It’s terrible.
On church and health. In the Marine Corps our doctrine was, don’t get sick. Have you seen our healthcare workers? We had corpsmen with limited training. You do preventative care: diet, sleep, hydration, exercise.
Government healthcare? You don’t want to use it if you can avoid it. So you take care of yourself. Keep yourself healthy.
Mental health matters. In a fourth turning, the world is dark and bad guys don’t hide. When good people are in charge, bad guys have to hide who they are. In a fourth turning, they don’t.
You need to meet with like-minded people regularly. Church is good for this. It keeps you mentally resilient. When you’re psychologically healthy, you’re more likely to be physically healthy. You’re not as depressed or sick to your stomach because you have hope. Others are living like you.
Remember Elijah. After Mount Carmel, when he was depressed, God told him there were 7,000 others who had not bent the knee to Baal. It’s not just you. That concept is vital for spiritual and mental health, which ties directly to physical health. You can keep yourself from becoming sick by joining these communities.
Thomas: One final point. The pressure of debt peonage is something your readers feel. Most don’t realize it’s a society-wide issue. They think they are uniquely failing. People don’t talk about their student loans. It’s a core psychological pain.
It’s hard for people to believe that college was the worst decision they ever made. The pro-college propaganda is so strong it’s even in our board games. In the Game of Life, the best decision is going to college. It’s the only decision you make. Everything else is dice. It’s not even a real board game. It’s a sermon on cardboard.
Alignable: Worth Your Time?
Jonathan: This past week I got an invite to Alignable. I logged in and connected everything. It’s a LinkedIn clone that claims to connect professionals and increase revenue. What I’ve gotten is more email. No new contracts. No one asking for developmental edits. Everyone’s just connecting for no reason. I don’t want to talk to people if I don’t have to. Connecting for no reason isn’t useful.
Thomas: Alignable is like someone asked an AI to clone LinkedIn, then make it more irritating with more emails. Real networking happens in real life, with meaningful interactions and favors over time. Networking is not how many people you know. It’s how many people you know who owe you a favor. Alignable is not a way to give favors. It’s not a good use of time.
New and Updated Patron Toolbox Tools
Thomas: I’ve been working on AI tools. My dad taught me to channel strong emotion into productive work. I’ve built five new Patron Toolbox tools and made significant improvements to existing ones.
Updates:
- Not a Developmental Editor now has a short story mode and a children’s book mode. It can also answer your questions about the edit. Ask for an editing plan to implement the suggestions.
- Character Compendium now creates a list of every character in your book in addition to profiles for the major ones. It also creates an audiobook profile for each character with instructions for your narrator.
- Usage limit issues on the Location Compendium and others have been fixed. If you hit a usage limit error, email me.
New tools:
- Amazon Page Reviewer. Paste your Amazon page URL and click review. It analyzes your page using all my episodes on Amazon page optimization and gives you what you’re doing well and what to improve. Even a small conversion lift doubles the effectiveness of all your marketing. Move your page from 2 percent to 4 percent and your ads and organic traffic both get twice as effective.
- Quotable Quote Finder. Upload your manuscript and it finds your best quotes for social, your launch, a trailer, your Amazon page, even your cover. It pulls funny lines, thematic lines, and the best one-liners. It’s fun.
- Historical Fact Checker. Tuned on my brother’s book Snow White and the Seven Guns, set in 1812. It checks for historical accuracy and anachronisms and explains fixes when needed. It can also detect when a cinematic flourish should be left alone.
- Chapterize: Dictation Cleaner. Paste a raw dictation transcript. It fixes punctuation, capitalization, and obvious transcription errors, including homophones from context. It detects run-ons, stutters, and filler words, and formats dialogue correctly. It does not change your voice. It just gets the text ready for editing. A new app called Just Press Record works on Apple Watch, Mac, and iPhone and is a 5 dollar one-time purchase. If you use Android, I have recommendations linked.
- Podcast Blog Fire. This is the adapted tool we use for Author Update. Paste your transcript and it turns it into a blog post. It keeps attributions like Thomas and Jonathan in front of the right lines.
Jonathan: Two comments from the chat. One, we should all feed Thomas bad news all week long so he keeps making tools like this. Two, you’re rapid-releasing AI tools.
Thomas: I’ve been in the zone. You can check these tools at PatronToolbox.com. You can become a patron and get access to all of them for 10 dollars a month. These are just the new tools. There are 50 plus more I built this year, including AI Thomas, an AI version of my brain you can ask marketing questions. It answers from the episodes we’ve recorded.
Privacy on all tools is cranked up. I don’t have access to what you upload. The models don’t either because we use API access. The exception is AI Thomas, Jane Bot, and Twain Bot. I do occasionally look at questions people ask AI Thomas for episode ideas. Anything AI Thomas tells you, human Thomas can see. Keep that in mind.
Jonathan: If he makes an AI Jonathan, it will be angry all the time.
Thomas: It will start every answer with, first of all, I’m a Marine.
Closing and What’s Next
We have more news, but we’re out of time. We’ll be back next week with more, including updates on the Anthropic case. The next hearing on the copyright class action lawsuit is next week, so there’s no news yet. The news is there’s no news.
Do check out Jonathan Sugar’s Kickstarter. Link in the description. Back it for a dollar or more. It’s a great way to support Jonathan and learn Kickstarter.
I’m Thomas Stead Jr.
Jonathan: And I’m Jonathan Sugar.
Thomas: Live long and prosper.
