Facebook Advertising Changes Forever… Again

by | Sep 2, 2026 | Author Update | 0 comments

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

For Week Ending August 28, 2026

This week, Meta killed the switch that kept your Facebook ads out of its Audience Network, and your campaign budget may already be bleeding. Amazon raised Kindle prices $40 overnight on memory costs. A new study flags 63% of religious books on Amazon as likely AI-written. Ingram launched a professional rival to NetGalley. And we say farewell to the woman who mailed 332 million free books to children.

Publishing News

Meta Removes Manual Placement Controls

Authors who send Facebook ads to an Amazon book page lose the switch that kept those ads in News Feed. According to Jon Loomer on August 20, 2026, Meta is removing placement exclusions from the ad set. Advertisers are seeing a notice in the Placements section of Ads Manager. The notice says excluding placements, platforms, devices, and operating systems will no longer be available for your ad sets. Loomer says Meta has not said when the change hits each account.

What Leaves the Ad Set

Loomer lists four losses. You will not

  • remove a single placement from one ad set
  • drop a whole platform and every slot inside it.
  • limit an ad set to mobile or desktop
  • limit an ad set to one operating system.

Social Media Today covered Loomer's Ads Manager screenshots and the same notice. Meta's account-controls help page still describes placement limits as an account setting. Meta has not published a dated newsroom post that names a cutoff.

Why Amazon Ads Take the Hit

David Gaughran mailed subscribers on August 22, 2026. He says News Feed converts. Audience Network, Stories, Reels, and the rest of the pool send cheap clicks that do not buy books. Authors who point traffic at Amazon or another retailer used to turn off Advantage+ Placements, open Manual Placements, and keep the ad in News Feed. Gaughran calls that the back door. He says Meta is closing it.

Loomer's warning matches the Amazon problem. If you optimize for link clicks or landing-page views, Audience Network will find cheap, low-quality clicks. Authors who buy clicks to a retailer page have been using that exact goal.

What Still Works

Loomer says you can still set a value rule that bids more or less by placement, platform, device, or operating system. Value rules now cover 7 placements, including Audience Network. You can also open Advertising Settings, then Account Controls, then Placement Controls, and uncheck placements for the whole ad account.

Gaughran's first move, once the notice hits an account, is a value rule that decreases the Audience Network bid by 90 percent, the maximum. He also decreases Facebook Stories, Facebook Reels, Instagram Stories, and Instagram Reels. He saves that set and reuses it. He uses account-wide Placement Controls as a backstop, not the first lever, because those controls apply to every campaign in the account and offer a shorter menu.

Gaughran says he has not tested the workaround yet. The notice has not appeared in his ad accounts. He expects a staggered rollout.

What Authors Do Next

If you still see Manual Placements, you can keep News Feed-only on the ad sets that send readers to Amazon. When that edit disappears, copy Gaughran's Audience Network value rule before you spend. Check Stories and Reels after the first day of spend. Leave account-wide blocks for placements you never want, such as Audience Network, and keep them rare so the delivery system still has room to work.

Sources:

Commentary

Thomas: Meta owns Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp, with big plays in AI and in the metaverse, which it sank $80 billion into just to watch burn.

Losing the placement switch is like a billboard company that won't sell you the highway billboard alone; you have to buy the whole package, including the back-road billboards that far fewer cars pass.

Jonathan: This could kill book advertising on Facebook. We had a golden age when it was cheap. Authors got sales, because our target audiences were there.

Thomas: Some authors will benefit from this, thought. I interviewed Connor Boyack, who spent about $10 million on Facebook ads in a single year and made far more than that back. Boyack, author of The Tuttle Twins, has built one of the largest independent middle-grade brands right now. Because his audience leans right, many people on the left have never heard of him.

He sells millions of units, most of them directly to readers, without Amazon. This move works better for him, because the Facebook algorithm optimizes for conversions when you tune it that way.

Meta's shift takes decisions away from humans who don't know what they're doing. Most authors clicking those placement buttons can't tell you whether mobile beats desktop, or whether the News Feed beats the other feeds. It's mostly superstition and guessing.

Meta's ads engine runs its own split tests against your audience and optimizes for clicks or conversions. Authors who sell directly from their own websites win because their store can tell Facebook when a conversion lands. The ones who get hurt are those who send people to the Amazon sales page, which never calls home. There's no Facebook pixel on an Amazon page, so nothing stops the algorithm from firing a flood of cheap clicks. You paid for clicks, so it gives you clicks.

This won't break Facebook advertising. It hurts Amazon more than it hurts savvy authors. Authors spending thousands to send buyers to Amazon can begin to sell direct without much trouble, and many already do. Plus, they'll bid against fewer competitors as other authors bail.

Jonathan: The problem is building the target set. It costs more, because Facebook decides it already knows your book and who to send it to. When it guesses wrong, it burns your money on the wrong audience, then resets and learns again.

That's a whole stretch of waste I could have skipped if Meta had let me keep the targeting controls myself.

Thomas: This is part of a trend 20 years in the making. Everyone in a moral panic over AI should realize Facebook is AI all the way down. The person complaining about AI in your Facebook feed may not even be real, but the algorithm serving you their complaint is. The ads engine is AI. What you see is AI.

X Hands Grok the Keys to Your Ad Account

According to an X post by Polymarket on Friday, August 21, 2026, X launched Ads MCP so AI agents can create and manage advertising campaigns through conversation. X Business posted the official launch the same afternoon: create, manage, and optimize campaigns from the AI you already use. Elon Musk quoted the rollout with one line: use your AI to manage X ads.

What X Shipped

X built Ads MCP as a remote Model Context Protocol server at ads-api.x.com/mcp. MCP is the open standard that connects a language model to outside tools. Point Grok, Claude Code, or a custom agent at that one URL and the client discovers 23 X Ads tools with no custom Ads API code. Nine read tools list accounts, campaigns, line items, funding instruments, promoted posts, targeting, and live entities. Two analytics tools pull account stats and campaign reach. Two search tools look up interests and locations. Ten write tools create and update campaigns and line items, add or remove targeting, create an ad post, promote an existing post, and activate spend.

X documentation states the agent chains the workflow from one plain-English request: accounts, funding instruments, campaign, line item, targeting. Ask it to show last week's results. Ask it to build a paused website-clicks campaign with a $10 daily budget aimed at readers in the United States. The model picks the tools.

The Safety Gate That Keeps the Card From Charging

X creates every new campaign and line item in a paused state. Nothing spends until someone issues an explicit activate call. Authentication uses the advertiser's own OAuth2 token, so the agent sees only the ads accounts that user can open. Three scopes control the blast radius. The ads.read scope covers browse and analytics, ads.write covers campaign and creative changes, and offline.access refreshes the token, which dies in about 2 hours without it. Leave ads.write off and the agent can study the account but cannot create, promote, or activate.

How an Author Turns It on This Week

Access runs through an X Developer Platform account tied to an Ads project, which X Business named as the entry point. Confirm an ads account at ads.x.com. Open the X Developer Console, create or reuse an app, and assign that app to an Ads project. Connect Grok at grok.com/connectors with server URL https://ads-api.x.com/mcp, or add the same URL in Claude Code. Start with ads.read and this prompt: show my campaigns and how they performed last week. Grant ads.write after you trust the connection, and keep activation as a human step. Then feed the agent a winner you already posted and tell it to promote that post to a defined interest and a hard daily cap.

Social Media Today reported on August 23, 2026 that X named Grok, Claude Code, or a custom agent built on the MCP SDKs as compatible clients. Best Media Info quoted Monique Pintarelli, Head of Global Advertising at SpaceXAI: X Ads MCP brings full-funnel campaign management into the AI tools advertisers already use.

Why This Matters for Authors

Most indie book ads still die in a dashboard. An author who already drafts copy in Grok can now ask that same chat to promote the post that is already working, then read the numbers in the same thread. The paused-by-default rule gives a chance to inspect targeting and budget before money moves. The write tools also give a funded agent a path to activate spend, so treat ads.write as a loaded instrument. Bring a live X Ads login to the conversation this week, and decide in advance whether the agent may only read, or whether it may build paused campaigns you activate by hand.

Sources:

Commentary

Thomas: X has spent a year making its ads engine work for normal people. A year ago, advertising on X only made sense for brands like Coca-Cola. Facebook's magic sauce, the reason it can lose $80 billion on the metaverse and nobody notices, is that it made ads work for the little guy. The classifieds and the local plumber's ad all went to Facebook, because it made results easy for unsophisticated buyers. X is moving that way, and it just handed Grok the keys to your ad account.

You could say, "Grok Bot, become my advertising manager," and it will run your ads for you.

Jonathan: What does that conversation look like? Do I target old, lonely women who love cozy mysteries but want a hint of danger, active during these hours, on these devices, because that's when they convert?

Thomas: I'd upload my book to Grok Bot and say, "Build an advertising campaign around this book." It can read the whole thing. To save usage, I'd first run the book through my Patron Toolbox tools, Book2Blurb for back-cover copy, Quote Finder for the most viral quotes, my ad-targeting tools, and the Timothy Finder, which identifies your ideal reader and where they hang out. Then I'd feed Grok Bot those reports instead of the whole book, and it synthesizes a targeting package for your readers on X.

Some authors are far more likely to have readers on X, and this is the best way to find out if you do.

Jonathan: Targeting has worked the same way since the advent of artillery. You use ammunition to dial in on your target, and in advertising that ammunition is your dollars. You fire dollars, see if you hit, adjust, and fire again. U

se these tools first to understand the terrain, how ads have behaved in this market before, and let AI collate it into a target package, and you save yourself who knows how many dollars and how much frustration. People who work in targeting, as I have for 15 years, use this stuff religiously, because Hellfires are expensive.

Thomas: Grok Bot answers so many author frustrations. Authors who just want to write and delegate the rest finally have an assistant.

In the last two weeks we crossed a line. AI no longer just tells you things, it does them for you. Right now a Grok Bot is patching all my websites for a security vulnerability while I record this episode.

Scholastic Reports That Kids Drop Daily Reading at Age 9

According to Vox, Constance Grady reported on August 19 that books for kids ages 8 to 12 have been losing sales for about 10 years, and that the slide steepened in 2020. If you write middle grade, the format houses want from you this season has already changed.

The Drop Hits at Age 9

The Scholastic Kids & Family Reading Report found that 57% of 8-year-olds read books for fun 5 to 7 days a week. At age 9, that share falls to 35%. Joanne O'Sullivan, a children's author and Publishers Weekly reporter, told Vox that kids move from short illustrated chapter books and leveled classroom readers into novels that feel "chunkier" and "abrupt." Kelly Dickinson, a middle school librarian in Bethesda, Maryland, told Vox a long spine stops a less confident reader before page 1. The child looks at the brick and thinks, "I can't read that."

The Books Got Longer After Harry Potter

Booklist counted average middle-grade page length at 174.5 pages in 2006 and 290 pages in 2016. Vicky Weber, a middle-grade author, agent, and coach, wrote on Substack in April that Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone runs 76,944 words and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix runs 257,045 words. Vox set those counts beside The Baby-Sitters Club title The Truth About Stacey, which lands around 35,000 words. Weber told Vox that houses copied Potter's bulk and missed how many of those readers were adults.

Kristen McLean, who runs Circana's Entertainment Knowledge Group, told Vox that closed schools, lost time with peers, and extra screen time during the pandemic "broke the discovery chain" for middle-grade fiction. She called the mix "a perfect storm for lower literacy."

Two Children's Imprints Closed This Spring

Penguin Random House shut Dial Books for Young Readers in March 2026. Macmillan shut Roaring Brook Press the same month and stood up a new imprint for nonfiction and illustrated books. Vox reported that one of the three people who stayed after the Dial closure edits picture books and graphic novels. Earlier waves already folded Inkyard Press, merged Razorbill into Putnam, and ended Algonquin Young Readers.

The Books Kids Finished Were Short, Funny, and Full of Pictures

Vox reported that illustrated books, graphic novels, and manga rose during the pandemic. Dav Pilkey's Dog Man series is the commercial model houses now chase. The Comics Beat, citing Circana BookScan, put Dog Man: Big Jim Believes at 767,342 copies sold in 2025 and Dog Man: Big Jim Begins at 681,041 copies. ICv2's 2025 chart of kids graphic novels gave Graphix 17 of the top 20 slots, and 13 of those titles were Dog Man volumes.

Jackie De Leo, chief merchant and publisher at Scholastic, told Vox the books are full color and physical, with pages that flap into a tiny animation. She said kids want funny books, and that houses spent years sending them "books for adults packaged as middle-grade books." She called graphic-novel reading "a different type of literacy." Dickinson told Vox the demand is comedy, and that shelves still lack enough funny books beyond the illustrated hybrids.

Nine-Year-Old Reading Scores Rose 4 Points

The Nation's Report Card long-term trend results released June 10, 2026 show 9-year-olds gained 4 points in reading from 2022 to 2025. That average matches the 2020 score from before the pandemic. Thirteen-year-olds showed no significant change from 2023. O'Sullivan told Vox this is the first year she has heard publishers sound optimistic about new middle-grade ideas.

What Authors Should Do This Week

Cut length on manuscripts aimed at ages 8 to 10, because a 35,000-word story sits closer to the books those kids already finish. Break the wall of text, since panels, illustrated chapters, lists, and in-world text messages give a reader a place to rest. Write jokes, because librarians in the Vox piece say comedy is the request they cannot fill. Build the graphic novel or illustrated hybrid if that is the story, since that is the format houses staffed through the spring closures. And keep an eye on 13-year-olds, whose scores stayed flat, which is the next cliff for upper middle grade.

The fight this week is the handoff from chapter book to novel. The houses that still have a middle-grade list are meeting the 9-year-old with a shorter, funnier, more visual book. Authors who ignore that handoff will write for a reader who already left the aisle.

Sources:

Commentary

Thomas: Every kid is a reader when they learn to read, and then they stop. I remember being intimidated by big books when I was a new reader. I wanted to read The Courtship of Princess Leia, because I was into Star Wars, but it was this thick and it intimidated me. I was reading Boxcar Children and Choose Your Own Adventure books.  

Making a Choose Your Own Adventure book is easier now than ever, and yet I can't find one for love or money at any bookstore. If someone made a based one that was thin instead of thick, I'd buy it for my kids in a heartbeat.

Part of this is the Harry Potter effect. J.K. Rowling got away with a huge book because her books were that good, and they started smaller. The first wasn't as thick as the later ones, and once you commit to one book, you'll commit to bigger ones. Not everyone is Rowling. The right move for a successor is to do less and do it better.

But length isn't the only consideration. A bigger problem is that the stories got too preachy. It's socialist realism. They're so focused on portraying the world as it should be under their progressive ideology that they don't write interesting characters or worlds.

Hollywood and video games have the same problem. Conservatives are writing books, but many children don't pick their won books. Left-leaning librarians and teachers pick for them. If you put the worst leftist slop in kids' hands, they don't find it interesting.

Gen Alpha is more conservative than Gen Z, which is more conservative than the millennials, who weren't conservative at all. These teachers are so far left that the world they present is unappealing. Kids would rather play Minecraft with no narrative at all than suffer a story-rich world where the story is bad.

Jonathan: Look at the competition. Minecraft, Fortnite, battle royale games like Call of Duty have no story or sides; you just play. Helldivers is different, because you have a side, and your side is so ridiculous you love being part of it. Meanwhile the nine-year-old is right at the point neurologically where they can handle heavier content, but the ramp from chapter books to novels is too steep.

Thomas: A lot of the research says middle-grade books are too grim, intense, and serious. Kids want something lighter, funnier, more whimsical, like Dog Man.

To keep my daughter reading, we get her into older books as fast as possible. She's seven and into Nancy Drew, so I feel safe, because there's effectively an unlimited supply of those books. They sit outside the current political reality. They're noble, bright stories. Law and order wins, the world isn't too corrupt, and Nancy is a true hero. I'm happy for her to read that.

It's crazy that if I wanted something like Nancy Drew, I wouldn't trust anything published since 2000 not to smuggle in subversive political messaging. We have to vet books written after 2000, and that's a burden for us when we want the book to be a break. We want to say, "Go read this quietly and don't bother me." Before iPads, we had books. We'd be quiet and flip the pages. You can't trust the modern stuff.

The public schools are now far more invested in teaching a rainbow political ideology than in teaching reading, and literacy is way down. They took down the reading posters and put up the love-is-love posters. Put the reading posters back. Teach the kids to read.

Ingram Opens Covered to Booksellers and Librarians

According to Ed Nawotka's August 17 report in Publishers Weekly, Ingram Content Group opened Covered on August 17, 2026 to booksellers, librarians, and other industry professionals. The first live product is digital review copies. If you want store buyers and collection librarians to read your next book before publication day, a new Ingram pipe just opened beside Edelweiss and NetGalley.

What Happened

Ingram spent several weeks in a publisher-only beta, then flipped the switch for the trade. About 200 publishers who sat on the advisor group already share titles. Ingram says it can now add houses beyond that first circle.

Margaret Harrison, Ingram's vice president of digital services, told PW that booksellers and librarians who read those files can post community reviews and build individual or company profiles. Readers open the file on the Covered website or the new Covered mobile app. Files stay inside the product. Publishers get usage analytics that include reading time and completion rates. The live formats are EPUB and PDF. Harrison said audiobook listening copies should reach the app in September 2026. Print galleys sit off the current plan.

Ingram first announced Covered at Winter Institute in February 2026 as a lower-cost rival to Above the Treeline's Edelweiss and NetGalley. Catalog creation and broader ordering tools are slated for fall 2026. Banners and e-newsletters wait until 2027. An influencer and consumer-reader program will live on a separate Ingram consumer product starting in 2027. Covered itself stays a professional room. Harrison put the rule in one line: "This is going to be the only exclusive professional platform. No influencers, no public. This is a community of professionals backed by Ingram."

How Buyers Get In

Ingram is riding iPage, its existing order system, which PW reports at about 50,000 bookseller and librarian accounts. Those users can turn on Covered with one click and their current iPage login. Harrison told PW Ingram had hoped for 100 industry advisors and more than 700 signed on.

Publishers will pay to list frontlist titles. PW did not publish a dollar figure. Harrison said most orders that start on Covered should run straight to the publisher. Stores and libraries keep their current paths through sales reps, point-of-sale software, or a link back to iPage. "When our publishers are successful, we're successful," she said.

The Indie Door

IngramSpark authors will be able to set up a DRC through a credit-card checkout, according to the same PW report. A store or library can then drop that title onto an Ingram order. That is the self-published path onto a professional buyer desk that used to run through Edelweiss or NetGalley pricing.

Those rival fees already moved the market. After Valsoft bought Edelweiss in late 2024, Publishers Weekly documented the 2025 rate reset: a $90-per-title baseline for new listings, plus DRC upload fees. Kensington CEO Steve Zacharius told PW the house's annual Edelweiss fee jumped from about $1,400 to $4,400, and the press cut its Edelweiss DRC commitment to 60 titles. Harrison told PW in February that rising galley and catalog costs "disproportionately disbenefit independent publishers." Covered's public pitch is a cheaper way to put the same files in front of the same buyers. Ingram still has not posted a Covered price list.

What Authors Should Do This Week

If you publish through IngramSpark, export a clean EPUB or PDF now and watch the dashboard for the Covered DRC checkout PW described, then ask Spark support when that checkout is live on your account. If a traditional house publishes you, ask your publicist whether the imprint is one of the 200 already loading files, and which of your next titles will get a Covered DRC. If you already sell to stores or libraries, treat Covered as a second professional discovery pipe, since sign-up sits on Covered's site and iPage users can flip access from their current login. Keep consumer reviewers on NetGalley, BookSirens, or your own ARC list, because Covered is built for booksellers and librarians through 2026.

Sources:

Commentary

Thomas: NetGalley is a crazy expensive solution to a problem that barely exists. Publishers fear that advance reader copies get pirated, and that piracy cuts into profit. So for about $500 a month, NetGalley puts DRM on your ebooks and lets you issue them to specific readers through a special app, with analytics.

Indies look at $500 a month and bounce. That's why you never hear an indie mention it. An indie with BookFunnel can just send a non-DRM ebook to a reviewer. The NetGalley reading experience isn't good. It's built for publishers protecting their rights, not for readers.

Will indies get access to Covered? Sure, and it'll probably be cheaper than NetGalley. Will it solve a problem indies actually have? Not really, because BookFunnel is already better.

Jonathan: I see this as a trad-pub advancement. It's a new gate for the gatekeepers, a new way to push their books forward and choose which ones get pushed.

Thomas: Giving a librarian your book early isn't usually the bottleneck for a "yes." That's the easy part. The hard part is getting them to consider you, and this won't help much there.

Jonathan: You have to know where a librarian looks for recommendations. They have an established pipeline, and it's not the channels readers use. Readers use newsletters, advertising, and BookBub. Librarians look at ads in Publishers Weekly, the big trade sites, and a traditional pipeline they've used for 200 years, then they teach their replacement the same system.

Thomas: They also watch bestseller lists and the books their own patrons request. So Covered doesn't solve many problems, but it's worth watching, because Ingram keeps making moves here.

Where they're headed is a real challenge to BookFunnel. Ingram wants to help you sell direct and deliver direct, ebooks and paperbacks, in one portal. They're taking steps, but it's not good enough to use yet, and their approach of owning everything while letting you feel like it's direct may not work. What they need is an API that lets you sell direct on Covered's tech stack, which I don't think they'll build.

Jonathan: They also need to overcome their terrible image from years of terrible customer support.

Thomas: Ingram carries a lot of tech debt and corporate cruft, the we've-always-done-it-this-way kind. They're a big, bulky corporation trying to accommodate indies, and that's hard, because indie needs are very different.

The best way to serve indies is by doing what BookFunnel does. They build simple software that isn't customizable, but it just works.

Traditional publishers want the opposite. They want software tailored to their idiosyncratic needs. The temptation is to customize for indies too, but no single indie gives you enough business to justify it, and they'll carpet-bomb you with little tweaks. It takes a completely different philosophy, and Ingram is struggling with that.

But they're profitable, they're trying, and even if it never works for indies, it'll probably work for trad pub. I applaud them for putting heat on Amazon. Amazon's getting it from all sides today.

Amazon Hikes Kindle Prices Overnight as Memory Costs Spike

According to a Yahoo Finance exclusive first published by Fortune, Amazon raised list prices overnight on its first-party hardware, including the Kindle line. Sebastian Herrera reported the change on Friday, August 21, 2026, and an Amazon spokeswoman confirmed the new tags. If you buy Kindles for giveaways, ARC readers, launch prizes, or your own next device, the checkout price moved this week.

What Happened

Amazon lifted prices across Echo speakers, Fire TV sticks, eero mesh systems, and Kindles after a Fortune review of the hardware lineup. The 16-gigabyte Kindle moved from $109.99 to $149.99. The 16-gigabyte Kindle Paperwhite moved from $159.99 to $199.99. That is a $40 jump on each of the two readers most authors recommend to new Kindle customers.

The Verge published the full percentage table on August 22. The base Kindle rose 36.4%. The Paperwhite rose 25%. The Echo Dot took the steepest hit on the list, from $49.99 to $79.99, a 60% increase. The Fire TV Stick 4K Max rose from $59.99 to $84.99.

Amazon's current Kindle compare chart matches the new floor. The Kindle Paperwhite product page lists the 16GB Paperwhite at $199.99, the Paperwhite Signature Edition at $249.99, the base Kindle at $149.99, and the 16GB Colorsoft at $289.99. Good e-Reader reported the Signature Edition rose $50 overnight and put the 16GB Colorsoft at $289 after a $40 increase from $249.

Why Amazon Moved

An Amazon spokeswoman told Fortune the consumer electronics industry is "facing significant increases in memory and storage component costs." She added: "After absorbing these increases for as long as we could, we recently adjusted pricing across our product lines." Fortune tied the squeeze to AI demand for memory and storage. Amazon now plans $220 billion in capital expenditures this year, up from $200 billion, with most of that money going into data centers. AWS posted $42.2 billion in second-quarter revenue, up 37% from $30.9 billion a year earlier.

Apple, Microsoft, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Asus have already raised device prices or cut memory in the same chip crunch. Fortune quoted Apple CEO Tim Cook calling the memory market a "100-year flood on memory pricing." Microsoft is adding $100 to $150 to Xbox console prices. Amazon framed its own move as a late adjustment after holding the old tags.

The spokeswoman also said Amazon "aims to continue to offer products at accessible prices" and "will also offer promotions across its lineup throughout the year."

Why Authors Care

The hardware gate into the Kindle Store now costs $40 more on the two volume devices. A five-Kindle launch giveaway that cost about $550 last week now costs about $750 at the new Paperwhite list price. Street-team kits, conference raffles, and "buy a Kindle, load my book" campaigns need a new budget line before the next purchase order. New readers who still need a first e-reader now face a higher cash hurdle before they ever open your sample. Good e-Reader says the higher tags now apply in Canada and the United Kingdom as well as at U.S. retail partners such as Best Buy, so international giveaways track the same move.

This is a device-price story. Fortune and Yahoo Finance reported hardware list prices. They did not report a change to ebook list prices, KDP royalty bands, or Kindle Unlimited page rates.

What to Do This Week

Open the Kindle compare chart before you buy hardware for a campaign and lock the live list price into your budget. Recost any Q4 giveaway, prize bundle, or reader-magnet that assumed a $109.99 Kindle or a $159.99 Paperwhite. Watch Amazon's promised in-year promotions if you can delay a bulk hardware buy. Keep ebook pricing on its own spreadsheet, because this hike sits on silicon, not on your $4.99 file.

Sources:

Commentary

Thomas: The cost of every device has risen by about 40% due to the increasing costs of AI.

Only three or four companies make memory chips, and the types are consolidating, so NAND flash and solid state are similar chips from a handful of makers, and they're all sold out a year in advance. The 2027 supply is already gone. That means a company like Amazon that needs gigabytes next year has to outbid data centers that will pay more.

That's the shift of the last two weeks. AI now does things for you. Hand it a project, say "update my website," and it does. As more people realize they can offload the jobs they hate, like bookkeeping, marketing, and payroll, demand keeps climbing and gigabytes keep getting more expensive.

Another knock-on effect is that pricier Kindles could slow the purchase rate. We report the Kindle Global Fund for KDP Select rising every month, because Amazon keeps selling Kindles and adding Kindle Unlimited subscribers. If you slow new subscriptions, you could slow that fund.

Jonathan: Current Kindle readers will just make the investment. If they need to replace a Kindle, they'll pay, because it's part of their habit. The big readers are unaffected. But for bringing new readers into the pool, the barrier is much higher now.

And it wasn't just Kindles. Anything with memory went up. Game systems jumped $150 to $200. If your habit was a $500 console and a $100 Kindle, that's a $600 outlay. Now it's $800 for the console and $200 for the reader. Your cost went up $400, and the console fits the old budget, so that's what people choose.

Thomas: Apple raised prices across new computers. A friend told me my five-year-old Mac Studio might be worth more now than when I bought it, because it has 64 gigs of memory and can run local models.

Every Apple product except the iPhone got a bump. The new iPhone announcement is three or four weeks out, and I suspect a $100 bump there too. It's industry-wide. It'll even out as we build more semiconductors in the United States, but that could take a long time, because AI demand is a hockey stick, doubling every 12 weeks. It's pressuring everything that uses a computer.

Study Flags 63% of Amazon Religion Books as Likely AI-Written

According to Publishers Weekly, Jim Milliot reported on August 19, 2026 that AI detection platform Originality.ai flagged 63% of the religion paperbacks it scanned on Amazon as likely written by AI. If you write for faith readers, those titles now sit on the same browse pages as yours, at a lower price and a shorter page count.

What the Scan Measured

Originality.ai scanned 2,034 English-language paperbacks in Amazon's Religion & Spirituality category. Every title carried at least a four-star average rating. Most of the books reached Amazon between January 1 and June 30, 2026. The firm scored three public fields on each listing: the summary, the author bio, and the in-book sample. The sample served as the main measure. A score of 50 or above received the label "Likely AI." The scan flagged 1,272 titles, which is 63%.

Journalist Michael Fraiman wrote the report. The 14 categories were agnosticism, atheism, Buddhism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Mormonism, Orthodox Christianity, Protestantism, Satanism, Sikhism, Taoism, and Wicca, Witchcraft & Paganism. Sikhism supplied the smallest set at 15 titles. Mormonism, atheism, and Satanism each supplied fewer than 50 titles. Fraiman's team states that a "Likely AI" score measures probability. The tool does not prove who typed the manuscript.

Where the Flags Clustered

Witchcraft, drawn from Amazon's Wicca, Witchcraft & Paganism shelf, hit 78%. Hinduism hit 76%. Taoism hit 74%. Mormonism hit 42%. Atheism hit 40%. Satanism hit 22%. Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism, Orthodox Christianity, and Judaism landed in a band from 51% to 63%.

Hinduism led the all-three-fields count: 72 books, or 25% of the Hindu sample, scored as likely AI in the summary, the bio, and the sample. Taoism hit 41% on that full-stack measure, or 25 of 61 books. Witchcraft hit 33%, or 46 of 138 books. Summaries drew the most machine text of any field, including on titles the sample scored as human.

Price, Length, and Claims

Likely AI religion books averaged $16.84 and 170 pages. Likely human books averaged $18.96 and 208 pages.

Five categories had more than half of fact-checked claims flagged as potentially false: atheism at 58%, agnosticism at 53%, witchcraft at 53%, Satanism at 52%, and Buddhism at 52%. The report's authors write that AI books "pull at the heart of a religious person's beliefs" and sell that confirmation for profit. Their hypothesis for the Eastern-religion spike: "Our hypothesis is that non-native English speakers are likely using AI to enter the English-speaking market."

Amazon's Line

An Amazon spokesperson told Publishers Weekly: "We are committed to a bookstore that readers love and publishers and authors trust, with multiple safeguards we continuously strengthen to protect their experience. Our content guidelines govern which books can be listed for sale, and we take proactive and reactive measures to prevent, detect, and remove content that violates those guidelines, whether AI-generated or not." Amazon's guidelines permit AI-generated work that meets those rules.

Fraiman told Decrypt that Amazon "uses the honour system for authors to self-identify their work as AI-written." He added, "We have no data on how many authors actually disclose that." The disclosure lives inside the KDP upload flow. Shoppers never see it on the product page.

Why This Matters for Authors

Faith categories now carry a majority "Likely AI" share inside this 2,034-book sample. Machine titles undercut you by about $2 and 38 pages, which pushes your book down a results list packed with lookalikes. Readers use these books for prayer, health, and life choices, so a false claim in that aisle costs more than a bad review. Your Amazon description is the first field machines flood, which makes a human sample and a specific bio the proof of work.

What to Do This Week

Open your live KDP listing and rewrite the description in your own syntax, naming a congregation, a tradition, a date, a failure, a source. Put a photograph and a verifiable credential in the author bio, because generic "seeker and teacher" copy matches the machine pile. If an AI tool generated text, images, or a translation in the book, answer the KDP AI question on the next upload. Price and package for trust, with more pages, sourced claims, and reviews from named readers in your tradition. If you write in witchcraft, Hinduism, Taoism, or a self-help-adjacent faith niche, assume most neighboring paperbacks in this sample carry the Likely AI flag, and differentiate with documentation a model cannot invent.

Sources:

Commentary

Thomas: I have a theory. There was unmet demand for religious books on witchcraft, Hinduism, and Taoism. Witchcraft and Taoism especially are B-tier or C-tier religions. They're old, but they count adherents in the millions, not the billions. They've always had the old books, but nobody was writing new ones. Some enterprising entrepreneurs saw the demand, started generating witchcraft books fast, and found they were making a lot of money.

AI is really good at religious texts, especially the written religions. The more Gnostic a religion, the more secret rites it has, the harder it gets to write books about it because the information isn't public.

Mormonism hitting only 42% makes sense, because more than half of it is secret to non-Mormons. What happens behind the temple doors stays there. Same with the Freemasons and the other Gnostic, Antichrist-type, secret-rite religions.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have no secrets. It's not a value for them, so AI can know everything written about the religion, and everything written is enough to keep writing.

What's interesting is that witchcraft is also a Gnostic, secret-rites religion, where you're invited into the conclave and learn the secret incantations.

Jonathan: But that's the entrance to the funnel. The secret stuff comes later. It's a fish trap. You only learn the level-one spells.

Harriman House Claims a Trade First With an AI-Facilitated Raoul Pal Book

According to The Bookseller, Harriman House claims a trade publishing first with an AI-facilitated book by macro investor Raoul Pal. Melina Spanoudi filed the exclusive on August 20, 2026. The title is The Everything Code. The on-sale date is November 3, 2026. If you keep a decade of talks, newsletters, and frameworks in a drawer, this deal sketches a path from that pile to a hardcover with a Big house logo on the spine.

What Happened

Harriman House, the finance imprint Pan Macmillan bought in 2023, will publish Pal's first book. The house lists 208 pages and ISBN 9781804094198. The publisher page calls the book human-originated and AI-facilitated. The manuscript draws on Pal's archive of speeches, frameworks, and written work through Weave, a secure AI application from a firm named CHAPTR. The Bookseller's own post describes Weave as a proprietary tool trained only on Pal's existing work. Harriman House says fact-checkers and human editors stayed on the text, and that the title follows Pan Macmillan's AI principles.

Pal built the platform for this. He co-headed hedge fund sales at Goldman Sachs, co-managed GLG's Global Macro fund, then launched Global Macro Investor in 2004. He runs Real Vision and Exponential Age Asset Management. Harriman House credits him with more than 1 million followers on X and more than 100 million views across video and podcast interviews. The copy frames 30 years of analysis as a map of debt cycles, currency debasement, and the Exponential Age. An Audible edition runs 6 hours and 27 minutes, with Pal as narrator, on the same November 3 date. A US wholesaler lists the paperback at a $19.99 retail price.

Why This Matters for Authors

A Macmillan imprint just put an AI-facilitated process on a named trade author and said so in the catalog copy, which makes disclosure a house posture, at least on this title. The training claim is the part that travels. Harriman House and The Bookseller present Weave as a closed tool pointed at Pal's own speeches and writing, so authors who own a large personal corpus gain a model they can take to an agent: train on my archive, keep the corpus private, keep a human editor on every page. Thought-leader nonfiction is the wedge category, because Pal already talks for a living and the book harvests that inventory, which means authors sitting on conference keynotes, Substack archives, and podcast transcripts can price that pile as raw material for a trade proposal. Pan Macmillan's public AI page commits the group to clear labelling for content that is significantly AI-generated and to human review before publication, so ask your editor, in writing, how your house will label the next book that uses a similar tool. "Trade first" is Harriman House's claim, as The Bookseller reported it. Indie authors have shipped AI-assisted books for years. The news is the logo on the spine and the sentence in the product description.

What to Do This Week

Inventory the archive you already own, the talks, newsletters, course modules, and interview transcripts, date-stamp the files, and keep originals off public chat tools. If you query a trade editor, ask three questions: which model touches the manuscript, whose text trains it, and where the catalogue will disclose the process. If you stay indie, write the same disclosure you would demand from Macmillan, because readers will compare your flap copy to Harriman House's "human-originated and AI-facilitated" line. Watch the November 3 launch for returns, reviews, and whether bookstores treat the label as a selling point.

Sources:

Commentary

Thomas: We covered this exact story last week, another very powerful man using the same approach, except he only admitted it after publication. What's different here is that they're upfront from the start, saying, "Yes, that's how we did it." It's a fast bifurcation, where the wealthy elites use AI with no repercussions and peasants cannot.

Jonathan: Everyone already hates billionaires. When you're already hated, you can't do anything wrong. There are very few rules a rebel can't break.

Thomas: This guy is a multimillionaire macro investor who writes about how to get rich. Publishers only cancel you when it makes them feel more powerful. They're not going to cancel you if they get nothing out of it. They want to partner with big-selling authors like this.

The readers of this book do not care at all that AI was used. They care whether his framework for getting rich works. It was the same with the health book we covered last week. Readers only cared whether it would help them lose weight or get buff.

When a book is about truth, readers only care whether it delivers truth. In Aristotle's terms, they care about the logos more than the pathos or ethos. But both books still have ethos, because both authors claim the ideas as their own and say AI only synthesized them.

I did the same thing. Instead of writing Thomas's Guide to Marketing, I built AI Thomas, a free tool that writes you a custom chapter for your specific problem, links sources, and recommends the matching tools and courses, so every answer has an ad built in.

Author Alerts

Atticus Ships Free Updates to Every Owner

According to Dave Chesson's August 24 Kindlepreneur email, Atticus added a new book previewer, more than 1,000 fonts, image folder organization, dark mode, ALT text for images, export failure diagnostics, and faster handling of long manuscripts. Existing owners receive those updates at no extra cost, and new buyers pay a one-time $147 price that includes all future updates for life plus a 30-day money-back guarantee. Authors who own Atticus should open the app this week and run the new previewer and ALT text before the next export; authors still choosing a formatter can buy once and keep every later upgrade.

Sources:

Commentary

Thomas: I'm torn on Dave Chesson giving everyone 1,000 fonts, because with great power comes great responsibility. There's something to Vellum's approach of only giving you the good fonts. Just because you can use Comic Sans doesn't mean you should.

Jonathan: Now everyone becomes a font snob, because there are more options.

Thomas: Atticus can run inside Grok Bot. Grok Bot has its own Linux computer in the cloud and runs Atticus natively. So if you own Atticus, give your Grok Bot access, send it your Word document, say, "Turn this into a PDF or an EPUB," and it does.

Atticus was the heaviest app when I tested it on the new 8-gigabyte Mac, which I saw as a downside then. But running inside a Chrome wrapper is exactly what lets it run natively inside Grok Bot, turning its biggest weakness into its biggest asset. It still performs great on an 8-gig machine. You don't need it if you run the Scrivener-to-Vellum path, but if you're still on Microsoft Word, consider using Atticus.

Amazon Tightens DRM on the Kindle Oasis

According to MakeUseOf, Amazon shipped firmware 5.18.2.1.1 to the Kindle Oasis 3, the first Oasis 3 update in over a year, and that build adds the tougher DRM used on newer Kindles. Good e-Reader reports the same Oasis firmware applies Amazon's hardened KFX-ZIP encryption, and MakeUseOf says Calibre and DeDRM fail against files downloaded to the updated device. Authors who sell DRM-free EPUBs through Smashwords, Baen, or a direct store should tell readers those files remain usable on Kobo and Boox hardware.

Sources:

Commentary

Thomas: Kindles can still read non-DRM files, and you can offer your book without DRM.

An author recently told me that if you turn off DRM, Kindle gives your readers the option to download the book as a PDF straight from Amazon. I haven't verified it, but for him it was a huge asset. And if you do use DRM, it just got tighter. Amazon is picking both lanes now, super DRM or no DRM, with no work around.

LinkedIn Time Travel: Workers Add AI and Strip DEI

According to an X post by Paul Graham (@paulg), LinkedIn users have been editing work histories to add "AI" and remove "DEI." The chart he posted is Figure 7 from the July 2026 NBER working paper Time Travel on Professional Profiles by Nicholas Bloom, Gideon Moore, Lisa K. Simon, and Caelan Wilkie-Rogers, which finds that 19.7 percent of established U.S. LinkedIn users edit the title or description of a job they already left, with AI language rising more than 6 times after late 2022 and DEI terms falling in early 2025. Audit your LinkedIn, Amazon author bio, and media kit this week so every AI claim matches work you can prove, because readers and recruiters treat those edits as a live map of demand.

Sources:

Commentary

Thomas: This gives a sense of how the zeitgeist tide is shifting. It's also fun, because once you realize we've used AI for 30 years, nothing stops you from saying, "I've been using an AI spellchecker."

It's a little disingenuous, because when people say AI they usually mean a large language model, but most people have no idea of the difference between a large language model and machine learning, and that includes your potential employer. I can see this helping you optimize for the AI that decides who gets the job.

Grok Bot Opens to More Plans

Grok Bot is now open to SuperGrok Plus, Cursor Pro+, and Cursor Teams subscribers, according to an X post by Grok Bot on August 21, 2026. The same post offers a free trial with limited usage for every other user, and the Grok Bot product page describes the bots as AI teammates that sign into your tools, keep their own computer, and come back with finished work. Authors who already pay for those plans can hand off research, outreach drafts, inbox triage, and website tasks this week, and everyone else can run the limited trial at x.ai/bot before they spend.

Sources:

Commentary

Thomas: Grok Bot is opening to more plans. You no longer needed the $200 Cursor plan. If you pay for Grok, you probably have Grok Bot now. Don't sleep on it.

Using Grok bot is like cleaning the house with your children. At first you teach them where the brooms and trash bags go, so it isn't an instant productivity boost, but over time the task goes faster.

However, a webmaster bot probably does make the work go faster right away. For a non-technical author, it might take five hours to do what Grok Bot does in 20 minutes. Most of the time it's like a Roomba, which is slower than vacuuming yourself, but it frees you to do something else. Start playing with GrokBot now, so you're not spinning up a dozen tasks at once later, which burns a lot of usage.

And You Thought Naming Your Characters Was Hard

Former Anchorage mayor Dan A. Sullivan endorsed GOP Sen. Dan S. Sullivan over retired teacher Dan J. Sullivan in Alaska's Senate race, according to NBC News on August 23, 2026. The mayor called himself "the OG Dan Sullivan" and urged Alaskans to vote for the senator after an all-party primary that put Democrat Mary Peltola at 48%, Sen. Dan S. Sullivan at 43%, and Dan J. Sullivan at 2.4%. Give every character a name a reader can hold on one pass, because three men named Dan Sullivan now share Alaska's ranked-choice Senate ballot.

Sources:

Commentary

Thomas: I think Dan Sullivan is going to win this race. I just don't know which Dan Sullivan.

Technology

Publisher Rocket Team Ships Novel Report, a 22-Page Amazon Listing Plan

According to Novel Report, the Publisher Rocket team now sells a done-for-you analysis that reads your manuscript and returns a 22-page Amazon listing plan. You drop the file into their engine. The PDF tells you how to fill all 7 KDP keyword boxes, which categories to pick, what subtitle to test, what description to paste, which titles Amazon is likely to treat as your neighbors, and which phrases to load into Amazon Ads.

According to an email from Iara Rudy of the Novel Report team on Monday, August 24, 2026, first-time buyers get 50% off the first report. Reply to Iara at iara@novelreport.com for the code. An affiliate program is coming. The commission terms stay unpublished.

What the Report Contains

The 22-page sample report walks through three keyword layers: targeted descriptive phrases sized for the 7 KDP boxes, genre and topic terms, and category-anchoring phrases scored for relevancy and conversion. It then splits category picks across Kindle ebooks, paperbacks, and Audible. It names categories to avoid. It flags slots with the strongest path to a bestseller tag. It offers multiple subtitle options, a hooked description, an alternate description, and a back-cover blurb.

The sample also lists Amazon's perceived similar books so you can point ads at those ASINs, plus a dedicated Amazon Ads keyword section. The order form repeats that payload: keywords, categories, book descriptions, and ad keywords.

How the Workflow Runs

Novel Report lays out four steps. Upload the manuscript. The system reads the book against Publisher Rocket's Amazon market data. A report lands. You use it on your own title or hand it to a client. The homepage promises delivery within a day, while the order form tells buyers to expect results within 3 business days. Files move through encrypted upload, automatic deletion after processing, and a pipeline the company says it never uses for training.

The site claims 14.7 million profitable Amazon keywords tracked, 14,000-plus categories mapped, 8 hours of research saved per book, and 11,000-plus customers already using that data. Dave Chesson, CEO of Kindlepreneur, endorses the system on the same page. Tim Grahl, CEO of Story Grid, says he will run it on every book he touches.

White Label and Bulk

The PDF is intentionally neutral and white-label friendly. Publishing companies, marketing shops, and author-services firms can buy multiple reports through the publisher signup flow or contact the team for bulk pricing. That is the product pitch to anyone who sells metadata as a service.

What Authors Should Do This Week

If a launch sits on the calendar, order a report before you lock the 7 KDP boxes, the browse categories, and the subtitle. Open the sample PDF first so you know the format you are buying. Email Iara Rudy at iara@novelreport.com for the 50% first-report code from the August 24 message. If you already own Publisher Rocket at $199 lifetime, decide whether you want the software workflow or a per-title PDF you can paste. Service providers should price the white-label report against the hours they now burn on keyword and category research.

Sources:

Commentary

Thomas: Publisher Rocket is now competing directly with one of the 90 Patron Toolbox tools, and I suspect theirs is better, because they have data the Toolbox doesn't.

You upload your book and get a 22-page report on keywords, categories, and similar books. My Patron Toolbox can answer a lot of that from your book alone, but this report overlays your book with Amazon data on which categories are popping right now. It's at NovelReport.com, from Dave Chesson and his team. This is not an endorsement, because we haven't tried it.

Check it out and see if it works for you.

Meta Caps Teen Instagram Time After a Multibillion-Dollar State Settlement

According to the Associated Press, Meta agreed on Wednesday, August 26, 2026, to pay $17 billion and add child-safety measures on Facebook and Instagram to end a landmark trial over teen social media addiction. Meta's own newsroom puts the payment at approximately $18 billion and folds in a separate Texas deal. If you sell books to teens, or run ads toward parents of teens, the product changes matter more than the check.

What the States Extracted

Attorneys general from 47 states plus additional jurisdictions announced the deal while a federal jury trial was underway in Oakland. California Attorney General Rob Bonta said a bipartisan coalition of 51 attorneys general filed the proposed settlement, which still needs court approval as a consent judgment. U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is overseeing the case in the Northern District of California. Trial opened on August 18. Instagram head Adam Mosseri testified on August 25. Mark Zuckerberg was next in line for the stand. Twenty-nine states first sued in 2023 after Wall Street Journal reporting in 2021 on Instagram's documented harm to teenagers, especially teen girls.

The money is split by state. California stands to receive $1.5 billion to $2.1 billion. New Jersey expects at least $525 million. Massachusetts is in line for at least $366 million, and Virginia's share is $353 million. Meta booked $201 billion in 2025 revenue and denied the states' allegations.

How the Money Actually Moves

Payments run in annual installments over 10 years. States receive about 70 percent up front, roughly $12.7 billion. The remaining 30 percent, about $5.3 billion, releases only if YouTube and TikTok adopt a one-hour daily limit, night mode, and age-assurance measures, and each pays a matching sum. The New York Times reports a separate Texas settlement of about $1 billion. School-district and individual suits continue.

The Product Changes Authors Will Feel

Bonta said Meta must make the transformations within months, and an independent auditor will police compliance. There is a default two-hour daily cap across Facebook and Instagram combined, lifted only with a parent's permission, and time on multiple accounts counts toward the same clock. A default night block from midnight to 6 a.m. takes away Feed, Stories, Explore, and Reels during those hours. School-hours muting turns push notifications off from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., and Bonta's office also lists default notification blocks from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. and during the school year from August 15 to June 15. Prompts appear after every 15 minutes of continuous scrolling, then again at 60 and 90 minutes. Teens get default hidden like and reaction counts on their own posts and on other people's posts, a ban on cosmetic-procedure filters and extreme makeup filters, and an option for a non-personalized feed that parents can lock. Stronger age-assurance tools catch under-13 accounts and place 13-to-17 users into teen experiences even when the birthday on the account says adult. Direct messages stay outside the time limit, night block, and school mute, so teens can still message friends and family.

If Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube accept comparable terms, the daily cap drops to one hour for 10 years.

Why This Matters for Authors This Week

Teen Bookstagram and teen Facebook groups just lost hours of idle scroll. A launch post that used to ride likes and Reels recommendations now hits a two-hour ceiling, a dark window after midnight, and a like count the teen cannot see. YA and middle-grade campaigns that treat Instagram as a teen hangout will reach fewer sessions per day.

Age-assurance upgrades will reclassify accounts that listed an adult birthday. Ads and follow lists built on those accounts will shrink as Meta parks them in teen mode. Hidden likes strip social proof from teen-facing cover reveals and unboxings. A non-algorithmic feed option cuts the Reels lottery that some debut authors still treat as a discovery engine.

Parents gain new supervision tools, including alerts when a teen links a second account. Marketing that speaks to the parent who holds the password now sits closer to the purchase.

TikTok remains the larger teen discovery channel for books. Meta is betting the states will drag TikTok and YouTube into the same one-hour box. Watch that clause. A one-hour BookTok day would rewrite YA launch math overnight.

What to Do This Week and This Weekend

Pull your last 90 days of Instagram and Facebook ads and separate spend that targeted 13-to-17 interests from spend that targeted parents, teachers, and librarians. Rebuild teen-facing content for a shorter session: one clear hook, one link in bio or a DM keyword, one reason to leave the app for a newsletter or a retailer. Move proof and urgency onto channels teens and parents still control after the cap, such as email, school and library events, Bookshop.org lists, and parent Facebook groups on adult accounts. If you write YA, draft a parent-facing page that explains the book in one screen, because the adult with the override code is now part of the funnel. Keep DMs in the plan, since the settlement leaves messaging open. And track whether TikTok or YouTube signal talks with state attorneys general, because that is the $5.3 billion trigger and the one-hour threat.

Chief Legal Officer C.J. Mahoney said Meta calls on TikTok and YouTube to adopt the same framework right away. Authors who still treat those three apps as interchangeable teen storefronts should treat this week as the start of a narrower door.

Sources:

Commentary

Thomas: Zuckerberg did not want to testify. His attitude was, "Whatever we have to pay, pay it." They got a great deal. The states wanted tobacco-lawsuit type money, in the hundreds of billions, and Facebook basically said, how about $18 billion now and we call it a day. The AGs said fine. They should have made him testify first and agreed to the deal the next day.

This could trigger a feeding frenzy of other companies getting sued and settling, partly because how much Facebook pays depends on how many others companies settle too. Facebook pays more if they settle, so it's incentivizing the AGs to go get those deals.

The worst case for Facebook is TikTok refusing, winning in court, and never taking the two-hour limit. The cap is daily across Facebook and Instagram combined, not per platform. So a teenager can spend two hours on Instagram, then two on TikTok, then two on YouTube.

Jonathan: Those aren't connected, so the clocks don't share.

Thomas: Right. As a cap per company, it does nothing for teen addiction. There are enough platforms to switch between that a kid can still spend all day zonked out on social media. What Facebook ultimately wants is a shared pool, where 20 minutes on Facebook is 20 minutes you can't spend on TikTok.

What would actually help teenagers is two hours on a screen and then going outside. The problem is they can't ride their bikes around town anymore, because the old ladies in the neighborhood won't allow it. They see kids outside unsupervised and call the cops.

I'm a little terrified of the old ladies in my neighborhood calling the cops on my kids. But they won't call if the kids are inside on the Xbox or zonked out on TikTok. Let kids be kids. Let them ride a bike or a little electric scooter without a helmet. That's far safer for the kid and for society than being inside all day on a screen.

Facebook is also backhanding a lot of regulation into this settlement. Big players want regulation, because the more Facebook weasels into the deal, the harder it is to build the next Facebook, and the more its monopoly locks in forever. Same as Bill Gates writing a desperate plea for AI regulation. He frames it as, AI is so dangerous that governments need to protect people from it, which means regulation, which means protecting Microsoft from competition, because Copilot isn't good enough to survive without it.

Jonathan: Bill Gates was asking for more AI regulation last week.

Thomas: We'll see a lot more lawsuits against big tech. They really did build their platforms to be addictive, on purpose. It wasn't an accident.

This is one of the more evil uses of AI, because the algorithm running the Facebook feed was tuned to maximize addiction. With machine learning, you set the success criteria, and Facebook's answer key was more time on Facebook. The more addicted the user, the more the machine is rewarded. So whatever addicts young people wins.

There's a strange hypocrisy in our society. We call something dangerous and addictive for children, then act like it's fine for adults. You turn 18 and suddenly tobacco, social media, and gambling aren't a problem. Nothing changed. It's just as addictive and just as damaging for a 40-year-old woman as for a 14-year-old girl. The algorithm hijacks you at whatever age you are.

Jonathan: If you're a 40-year-old woman, you just have 25 years of bad decisions keeping you locked in.

Thomas: What I really wanted was for Facebook to turn off its most addictive features, like infinite scroll and the like button. You can do it yourself. I did when I was purging Facebook. Go deep into the settings and turn off the like button. You could even have your Claude MCP do it, ask for the settings that make Facebook less addictive, then tell it to use your browser and toggle them all, because Facebook makes those options almost impossible to find.

There's no single privacy toggle. They give you a thousand toggles, each doing something different, on purpose. It's called a dark pattern, and AIs are exceptionally good at navigating dark patterns, because they don't share human psychology and aren't manipulated the same way.

OpenAI Says Its First Chip Outruns Nvidia on ChatGPT Work

According to an X post by OpenAI on August 25, 2026, the company finished lab tests on Jalapeño, its first custom inference chip, and called the results a major advance in work per watt and response speed. The same thread points authors to OpenAI's first-results page, where the company names Nvidia's GB200 and GB300 as the comparison systems and posts the numbers. Sam Altman put the pitch in six words on his own X account: we made a chip and it is fast.

What OpenAI Published

Jalapeño is an inference chip. It runs finished models when a reader asks ChatGPT a question or when Codex writes a line of code, while training new models stays on partner accelerators, including Nvidia. Across GPT-OSS 120B, DeepSeek R1 670B, and Kimi K2.5 1T, OpenAI reports 1.5 to 1.9 times more AI work per watt at peak throughput and 1.7 to 3.6 times lower end-to-end latency than the comparison systems, with interactive workloads showing a 2.1 to 4.1 times gain. OpenAI rates Jalapeño at 700 watts, with measured sustained power at or below 550 watts on the tested jobs, and lists Nvidia's GB200 at 1,200 watts and GB300 at 1,400 watts. On DeepSeek R1, OpenAI posts 1.65 seconds of end-to-end latency against 5.99 seconds on the GB300 setup, and about 700 tokens per second per user against 169. On GPT-OSS 120B, the page lists 85,448 mixed tokens per second per kilowatt against 44,960 on GB200.

OpenAI and Broadcom unveiled Jalapeño on June 24, 2026 after a nine-month path from first design to manufacturing tape-out. Celestica builds the boards and racks. Microsoft sits among the data-center partners named for gigawatt-scale rollout. Richard Ho, OpenAI's head of hardware, told TechCrunch the results show a very significant performance advance over the state of the art. He said the first chips enter OpenAI's own infrastructure in very small volumes by the end of 2026, with a larger ramp in 2027. The X thread adds that Gen 2 is deep in development and Gen 3 is taking shape.

Why Authors Care

Faster answers change the writing loop. A 1.7 to 3.6 times drop in wait time, if it reaches ChatGPT and Codex, turns a drafting session from stop-and-wait into something closer to a conversation. Inference is the bill authors pay every time they generate a blurb, outline a chapter, or run an agent across research tabs, so cheaper tokens per watt give OpenAI room to hold prices, raise limits, or ship heavier agents at the same subscription. OpenAI's June announcement frames the chip as part of a full-stack bet on products, models, and now silicon, and a company that owns more of that stack can move ChatGPT, Codex, and the API on its own timetable. Volume stays small through the rest of 2026, so authors who feel today's rate limits will see the first relief in 2027 if the rack count grows the way Ho described. OpenAI says it will keep deploying Nvidia and other partner chips for training and inference, so the Nvidia relationship funds the next model while Jalapeño funds the next answer.

What to Do This Week

Keep your ChatGPT, Codex, and API workflows as they stand, because the year-end drop is a lab-to-rack start, not a consumer flip. Watch API pricing, rate limits, and Codex session length after January 2027, since those three dials tell you whether the watt savings reached authors. Budget 2027 tool spend with a cheaper-inference case, because a faster agent that costs the same as today's chatbot changes how much research, metadata, and draft labor you buy from a machine. Track which writing apps sit on OpenAI's API versus other model hosts, since the chip race will show up first as speed and uptime on one stack.

Sources:

Commentary

Thomas: This isn't as big a deal as they'd like you to believe, because OpenAI can't make the chip. The bottleneck isn't chip design. Nvidia will ship a GB400 faster than this. The problem is that we, as Americans, stopped making chips. Apple doesn't make computers, it designs them. Flip your iPhone over, "Designed by Apple in California, made in China."

The problem with AI isn't the designed-in-California part. We love the people in California. It's the made-in-China part, or made in India, as Apple diversifies away from China.

The bottleneck is the specific memory chips that are measured in gigabytes. It's a lot like the chip shortage around 2020 and 2021, when automotive companies canceled orders, lost their place in line, and couldn't get it back, because chip manufacturing capacity is limited.

Amazon Auto-Enrolled Your Sponsored Products off Amazon on August 10

According to BookAds Weekly issue 6, dated Thursday, August 13, 2026, Brian Berni at BookAds flagged a change Amazon started on Monday, August 10. Amazon opened Sponsored Products to premium sites, apps, and Amazon Influencer Program creator content. Existing campaigns kept their bids and budgets. Amazon enrolled those campaigns by default. Clicks still land on your Amazon product page. The money comes out of the same campaign budget you set for search and product-page traffic.

What Amazon Changed on August 10

PPC Land reported on August 4 that Amazon updated its off-Amazon help page that day and set August 10 as the start date for creator placements. Amazon's own Understand Sponsored Products page now says campaigns extend by default to premium sites, apps, and creators. Creators in the Influencer Program browse eligible ASINs, choose titles that match their audience, and earn on qualifying clicks through affiliate links. TechTimes, published August 11, reported the creator layer applied to campaigns already set to Increase reach, while campaigns already set to Limit off-Amazon spend stayed off that new inventory. The United Kingdom sat outside the creator rollout.

The Two Settings That Decide Where Your Money Goes

Amazon's off-Amazon advertising help page puts the control under Campaign settings, then Settings for ads served off Amazon. Increase reach is the default, and Amazon uses your targeting to buy more off-Amazon impressions. Limit off-Amazon spend throttles delivery off Amazon, and Amazon says that choice can cut impressions and sales opportunities.

Berni's August 13 issue also pointed authors to deny lists. PPC Land confirmed advertisers can exclude specific creators and can block specific sites or apps through deny-list preferences. Amazon still reviews and blocks unsafe third-party sites on its own.

Bidding Rules That Break on the Way off Amazon

Your maximum bid still caps every click, on Amazon or off it, and dynamic bidding still runs off Amazon. But Amazon withholds Top of Search and Product Page bid adjustments from off-Amazon placements, and every off-Amazon click draws from the same campaign budget as your on-Amazon clicks. That last rule is the trap. A 50% Top of Search boost you set for shoppers already typing a genre term does nothing for a Pinterest or creator placement. The click still bills at your max bid.

How to See the Damage

Amazon's Sponsored Products placement report is the official source for off-Amazon store metrics. Pull that report. Look for the Off Amazon row beside Top of Search, Rest of Search, and Product Pages. Compare cost, clicks, and sales on that row before you raise another bid. US advertisers have had a bulk lever since June 8, when Amazon added an Off-Amazon ad serving column to Sponsored Products bulksheets. Use that column if you run more campaigns than you can click through by hand.

What Authors Should Do This Week

Open every live Sponsored Products campaign and read the off-Amazon setting, then switch campaigns that exist to harvest search intent to Limit off-Amazon spend. Add a deny list for sites and creators that waste clicks. Download a placement report covering August 10 forward and isolate Off Amazon spend. Leave Increase reach on only for campaigns you built to find new readers outside the store, then watch ACoS on that slice alone.

Why the August 13 Issue Put This Next to Two Other Numbers

The same BookAds issue pointed to a working paper that explains the cost of sloppy reach. Chakrabarty, Liu, Ginsburg, and Dhillon studied 14,419 self-published genre-fiction titles on Amazon from 2023 through June 2026. Titles with observed sales in a quarter grew 19.2-fold. Quarterly revenue grew 8.9-fold. More selling books chased a slower pile of dollars, and off-Amazon inventory pours your budget into that thicker catalog. The same issue pointed to BookBub's own yardstick so authors stop judging ads on noise. Audrey Derobert's August 13 BookBub Insights post tells advertisers to wait for 1,000 impressions before they trust the rest of the stats. Advertisers who hit their goals report click-through rates from well under 1% to well above 10%. A thin sample on a new off-Amazon surface will lie to you.

Your August 10 budget has already been shopping off the store. Open the setting before the next billing cycle closes.

Sources:

Commentary

Thomas: Increasing reach is a scary phrase, because reach doesn't make you money. Reach makes Amazon money, because more reach means more clicks. You want more conversions, not more reach.

Say your total addressable market is 100,000 people who bought a book in your genre in the last year. A tool that grows your reach from 100,000 to a million is now hitting people outside that market.

Amazon, Facebook, and everyone selling ads has a massive constellation of humans and bots to sell to, so they push the biggest possible circle. Advertisers want the smallest circle of the right people.

Jonathan: One important detail. You can build a deny list, excluding specific creators or blocking specific sites and apps. That matters if you have a hate-reader, or an influencer who profits off negativity, someone dedicated to badmouthing all your books. I could see Larry Correia wanting that. Or if you don't want influencers based in India, Singapore, or Serbia, you put them on a deny list.

Thomas: This is Amazon's off-Amazon advertising, its answer to the Google AdSense ecosystem, placing ads on people's blogs. I don't know how many authors actually use it.

Zeitgeist Report

Non-Cozy Female Detectives Now Move Nearly 13,000 Copies a Day on Kindle

According to the August 2026 K-lytics Female Detectives & Sleuths Market Report, the non-cozy corner of female-protagonist mystery, thriller, suspense, and crime fiction on Kindle now moves an estimated 12,978 copies every day. That figure comes from a virtual bestseller list built on 90-day average sales ranks across more than 2,100 carefully filtered titles. The report deliberately excludes cozy mysteries and books that lead with psychological or domestic thriller positioning.

Market Size and Money

The full analyzed set of 2,121 titles generates roughly $1.1 million in estimated author royalties per month. The top 20 books average 148 copies sold or borrowed per day and about $12,169 in monthly royalties. Titles ranked 21 to 100 still average 47 copies per day and nearly $4,000 a month, and even the 101 to 500 band clears about 24 copies a day.

Women's Sleuths Category Shows Clear Rebound

The dedicated Women's Sleuths bestseller list spent years sliding after the pandemic. Average sales rank of its top 20 titles has now turned upward through 2025 and into 2026. Those top 20 currently sit at an average rank of 357, good for roughly 223 sales or borrows per day per title. That places the category ninth among the lists most used by successful female-detective books.

Supply Spike Meets Rising Demand

New title volume in this non-cozy slice stayed relatively flat for most of the last decade. From mid-2024 onward the monthly count of new Kindle releases climbed sharply, especially inside Kindle Unlimited. K-lytics links the surge in part to generative AI tools. At the same time, Google search interest for the term "female detective" has risen dramatically, a 200 percent climb over the past two years.

What Authors Should Do Right Now

Study the categories that actually appear on the top-performing titles, which are Women's Sleuths, Police Procedurals, Murder, and Serial Killers. Series remain the dominant model among the highest-ranked books. Cover trends favor "no person" designs and silhouette or back-view figures over full-face portraits. Pricing, page count, and keyword patterns from the report's Top 100 database give the clearest current map of what readers reward. The increased supply means differentiation now matters more than ever, because a sharp professional investigator or a non-charming amateur sleuth still finds buyers, but the middle of the pack has grown more crowded.

The non-cozy female detective market is large, recovering, and still less transparent than cozy. Authors who treat the 90-day data instead of single-day ranks gain the cleaner signal.

Sources:

Commentary

Thomas: My daughter is getting into this with Nancy Drew. It's an evergreen genre going back to Miss Marple. Mystery is one of the genres most immune to zeitgeist trends. The desire for order and for solving a puzzle is universal. It doesn't come and go.

Maybe when crime is high or people feel unsafe there's more appetite for it, but how unsafe you feel has nothing to do with actual crime rates and everything to do with how much news you watch. Watch the news every night at 10 and you'll never go to bed feeling safe.

Jonathan: Mysteries are about figuring out who did it, not stopping crime in the act like Batman, so I don't think they follow crime rates. It's about pulling a thread and seeing where it leads.

It's interesting that the non-cozy stuff is spiking, because cozy was dominant for so long, and now people want the hard-bitten female sleuth. I wonder what's driving it.

Thomas: Part of it may be the Charlie Kirk case and several other big murder cases in the news. They had the same kind of moment during the O.J. Simpson year, when the trial was primetime television every day.

Jonathan: And what are the commentator accounts doing right now? Who did it, here's the evidence, here's the footage, what do you think? That may be driving it. The female-sleuthing angle could just be the number of authors working in it.

Thomas: It's also easy to overread one super-successful author. That's the challenge with aggregate data like K-lytics. A category can look up a thousand copies a day when 950 of those are one book. You have to tease out whether it's a trend or one author executing really well.

Jonathan: Alex's recommendation is to use the 90-day data instead of single-day ranks for a clearer read on the trend.

Thomas: Get the full report at K-lytics.com (Affiliate Link). It's a super-safe, enduring genre, but very crowded.

Some people do make money writing in the genre, but to make it here you have to dedicate your life to the genre. This isn't a hobby genre, or even a write-to-market genre. It's one where you've put in the blood, sweat, and tears, gone to the dojo, and gotten really good.

You must understand why the successful people are good, and then do it even better. You can't say these books are awful and you'll write something better. They're not awful. The thousands who buy them every day disagree, and if they disagree, they won't read you.

Readers want the normal kind of story done better than what they already have. They don't want your weird, exotic, genre-blending thing.

Jonathan: What's the Venn diagram with romance? The report doesn't say. Is this riding one wave or reacting to the last one? Cozy is being infected by a lot of AI writing right now, a fake-cozy feel people are starting to find disgusting. It's not what they came for.

Thomas: There's a kind of cozy buyer who isn't AI-sophisticated, can't spot AI writing, and gobbles it up, and I know people making a lot of money that way. It's easy to sneer that a video is obviously AI, so why watch it, and the answer is, because it's what they want to watch. People are tired of being told, don't read that, it's AI, don't watch that, it's AI. The constant shrieking becomes background noise. What AI is really good at is the normal kind, about as good as all the other normal kind.

Few authors will just follow their genre's rules, especially new ones, who all want to innovate. You haven't earned the right to innovate until you can write a non-innovative bestseller, the normal kind. You have to make basic Kraft mac and cheese before the fancy version. My kids won't even eat the mac and cheese at Chick-fil-A. It's too fancy. They want the normal kind.

I can predict an author's success with one question: "How many books in your genre have you read in the last month?" If it's zero, they won't be very successful, because they're not a fan. They think they're better than the genre, or want to fix it, and they lack the humility.

The worst is Christian fantasy, because Christian fantasy authors don't read modern Christian fantasy. They're convinced the others are idiots and that they're the true heir of Tolkien and Lewis, and they can't name a single author in the gap between Lewis and themselves. They insist on ignorance.

Clean Comedy Just Took the Guinness Record

According to Guinness World Records, Nate Bargatze sold 2,045,040 tickets on his "Big Dumb Eyes" World Tour, the most tickets ever sold for a stand-up comedy tour. Guinness dated the record to August 16, 2026, in Toronto, across 129 venues from April 6, 2025 to August 16, 2026. USA TODAY reports Guinness presented the certificate onstage at Scotiabank Arena and updated the listing on its site.

How the Record Looked Before the Certificate

Ethan Shanfeld's August 15 exclusive in Variety had the tour at approximately 2,016,254 tickets ahead of the Toronto show, already past Jeff Dunham's "Spark of Insanity" mark of 1,981,720. Variety said the final certificate number would be confirmed later that weekend. Guinness posted 2,045,040.

Pace and Rooms

Variety's comparison still explains the appetite. Dunham sold 1,981,720 tickets across 386 venues from September 13, 2007 through August 21, 2010, a run of 35 months and 8 days. Bargatze crossed 2 million after 16 months and 10 days. Variety counted 128 venues before the Toronto close. Guinness certified 129. Variety added that there were no puppets on the Bargatze tour. His reps told Variety he broke 84 venue records and became the only comedian to sell out 3 consecutive performances at Nashville's Bridgestone Arena in a single calendar year, a feat Variety says is matched only by Taylor Swift and Garth Brooks.

What Audiences Paid For

Variety describes Bargatze's "clean, deadpan comedy" as the style that made him famous among all age groups. USA TODAY calls it a clean comedy act. Guinness notes the dry delivery and family-friendly style. Variety, citing Pollstar, named him the highest-grossing stand-up comic of 2025, with $77.5 million reported that year. The author take is inference from those ticket counts and those clean-comedy descriptions, not a survey.

What Authors Should Take From the Room

Authors who write for mixed-age readers now have a live-ticket receipt. Clean material filled arenas at record scale. Variety also notes Bargatze's movie "The Breadwinner" earlier this year and plans for a $350 million Tennessee theme park called Nateland. The record is the story. The author move this week is to watch what that audience already proved it will buy.

Sources:

Commentary

Thomas: The days of obnoxious, in-your-face, cussing comedy are over. Clean comedy is king.

Why should authors care? Because it's forward-looking. Comedians are the modern prophets. They point out hypocrisy, point out sin, point out the things that make people uncomfortable, and often those inconsistencies are what's funny. Comedians venture the farthest from the pack, and when one starts howling, the whole pack moves that way. You can learn a lot about where society will be in five or 10 years by looking at where comedy is now. It's a leading cultural indicator.

Over the last five to 10 years, comedy has shifted hard to the right. Previously liberal comedians like Joe Rogan are now conservative. There's always been demand for clean comedy, from Bill Cosby to Brian Regan.

The idea that people prefer cussing comedy is wrong. The comedy-store crowd wants the edgier, riskier stuff, but the regular arena-goer doesn't want anything nearly that offensive.

Nate Bargatze has that classic, self-deprecating style, and it's resonating. He's not edgy at all, and a lot of his jokes are about family life. I

 think we'll see this move toward clean in fiction more and more. Some people will always want open-door content, but in aggregate the demand for foul language and explicit content is going down, and I think we peaked on that a few years ago.

Jonathan: Do you think it's because families are increasing, so more demand for family content, given the push for more kids?

Thomas: On the right, yes. On the left, they're just as anti-natalist as before.

Jonathan: That'll die itself out until it gets converts from the side having kids.

I remember watching comedians with my parents, and the worst we dealt with was a couple of cuss words. Now I'm hunting for old comedy videos to watch with my kids, because you can't watch the modern comedians. Dry Bar Comedy is great. I can watch Dry Bar with my kids.

Thomas: Bill Cosby's Chicken Heart and Chocolate Cake routines are still some of the funniest stand-up ever, and I'll die on that. Cosby the man is not a role model, but those routines were very funny.

Dolly Parton Died, and the Country Mourned as One

According to an X post by Nathan McDermott on August 25, 2026, President Donald Trump and the Democratic Socialists of America published condolences for Dolly Parton in the same news cycle. McDermott placed the two statements side by side and wrote, "We probably won't ever see anything like this for the rest of our lives."

What Happened

Dolly Parton died on August 25, 2026, at age 80, according to Associated Press reporting by Kristin M. Hall and Andrew Dalton. Publicist Marcel Pariseau said she died at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in Nashville after a brief battle with cancer, surrounded by loved ones.

President Trump wrote on Truth Social that Parton was "one of the greatest Country singers, and far beyond, EVER," then ordered American flags lowered for one week beginning at 6:00 p.m. on August 25. Hours later, the Democratic Socialists of America called her "a hero of the working-class and an inspiration to us all." An X reply from Andy Flattery named her "the last person that everybody liked."

Parton told Jad Abumrad on the podcast Dolly Parton's America, quoted by the AP, "I don't do politics. I have too many fans on both sides of the fence." Politico reported she declined the Presidential Medal of Freedom from the first Trump administration and later said she would decline the same honor from the Biden administration.

The publishing story sits under the rhinestones. In 1995 she launched Dolly Parton's Imagination Library in Sevier County, Tennessee, as a tribute to her father, who struggled to read. The program mails one free, age-appropriate book each month to registered children from birth to age 5. A child who stays enrolled builds a home library of up to 60 titles. The first book is The Little Engine That Could. The last is Look Out Kindergarten, Here I Come!

As of this week the Imagination Library homepage counted 332,411,218 books gifted and 3,197,250 children registered across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Republic of Ireland. In 2024 the program reached 1 in 7 U.S. children under age 5. Local partners pay an average of $2.60 per child per month for the book and the postage, according to The New York Times. Penguin Young Readers became the exclusive publishing partner in 2001, and Random House Children's Books joined after the 2012 merger.

A 2025 study led by Dr. Claire Galea surveyed more than 86,000 caregivers in five countries. After 10 books, children in the program were at least 4 times more likely to show stronger emerging literacy skills than children outside it.

Parton's family asked fans to honor her with money, not flowers. People reported the request: donations to Dolly Parton's Imagination Library at imaginationlibrary.com.

Why Authors Care

This is the largest sustained children's-book gifting engine in the English-speaking world, with more than 3.1 million living children meeting a new title that has their own name on the label. Early readers become later buyers, and the Imagination Library is a 31-year bet that a mailbox can create a reader before kindergarten. Children's authors write for a market this program feeds, and the 2026 U.S. list already sits on imaginationlibrary.com/usa/book-list. Local affiliates still need partners at $2.60 a child a month, so an author with a platform can fund a zip code.

What to Do This Week

Enroll a child at imaginationlibrary.com. Give at donate.imaginationlibrary.com. Find the affiliate that covers your town and ask what enrollment still needs. If you write for ages 0 to 5, study the current list, because those 60 slots are how millions of children first meet a book.

Sources:

Commentary

Thomas: This is the end of an era. It may never happen again in our lifetime. Dolly Parton may be the last person who's a hero to both sides.

Jonathan: The evidence is that President Donald Trump and the Democratic Socialists of America published condolences for her side by side on X. It showed up in the same place for a lot of people, and it's about the only thing those two have ever agreed on.

Thomas: And these were heartfelt condolences, not the perfunctory kind you give someone on the other side. If a senator like Lindsey Graham died, you'd see Democrats put out the stock "Thoughts and prayers for the family." That's not what happened here. The Democratic Socialists called her a hero of the working man, and Trump called her a hero for Americans and ordered the flags lowered.

Dolly represents a path to fame that no longer exists, which is sad but important, because you can't use her as a model for getting famous as an author. She made an effort to antagonize no one. Her brand was, I love you all the same. She refused to pick a side on any political issue. You didn't see her chanting "Free Palestine," and I don't think you saw her on the climate stuff. Her one big cause was literacy, tied to her own story, that her father was a very smart man who couldn't read. There's no way to criticize that. There's no gap for her enemies to exploit.

Jonathan: One in seven U.S. children under age five got a book from that program in 2024.

Thomas: I'm curious what happens to the program now that she's gone, because if it goes away, that's a huge hit for the authors whose books were featured in it.

Jonathan: Not just that, but literacy in general. That 2025 study of more than 86,000 caregivers found that after 10 books, children in the program were at least four times more likely to show stronger emerging literacy skills. The Imagination Library did incredible work. Someone reading your middle-grade novel, or your adult novel by now, could have started reading because of it.

Thomas: People don't realize Dolly was also a cultural prophet, calling out wickedness. She wouldn't take a partisan side, but she had one song that deserves to be shared, because you won't hear it on the radio.

The song imagines God looking down from a mountaintop in dismay, warning his children that if they don't pay attention, the consequences will be dire. It runs through politics, earthquakes, erratic weather, pandemics, war, and hate, and it lands as a direct call to repentance.

These are Hellfire-and-Brimstone lyrics, stronger than anything in a contemporary Christian song. Nashville has a whole apparatus to screen this kind of directness out of Christian music. Part of why she got away with it is that nobody tells Dolly Parton no, and part is that the music is friendly, happy, and light, so it's a surprisingly catchy song.

She's a genuinely talented musician. She'd play live and make up songs on the spot, which you never see from a Taylor Swift.

There's an intensity to it. It's a warning, and I think a true one. There's nothing in it I wouldn't expect in the Book of Jeremiah or Ezekiel. This is classic Old Testament prophecy, not predicting the future, but calling out sin and calling a nation to repentance. It's a song calling America to repentance, which you don't get from Christian music, but you got it from Dolly Parton.

Jonathan: I'll disagree on one point. You said this path no longer exists, that not choosing sides is no longer a route to popularity. I don't agree.

As a sergeant, I had people under me who believed vastly different things than I did. I had a trans Marine going through the transition while she was under me, and I wrote her evaluations. What they always told me was that they appreciated that I was fair, that I wouldn't punish them for their beliefs, no matter how vocally those beliefs were expressed.

You can just love your Marines, all of them, and that will always be appreciated. Dolly claimed all people. If you love your people, that generates loyalty, which generates popularity. To say that can't work anymore because everyone's so divided, I don't agree. We're already seeing fatigue with division and war. People get tired of fighting, but they don't get tired of love. Dolly was consistent in the intensity of the love she expressed, and that's eternal. It's hard, because it's hard to love everyone consistently when they're yelling at you. She was a white woman and a country singer, so people assumed all kinds of things and attacked her whether she took a stance or not. It's hard to stay consistent when there's pressure to move.

Thomas: It takes a lot of discipline to ignore a lot of stuff. Dolly had that royal energy of waving to the haters and saying, I'm still your king, and I still love you. It's the royal family's approach. The people are booing, and they keep waving and smiling, because they're still the monarch and those are still their people.

She did seem to really love people. It's hard to sort someone's brand from their reality at a distance, but what I most respect is that she was married to one man for 50 years in her business. You just don't see that. Unlike Johnny Cash, she didn't go through a dark, obscure window. She was Dolly Parton start to finish, stayed married to the same man, and that's true love, something to respect.

My first commandment of book marketing is to love your reader as much as you love your book. The open question is whether you can walk her path of neutrality. Can you be politically neutral starting out?

Jonathan: Choosing love is not neutral, and I can't believe I'm the one making this argument. Politics are temporary. When you choose love, you're choosing something eternal in scale, and against eternity, Republican versus Democrat is barely a blip.

Thomas: But it's not really Republican versus Democrat. It's that Marxist unifying religion.

Jonathan: Which is still just a blip at scale. Love isn't a blip. Love creates a trend, and you can see where it's in ascendance. The people who choose it are beloved in perpetuity. She preached love and practiced it consistently. People who preach love but cheat on their spouse or embezzle undercut their own message, and people hate them for it, which is endemic in ministry. But the few who stay consistent have loyalty forever.

Thomas: Love is an undervalued asset in marketing and in writing. You can tell when an author doesn't love people by how they portray their characters. It's one reason I never cared for Far Side comics. The creator obviously doesn't love humans. Everyone is grotesque, with a dark, anti-humanistic spirit, and that only appeals to a certain kind of person in a certain season of life. The bug humor is good, though. I think the creator was an entomologist.

Walking the path of love is difficult. It means embracing suffering and taking the hard route. From my perspective, if you love humanity, you must fight Marxism and all its manifestations, because of how anti-human that religion is at its core.

Jonathan: But Dolly was very patriotic.

Thomas: She was, to America. She did USO work and wrapped herself in the flag. She had a 60-year career going back to her 1966 debut. She lived through the Cold War, 9/11, and a lot of America, and stayed consistent the whole way.

Jonathan: The lesson is not to let fear dictate how you treat your people. Dolly never sent a newsletter saying, because the president tweeted this, I'm not putting out a song. She made songs she loved, for people she loved, in a country she loved, with a family she loved. Everything was love.

Thomas: I'd love for her example to still work. She was discovered and made famous by gatekeepers. Johnny Carson was key to her breakout, and she wrote a whole song basically thanking him. She played guitar live, no teleprompter, no Auto-Tune. That's a level of musician your modern Taylor Swifts and Keshas don't reach.

Jonathan: She's also the iconic Appalachian woman. Bubbly, sweet, loving you automatically. The kind of person you call sweetheart no matter what. We miss that as a culture. Europeans at the World Cup told us Southern hospitality is insane, and I can't remember the last time I really experienced it.

Thomas: She was one of the few versions of Southern culture Hollywood found acceptable. Hollywood goes out of its way to give its villains Southern accents. It's a movie-ruining cliche once you notice it, because the good guy with the Southern accent turns out to be the betrayer at the end of act two. It's telegraphed from the casting.

Jonathan: Being underestimated is a fighting principle going back to Sun Tzu. If you don't have many guys, look like you have more. If you have a lot, look like fewer. You want to be underestimated before a fight, because it gives you an advantage. Dolly did that extremely well. She's so sweet people assume she has no edges, and then she sticks you with a zinger, then kisses it and makes it go away, so you never do it again.

Thomas: Her path is very different from the Charlie Kirk path. Both are prophetic voices calling out sin, but Dolly's approach is much more gentle and subtle.

Jonathan: Conflict-averse, I'd say.

Thomas: Although those lyrics were not conflict-averse. TobyMac tried a call-to-repentance song, and it was weak compared to Dolly's, and TobyMac is the king of contemporary Christian music. Part of that is how captured contemporary Christian music is by Marxism and its Gnostic sister sects. Christian publishing has the same problem. It's hard to get the hard-cutting stuff through. You can do the tame, happy, lovey-dovey material, but the real calls to repentance never get past the gatekeepers, so you have to find ways to do it even if it means going into the wilderness. Not all books need to be prophetic, and not all authors need to be prophets. We need priests and kings too, and the kings are the most likely to get away with using AI. Your book on how to run a business, written with AI, is fine if you're powerful enough and it works. If you're a prophet, maybe AI is not the way to go.

Jonathan: My final thought is, choose love. I can't believe I'm saying it.

I go to war because of love, so it doesn't look like the same thing. When it feels like everything is divisive, everything is war, and the storm is all around you, pull out. Widen your perspective, and see what the blips are and what the trend is.

Liked it? Take a second to support us on Patreon!
Become a patron at Patreon!

Leave a Reply

Want more help?

Get a weekly email with tips on building a platform, selling more books, and changing the world with writing worth talking about. 

You have Successfully Subscribed!