For week ending August 6, 2026
This week, Libro.fm adds ebooks across 5,000 indie stores, opening a brand-new sales channel away from Amazon. A $2 million debut novel just collapsed mid-auction over an AI authenticator’s results. HarperCollins reports 15% quarterly growth, and the numbers tell authors exactly where to focus. Fable hits five million users, which could mean a new angle for indie sales channels. And a peer-reviewed study finds AI fiction now controls almost 30% of Amazon’s genre catalog.
Publishing News
Libro.fm Adds Ebooks This Fall for Its 5,000+ Indie Bookstore Partners
According to Publishers Lunch, Libro.fm announced on August 7 that it will add ebooks to its platform soon. The move lets independent bookstores sell ebooks through the same app that already handles audiobooks. Every purchase continues to support the reader’s chosen indie bookshop.
According to Publishers Weekly, the company starts with a beta version this fall for its more than 5,000 independent bookstore partners worldwide. Consumer access follows in 2027 after booksellers test the tools and give feedback. Libro.fm CEO and cofounder Mark Pearson called ebooks “a natural next step.” He noted that the company is 100% employee-owned with no outside investors and treats booksellers as its investors.
Key features include flexible credits that work for either ebooks or audiobooks once the consumer launch arrives. LibroSync lets readers who own both formats toggle between them or follow the text while they listen. Booksellers receive digital advance reading copies of ebooks, matching the advance listening copies they already get for audiobooks. Member benefits expand to include exclusive ebook offers. Libro.fm prioritizes as many DRM-free ebooks as possible, and for broader selection it will use LCP, an open industry standard, so files stay downloadable and readable on devices that include Boox, InkBook, and PocketBook apps.
Publishing Perspectives reports the same timeline and adds that booksellers gain first access so the company can refine the experience before it reaches readers. Lee Hooyboer, Libro.fm’s senior manager of bookseller partnerships, said the beta phase lets the company “dial in to what indie bookstores need.”
Why it Matters for Authors.
Libro.fm already routes money away from Amazon-owned platforms and into local bookstores. Ebooks multiply that effect. Readers who already buy audiobooks through Libro.fm can now spend the same credits on ebooks and keep supporting their preferred indie. The LibroSync feature rewards dual-format purchases, which can lift total units sold per title. Booksellers armed with digital ARCs gain a stronger reason to recommend specific books to customers.
Authors with wide distribution stand to gain a new sales channel that favors independent retailers. Those whose ebooks currently reach major platforms should confirm availability with their distributors as the consumer launch approaches. Promote the Libro.fm option to readers who value local bookstores. The platform’s existing membership base already spends credits every month, and those credits now stretch across two formats.
Sources:
• Publishers Lunch: Libro.fm to Launch Ebooks Alongside Audiobooks
• Publishers Weekly: Libro.fm to Expand into E-books
• Publishing Perspectives: U.S. Digital Audiobook Platform Libro.fm Adds Ebooks
• Book Riot: Ebooks Are Coming to Libro.fm—With Exciting New Features
Commentary
Thomas: DRM-free means AI can consume those books and train on them. But there’s a real advantage to a DRM-free book. As somebody who runs a book club, when my book gets selected and I have to run the discussion, it would be nice to feed the book I purchased into an AI to generate starter questions that I’d then tweak. That’s really hard to do if there’s no DRM-free version.
The bigger story is that Amazon’s ebook dominance is a little like the Roman Empire. Libro.fm is a new steppe tribe that has emerged over the horizon to raid into Roman territory. Will they dethrone Amazon? No, they will not. Will they steal some treasure and get back to the steppe before anything can happen to them? Probably.
The more of these companies add legit competition to Amazon, the better, because competition is good for readers and good for authors. Libro.fm is competing for authors and for readers, and that’s a win-win. We don’t want any one company to have too much control, though Amazon is still the big dog in the industry.
Agents Pull $2 Million Crime Debut Over AI Authentication Failure
According to The Guardian, agents for Jerry Falade withdrew his debut crime novel Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body from sale last week after a reported offer of more than $2 million from Minotaur Books, an imprint of Macmillan, in a 14-way auction. The deal included a second book. HarperCollins secured U.K. rights. Publication was planned for 2028.
In an email to publishers, the agents wrote that Falade “produced an incredible manuscript that dazzled us and the top publishing professionals around the world.” They continued: “Unfortunately, we are no longer able to authenticate how the manuscript fully evolved from origin to completion. During the submission process we vetted the manuscript with Jerry for AI and felt trusting in his reassurance that it was written without utilizing AI as a resource in the writing or editorial process. We can no longer substantiate that, and we are withdrawing the book.”
Marc Gerald of Europa Content ran the U.S. auction. He told The Bookseller an editor raised AI concerns halfway through submissions. The agency chose not to run detection software at that point because Falade’s explanation appeared clear and credible. After a July 29 meeting in which “aspects of [Falade’s] story changed,” the agency cut ties, citing the need for total faith. Gerald called the book itself “genius, however it came to be drafted.”
Falade’s Response
Falade denies using AI to write the novel. In a Wall Street Journal interview, he said he used a local open-source AI model solely for research queries, such as chemicals that might dissolve a body or Americanized word choices. He has retained legal counsel. He also claimed racial bias, stating that three Black authors received major deals this year and later faced AI suspicions that disrupted those deals, while some white authors openly discuss AI use without similar fallout.
Hachette pulled Mia Ballard’s horror novel Shy Girl from U.S. publication and discontinued the U.K. edition after online allegations and internal review. Ballard denied personal AI use and pointed to an editor. H.M. Wolfe’s Daggermouth, acquired by Simon & Schuster in a seven-figure deal after self-publishing success, drew academic and media scrutiny over AI-detection scores. Both the author and publisher deny AI authorship, and the book proceeded to hardcover release.
How Pubishing Assings Value
Traditional publishing is treating the value of a book as if it comes primarily from the amount of human labor that went into it. If tools reduced that labor, the finished product is viewed as less legitimate, even when the sentences still work.
This is closer to a Marxist labor theory of value than most people in the industry would ever say out loud. In that framework, worth is tied to the toil. Reduce the toil and you reduce the value, regardless of the quality of the result.
Readers do not operate this way. They open a book and ask whether the story holds them. They do not ask how many hours the author spent staring at a blank page. Markets reward the finished product. Publishing’s current posture often rewards the story of how the product was made. That instinct protects a certain self-image. It is not a durable competitive strategy.
Sources:
• The Guardian: $2m crime novel deal collapses amid questions over AI use
• The Substack Post: An author’s $2 million book deal was pulled over suspected AI use
• New York Times: Horror Novel ‘Shy Girl’ Canceled Over Suspected A.I. Use
• The Atlantic: Is “Daggermouth” the First Bestselling AI Novel?
Commentary
Thomas: Running a local model means he was not using ChatGPT, Grok, or Claude. He was running one of the models on his own computer, locally, probably because he was looking into dangerous, illegal-sounding stuff that would have gotten him flagged on a hosted model.
Jonathan: He’s claiming racial bias, that three Black authors landed major deals this year and then faced AI suspicions that blew up those deals, while white authors openly discuss AI use without the same fallout. Traditional publishing is treating the value of a book as if it comes primarily from the human labor that went into it, and if tools reduced that labor, the finished product is suddenly less legitimate even when the sentences still work.
Thomas: This is the Marxist theory of value. Marx believed all value was directly tied to human labor, so a machine only adds value to the degree that labor went into building the machine. There is no room for beauty in that. You’ll notice communist countries don’t produce much beauty. The architecture isn’t pretty, the art isn’t pretty, and the music isn’t exactly taking over the world. What gives the book value, in this view, is the process that went into making it rather than its objective worth as a story and how appealing it is to readers.
Jonathan: But in the way traditional publishing currently operates, who the author is matters. That a Black man, an African, produced this genius work makes it more marketable. Here’s the problem: we only prize handcrafted work from certain cultures, and the moment we find out they used tools that look more industrialized, it loses the charm. That’s racist. This is awful.
Thomas: This U.K. publisher only wanted handcrafted African art. They didn’t want any tool use. Nigeria is an English-speaking nation, but it’s a different kind of English, and this author may not have spoken English at home. He may have English as a second language, and ESL authors tend to lean on AI to avoid the embarrassments of subject-verb agreement and the like, or for translation.
What’s a little unfortunate is that some of the beauty gets softened out. There are real beautiful turns of phrase that translate well, a cliche in your first language that no one’s ever heard in English. Having another first language can be an advantage as much as a disadvantage. And if he was running a local model, those aren’t very good at writing anyway. They’re not as powerful.
I want to reiterate this: the book got up to $2 million because it was a 14-way auction. Fourteen publishers were bidding against each other, and Minotaur Books won the auction the agency ran. That’s strong evidence the book was well written on its merits. All these publishers looked at it and said, “This is a good book.” But they only wanted the handcrafted African stuff. They didn’t care that it was good. They cared that it was handcrafted African.
Jonathan: It’s like how diamonds are only more valuable if an African child suffered to pull them out of the mine.
Thomas: It’ as though if it’s made in a Chinese factory, it’s not as valuable, but if an African child bled on the diamond, then it’s more valuable. These people don’t think of themselves as racist, though. They think of themselves as anti-racist, which is fascinating.
Also, agents aren’t your agents. It’s a misnomer that an agent operates on your behalf. Very often agents operate on behalf of the publisher, because while agents get paid when you get paid, they get paid by the publisher. Real estate has the same issue. The seller’s agent and the buyer’s agent both take a percentage of the sale price, so both have a financial incentive for the house to cost as much as possible. Literary agents don’t have an incentive to maximize the money their authors make. They have an incentive to maximize the relationship with the publisher.
15% of $2 million is significant money. But it’s not worth torching their relationship with the publisher, which is worth more. Think about what they did. They fell on their sword for the publisher against their own client. They could have let the publisher say, “This is an AI book, we’re kicking you off,” and Minotaur would have been the bad guy. Instead the agent is the bad guy, and because the agent is unnamed, the blame now falls on agents overall. I didn’t start this show intending it to become an anti-agent diatribe, but every single week there’s a new story about how agents are bad for authors. You’re supposed to be a sheepdog. Stop acting like a wolf.
Jonathan: I’m frustrated by how the acquisition was approached, because it was clearly approached on the merit of the author himself, who he was and what he represented. We have a genius story written by a man of color from another country, and suddenly we think it was done with tools, and now it downgrades him to “Nigerian scammer.” It was never based on what it should be based on, which is how many copies his book will sell.
Thomas: And how objectively good the book is. There’s another possibility here, too. They may have lost confidence in the book halfway through editing and then blamed AI. That’s what CEOs do when they need to do layoffs. Regular layoffs make you the bad guy, but AI layoffs make AI the bad guy, and your stock price goes up.
Jonathan: The Blizzard game studio was just in the news for downsizing, cutting HR and a lot of that overhead because they weren’t making good games, and they blamed AI optimization for it.
Thomas: Here’s what’s really unfortunate, and I’ll say it every time, because this isn’t a new story. I wouldn’t feel too bad for this author yet, because he has absolutely received financial harm from an unproven accusation, which sounds a lot like libel, slander, and defamation, torts you litigate in civil court. A
n agency willing to walk away from a $2 million contract is an agency with money in the bank to pay a lawsuit, and maybe the publisher too. He doesn’t have to win in court. He just has to sue, drag it out, start winning in the court of public opinion, which he’s already doing with the race angle, and settle. Then he can publish his book with somebody else. If the book is objectively good, it’ll still find an audience.
What’s lost is the mystique of him as this debut African author with a brilliant, unique voice. That’s been ruined by potential defamation from his own literary agent, who turned against him.
Jonathan: It’s not defamation, though, if there was no contract. It was mid-auction. Nothing had been locked in. The agents withdrew it, which is him withdrawing it. The bidding had gone up, and the $2 million was the last offer, from Minotaur. It could have gone higher.
Thomas: That’s a great anchor price for a jury. They had an offer. They hadn’t signed, but they had an offer, and the $2 million was yanked away. His reputation was yanked away. His ability to go somewhere else was yanked away. He can sue his agent, and the agent can pay. I bet he gets his pound of flesh from this agency. The easiest money in this business right now is suing people who falsely accuse you of using AI.
HarperCollins Posts 15% Fourth-Quarter Revenue Jump as News Corp Closes Strong Fiscal 2026
According to News Corp’s official results release, News Corporation reported fourth-quarter revenues of $2.34 billion for the period ended June 30, 2026, an 11% increase from $2.11 billion a year earlier. Net income from continuing operations surged 167% to $230 million. Full-year revenues climbed 7% to $9.03 billion, with net income from continuing operations up 15% to $743 million and Total Segment EBITDA up 15% to $1.63 billion. Free cash flow rose 42% to $811 million.
HarperCollins delivers the standout publishing numbers. Book Publishing revenue hit $566 million in the fourth quarter, a 15% gain from $494 million, according to the News Corp release and Publishers Weekly coverage. Full-year sales reached $2.288 billion, up 6% from $2.149 billion. Segment EBITDA for the year fell 3% to $287 million from $296 million.
What drove the growth. A strong frontlist in General Books, children’s publishing, and the U.K. carried the quarter. Rachel Reid’s Game Changer series, including Heated Rivalry, delivered sustained sales across the year. Additional fourth-quarter titles that performed included Sarah A. Parker’s The Ballad of Falling Dragons, J.D. Vance’s Communion, and Ann Patchett’s Whistler. Christian publishing posted solid full-year results. Digital revenues rose 12% in the fourth quarter, with audiobook sales up 16%. Full-year digital sales increased 4% and represented 23% of consumer revenue. Backlist contributed 60% of consumer revenues in the fourth quarter.
Profit pressure came from one-time hits. The earnings decline stemmed from a $13 million write-off tied to the closure of Baker & Taylor and a $16 million inventory write-off at HarperCollins’s international operations. Higher costs from increased sales volume and employee expenses also weighed on the margin.
Inflation reality check. The U.S. Consumer Price Index rose 3.5% over the 12 months ended June 2026, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. HarperCollins’s 6% full-year nominal revenue gain therefore delivered real growth of roughly 2.5 percentage points after inflation. The 15% fourth-quarter jump cleared the inflation bar more comfortably and showed the power of a concentrated frontlist.
CEO Robert Thomson on the bigger picture. Thomson called Book Publishing one of the company’s three core growth engines alongside Digital Real Estate Services and Dow Jones. He highlighted News Corp’s content value in the AI era, noting trusted relationships with OpenAI and Meta while promising aggressive legal action against unauthorized use of the company’s work. Digital revenue already accounts for 61% of News Corp’s total.
What authors should do now. Prioritize strong audio editions; audiobook growth of 16% in the quarter outpaced e-books and shows where the incremental dollars are landing. Study the Game Changer model, since series with sustained multi-title momentum continue to outperform single-title frontlist bets. Factor write-offs and cost pressure into contract talks, because even a 6% sales gain can produce lower profits when inventory and distributor issues hit. Watch HarperCollins’s fiscal 2027 frontlist; management flagged upcoming books by Sylvester Stallone, James Patterson, Barbara Kingsolver, and Cher as catalysts for easier year-over-year comparisons. And treat the real-growth number as the true signal, because a publisher that clears inflation by only a couple of points still faces pressure on advances and marketing spend in the next cycle.
HarperCollins closed the year with clear sales momentum and digital acceleration. The profit dip from one-time charges does not erase the underlying strength. Authors who align with the formats and series that drove these results stand to capture more of the upside in the year ahead.
Sources:
• News Corp: Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year Results for Fiscal 2026
• Publishers Weekly: Sales Up, Profits Down at HarperCollins in Fiscal 2026
• Bureau of Labor Statistics: Consumer Prices Up 3.5 Percent Over the Year Ended June 2026
Commentary
Thomas: Big News Corp owns Fox News and HarperCollins and a million other things, so we’re drilling down to the publishing piece we care about. News Corp doing well doesn’t necessarily mean HarperCollins is doing well, but here HarperCollins is driving the growth for News Corp.
J.D. Vance does not have a dagger next to his entry on the New York Times bestseller list. Several politicians we’ve covered recently have daggers by his title which indicates bulk book buys. I’d bet Vance did it the hard way. He did so much press for that book, including going into very hostile environments. He went on The View, which has been attacking him personally for years, and sat right between all those ladies and just took it. He earned best-selling status the hard way.
That’s real encouragement for anybody doing marketing. Going on hostile programming, which Vance did a lot of during his book tour, helped drive sales enough to move the numbers not just for his publishing house but for its parent company. I have a whole episode on Novel Marketing on how to handle a hostile media interview, because I’ve done hostile media myself. If you know what you’re doing, it can go very well. Vance did a very good job on The View, and by the end he’d basically made friends with them. They even exchanged gifts on screen.
Publishing is not about the middle-of-the-road books. Those don’t drive these numbers. Five or six smash-hit bestsellers do. Heated Rivalry sold like crazy, and that one book is worth probably 80% of the rest of their catalog combined. Having hits is everything.
Jonathan: They put out good books. That’s all you have to do. And presenting themselves well also boosts consumer and industry confidence at the same time, which helps maintain growth, because perception matters a lot here. With the market viewing them well, they’ll land more of those hits.
Thomas: When they do these earnings reports, they always put their best foot forward and say a lot of positive-sounding things, and it’s easy for journalists to get bamboozled.
Revenue was up, but their actual net profits were down. Some of that is one-time write-offs, like the $13 million from Baker & Taylor cutting straight into net profit. That’s not a management failure. They worked with the industry leader and the industry leader went out of business. Could HarperCollins have bailed them out? Maybe. Would that have been a good idea? Probably not. Don’t throw good money after bad. Let Baker & Taylor die, let something better emerge from the ashes, and then use that.
This is the same story we’ve been covering all year. Traditional publishing isn’t going out of business, and they have hits bringing in money, but they’re not seeing the surging 10%-a-year growth the indie market is seeing.
Jonathan: You’re still winning as long as you’re selling on the merit of your book. In connection with the previous story, if you’re an author selling on the merit of being a particular author, traditional works for you. But if you’re selling on the merit of the book itself, indie is still the way to go, because the numbers are better.
Thomas: HarperCollins also has unique exposure to the Christian market, because they own two of the five biggest Christian imprints. Thomas Nelson, historically the biggest, is a HarperCollins brand, and so is Zondervan, which means HarperCollins controls both the NIV and the NKJV translations, even though it’s a secular company owned by Fox Corp, which also owns Fox News.
Young Readers Drive Fable to 5 Million as Book Clubs Explode
According to Publishers Weekly, social reading platform Fable has surpassed 5 million registered users, up from 3 million at its acquisition by Scribd, Inc. in June 2025. More than 820,000 people joined a new book club on the app in the past year. The platform now hosts hundreds of thousands of book clubs.
What Fable is. Fable is a social reading app built around book clubs, chapter-by-chapter discussions, reading streaks, monthly wraps, and community feeds. Readers join or start clubs, track progress, highlight inside books, and connect in real time. It offers an interactive ebook reader designed for social reading. Users can purchase ebooks through Fable’s web store and some titles inside the app, and purchased books support annotation and club discussion. After the Scribd acquisition, activity on Everand (ebooks and audiobooks) syncs automatically to Fable profiles so streaks and goals continue across formats.
How Fable compares with Goodreads. Goodreads remains far larger, with over 150 million registered members according to reports that have held steady through 2025 and into 2026. Owned by Amazon since 2013, Goodreads centers on individual shelves, star ratings, reviews, and annual reading challenges. Book groups exist, yet the core experience stays personal tracking and recommendation browsing. Fable operates at a smaller scale but emphasizes live community and shared reading. Its largest clubs already reach tens of thousands of active members with spoiler-free chapter rooms, and features such as daily streaks, reading challenges, and automatic format syncing reinforce habit and conversation in ways Goodreads does not prioritize. Many readers import Goodreads data into Fable and use both platforms.
The three largest Fable clubs are Inklings Book Club, moderated by Jack Edwards with nearly 70,000 members; Killer Thriller Crew, run by Kat @thecandidkatalog with more than 25,000 members; and Catastrophically Classical, run by Tori Ross with more than 13,000 members. An Everand end-of-year wrap-up reported 250,000 users maintaining 30-day reading streaks. In a user survey, more than half said they read more than before, including 64% of 18–24 year olds. The user base skews young, with the vast majority under age 40, split between Gen Z and younger millennials, and approximately 85% identify as women.
Kim Marsh Allee of Scribd, Inc. and Fable told Publishers Weekly that the idea of reading in decline runs completely counter to what the platform sees. Aroash Solomon, senior director of product, said growth has come almost entirely through word of mouth rather than paid marketing, and credited Fable’s origins as a book club product, where features such as streaks, monthly wraps, and stats reinforce shared identity.
What this Means for Authors
Fable is primarily a reader platform. Authors can participate by hosting free book clubs, joining existing ones, and engaging in discussion. Indie authors make books available for sale primarily through Draft2Digital by selecting Fable as a retailer, and users can also request titles for the catalog, including self-published books.
This week, enable Fable distribution in your Draft2Digital account if you publish wide, and start or join a book club and engage consistently with members. Watch which adaptation-tied or social-media-trending titles gain traction and consider positioning similar books, review Fable’s Media Kit if you want to explore paid placements into larger clubs, and track streaks and community features if you already use Everand, since the sync creates a direct path from subscription reading into active discussion. For authors, that community now numbers more than 5 million and continues to expand through conversation rather than ads.
Sources:
• Publishers Weekly: Fable Surpasses 5 Million Users
• Publishers Weekly: Everand Acquires Online Book Club Platform Fable
• Fable: 2026 State of Reading Report
• Scribd, Inc. Newsroom: Everand and Fable Launch a Single Shared Subscription
• Fable Help: How can I sell my books on Fable?
• Fable Help: How can I promote my books on Fable?
• Companies History: Who Owns Goodreads? (citing 150 million+ members)
Commentary
Jonathan: This is great, because Goodreads has been trying to do book clubs and Goodreads is miserable to use. People are tired of it, so I imagine Fable is picking up disgruntled Goodreads users. Fable is basically a digital hunting lodge for people who hunt books. You mount the heads of the ones you’ve read on the wall and brag about them.
Thomas: The comparison is a bit apples to oranges. It’s registered users to registered users, but the real question is how many active users Goodreads has, and Amazon doesn’t share that. My guess is the vast majority of Goodreads users aren’t active. They have an account and log in maybe once or twice a year.
Fable and social book reading skew heavily female. Most readers are female, and while plenty of men read, they’re much less likely to join a book club or hop onto a social network to talk about it. I’m in a book club, but it’s a bunch of guys who also go to the gun range together and argue about calibers. It’s a very Texas book club.
One thing I like about Goodreads is that it feels very Web 1.0, like using Facebook back in the 2000s, because they’ve made no real updates in about 10 years. It’s like a grungy old diner with smoke stains on the walls and ratty carpet and amazing food, and it’s always packed because it does the one thing people need. That one thing is that Goodreads is a New Year’s resolutions website. It’s busiest in December and January, when you log everything you read to see how you did on your reading goal and set next year’s. There isn’t a strong monthly reward cycle.
Fable is more “let’s all read this book together and discuss it,” and you can track exactly where your friends are in a book down to the page, which Goodreads doesn’t offer but Fable does through the Scribd integration. That makes it another barbarian at the gates creating ebook competition. If I’m in a book club tracking progress and I want to talk about chapter three, a book I bought through Amazon won’t sync, but if we’re both reading through Scribd, I can see that Jonathan has read chapter three too.
Jonathan: I like that, because I’d be able to tag you at a certain part without spoiling it until you reached that point, since we’re reading together. Thomas and I have talked about doing a read-through of Dante’s Inferno and discussing it on the show, so that would be a cool way to work through it.
Here’s an interesting way to use Goodreads. I like reading my reviews, positive or negative, because it doesn’t bother me either way. When I get a three-star or negative review, I go check that reader’s history. If they’ve been reading things unrelated to my book, they were never going to like it. But if their reading list is very similar to mine, say a lot of military post-apocalyptic fiction like Semper Di, and they still didn’t like mine, that tells me there’s something I need to work on, because a reader acclimated to the genre isn’t appreciating what I’m doing.
Thomas: My official position is to use Fable as a reader. It’s not a marketing platform right now; it’s built for readers. On Goodreads, if you use it as a reader, you can click any user and get a Venn diagram of how many books overlap with yours, so at a glance you can tell whether this person is your kind of reader and whether their review is even relevant to you.
A review is not about you, and it’s only a little about your book. A review is mostly about the reviewer, and it tells you about your target reader. The most common words in reviews are “I,” “me,” and “my.” Once you understand that, it becomes a useful marketing tool. But if you read a review as a verdict on your worth as a person, don’t read reviews at all.
Jonathan: More specifically, it’s about the experience of the reviewer at that moment. I’ve had people go back, reread my book, and update their reviews, because the person changed. It’s like the proverb that when a man steps into a river, it’s not the same man who leaves the river, and it’s not the same river either.
As an author, I do a lot of book fairs and live selling, so I ask those buyers to review on Goodreads, because Amazon prefers reviews from people who bought on Amazon. I don’t tell people where to review, to keep it organic, but if I write something compelling enough, they’ll review it on their own. That’s on me as the artist, to make people feel something.
Thomas: Here’s a Goodreads secret most people don’t know. If you give away your ebook on Goodreads, those giveaways count as sales for bestseller-list rankings when your book is a debut. Give away 100 ebook copies, which costs about $130, and it counts as 100 sales toward ranking for number-one new release and number-one category bestseller. It won’t make up for getting no sales, but for a lot of authors an extra 100 sales is the difference between hitting the top of the chart and not.
This is also why Goodreads is still valuable. The readers who find platforms like Goodreads most useful are the ones who read the most, what we call whales in the industry. A reader doing 75 to 95 books a year, one to two a week, has burned through their favorite authors, who don’t produce fast enough, so they take risks on brand-new authors and hand out recommendations. If you’re a brand-new author, those are exactly the readers you want to reach, because they’re the most likely to take a chance on you.
Jonathan: If you’re too sensitive to go into your reviews looking for what’s useful, have someone else do it. I did this as an intel professional, separating myself from the person who had a good or bad experience and just looking for the data.
Thomas: It’s also something ChatGPT and Claude Cowork can do for you. I wouldn’t use the regular chat interface, since it may not read all the reviews, but using the app on your computer, Claude can click the links, browse Goodreads, compile a complete list of reviews on your book, synthesize the takeaways into advice, and act as that filter. AI can be as gentle as you need it to be, which softens the harsh feedback.
Author Alerts
Author Alert: HarperCollins CEO Demands Industry Standards for AI Authorship
According to Publishers Weekly, HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray stated on August 6, 2026, that agents, authors, and publishers must jointly establish best practices to certify that books are written by humans. Murray pointed to recent canceled deals for books believed to involve AI assistance, including Shy Girl and a more recent title, and described the resulting situation as “very murky.” He rejected AI detection software as a reliable fix and said generative AI differs from prior technologies because it directly impacts the writing process. An AI-assisted book, he warned, “could very well be treated as a book in the public domain,” opening legal risks for copyright. Murray added that publishers must know “up front” a manuscript contains no AI assistance and suggested authors may need to keep records of their writing process. He framed the solution as relying on the industry’s foundation of trust and relationships while acknowledging the path forward will require “difficult conversations.”
Authors who use any AI tools in research, outlining, or editing now face rising pressure to document their full process and disclose it early to agents and publishers. Without clear records, a manuscript risks rejection or deal cancellation even when the author claims human authorship. Start logging drafts, timestamps, and tool use now so you can prove your work meets the standards Murray is pushing the industry to adopt.
Sources:
• Publishers Weekly: Brian Murray Addresses AI Authorship Issues
Commentary
Jonathan: We talk about this all the time, and everybody’s trying to do it. The part where he says generative AI directly impacts the writing process does happen in a loop, because it draws from the writing process that came before it, so you often can’t even tell. But the claim that an AI-assisted book could be treated as public domain doesn’t seem likely.
Thomas: That is so wrong. We’ve covered this, and there are many court cases saying exactly the opposite. Certain AI myths just persist. One is that AI uses up enormous amounts of water. The source of that myth is a researcher who confused liters and cubic meters in her spreadsheet. A cubic meter is 1,000 liters, so she concluded that AI data centers use 1,000 times more water than they actually do. She posted a retraction, but the paper copies of her book Empire of AI still have the wrong math, and people still believe it. The myth can’t be killed.
The other myth is that if you use AI your book can’t be copyrighted, and that’s not the case. AI can’t own the copyright. That’s what all the court cases said, going back to the monkey selfie case. We’ve covered it ad nauseam, and we still can’t get the lie back. It’s like every kid in kindergarten believing swallowed gum stays in your stomach for seven years. It’s not true, but every kindergartner still believes it.
Jonathan: People ask whether Thomas and I write our books with AI, and there are different ways to answer depending on how hostile the person is. If someone asks in a hostile way, I’ll tell them it’s not their business and to go somewhere else. If you’re friendly and you ask how I used AI, or whether I used it at all, I’ll say I use it for research, and I ping ideas off it and pull something useful out of all the flattery once it’s done telling me how great my latest idea is.
AI does not write the words in my book. But if I’m stuck, I’ll ask it a question. Does this seem weak? How does this pacing work against the thing that happened earlier? How does this strike you? Sometimes I don’t even give it parameters, I just throw spaghetti at the wall to get over the hump. The final product is always me, because that’s the value proposition I’m making.
Thomas: Society has lost the concept of responsibility. We live in a culture where decisions are made by consensus, no one owns a choice, and the way up the corporate ladder is to avoid responsibility as much as possible. The Russian word for committee is “soviet.”
But if you take responsibility, you take the credit and the blame. Who built Solomon’s temple? Solomon did, according to the Bible. That doesn’t mean he hammered every nail. He didn’t need to, because he took responsibility and paid for the temple’s creation. When you use AI, take responsibility for its outputs. If you’re willing to take the responsibility, you can take the credit. If you’re unwilling, you can’t take the credit, because you have to own every word.
This show wouldn’t exist without AI. I didn’t have the capacity to add a weekly news podcast without it. We gather the stories ourselves, which is the most time-consuming piece, then run them through a prompting engine that fact-checks and pulls sources, since we cite a source with every story. Jonathan reads and interprets the stories and editorializes as he goes, so it doesn’t sound like AI, and my reactions are my own, often unplanned. We use AI as a tool that makes us more productive, in line with the Pope’s guidance on the ethical use of AI. If we didn’t use it, the show simply wouldn’t exist.
Technology
Hank Green’s AI Research Habit Triggered a Trust Crisis
According to Dexerto’s reporting on the July 30 Complexly upload, Hank Green’s “Ask Hank Anything” episode with Soupytime contained a Future Hank monologue in which he said, “I appreciate the pushback.” Viewers immediately flagged the phrasing as classic large-language-model language. Clips spread. Accusations followed that he had read AI-generated notes or left prompt feedback in the script.
According to Green’s own since-deleted X post and subsequent Reddit statement, he produced the video under heavy pressure. He used ChatGPT to surface papers and generate research notes. He checked the script and confirmed the specific line was an ad-lib referencing the guest’s earlier disagreement. The broader delivery still carried an AI feel. He called the reliance a bad habit born of overcommitment.
The apology that followed. In the r/nerdfighters response, Green wrote that he was mortified. He had relied too heavily on AI as a research aid. The tool delivered papers fast yet removed the freedom to find his own paths through a topic. The dopamine from constant LLM interaction and higher output volume was not healthy for him or the audience relationship. His wife Katherine and brother John both told him the pattern looked unhealthy. He announced fewer videos on the channel, a possible full pause, and pauses for SMUSH and 4×3 while he finishes a longer project he considers important.
Complexly’s August 1 statement confirmed the limited research use did not violate their published AI policy. That policy allows preliminary research tools and bars AI from writing, editing, or fact-checking. Scripts and final claims stay human.
Green has spent years criticizing non-consensual training data, climate costs of large models, and the concentration of economic power in AI companies. He released “Educational Video in the Age of AI” in May 2026. He has argued that AI chat interfaces risk starving the creators whose work supplies the systems. That record made the personal research habit land harder with viewers who expected consistency.
What it Matters for Authors
Extreme anti-AI voices treat any use as betrayal. No volume of disclosure, no restriction to research-only, no public pause satisfies the demand for total abstinence. Trying to appease that standard produces endless purity tests. The standard moves. The creator loses time, voice, and energy defending process instead of producing work.
The winning move is refusal to play that game. Define your own boundaries in writing. State them once. Disclose research tools the same way you disclose a research assistant or database subscription. Protect the part of the process that must stay human: the slow finding of original paths through material, the formation of takes that only you could form, the voice that audiences return for. Reduce volume when speed starts diluting that core. Measure success by the integrity of the finished piece, not by whether the loudest critic grants absolution.
Sources:
• Dexerto: YouTuber Hank Green pauses multiple channels after admitting he relies “too heavily” on AI
• Hank Green’s Reddit response in r/nerdfighters
• Complexly statement on AI use in Ask Hank Anything
• TechCrunch: YouTuber Hank Green says his AI usage is ‘not healthy’
• Forbes: The Anti-AI Backlash Against Hank Green, Explained
• YouTube: Does Hank Green Shave His Butt? | Soupytime Asks Hank Anything
• YouTube: Educational Video in the Age of AI
Commentary
Thomas: Hank Green is a big-time YouTuber whose face you’d recognize from Shorts, and he’s historically been very anti-AI. The danger of trying to be anti-AI is that there’s no appeasing the purists.
He did an audit. He uses it for research, not writing, and he went and checked his script. Was “I appreciate the pushback” an ad-lib? It was. And here’s the thing. Even if you religiously never touch an LLM, you’re not safe, because you can use a phrase that’s common with AI without any way of knowing it. “I appreciate the pushback” is also common corporate speak from the 2000s. If you’ve spent time in big institutions, you’ve said it or heard it, and that doesn’t make it AI slop.
Jonathan: It’s corporate slop.
Thomas: Humans make the best slop. All AI is doing is synthesizing the slop it consumed from the internet, and there’s a lot of internet corporate slop. The real danger for anti-AI purists is that they don’t know what AI actually looks like. I caught myself once. I was giving a speech to a group of young people I knew were hostile to AI, and I’d crafted a powerful “this isn’t X, it’s Y” line completely in my head. It alliterated. The line was, “This isn’t compromise, this is conquest,” and I didn’t say it, because I knew I’d get accused. It’s a very ChatGPT-sounding sentence.
I remember C.S. Lewis using that kind of sentence in The Four Loves. It’s a powerful form, but it’s become cliched because it’s vectorized. LLMs have a vectorized understanding of language, so it’s an easy way for a model to build a coherent sentence by comparing things it understands.
Jonathan: Wasn’t there a prompt someone shared for stripping all that out?
Thomas: I shared one with you privately, and I should post it to authormedia.social. There are about 20 of these AI-isms, and it’s a simple prompt. I’m also building a project-instructions generator so you can create your own project instructions in ChatGPT, Grok, or Claude, with the anti-slop language baked in. Even if you’re not using AI to write, reducing the amount of slop you consume is beneficial.
Study Shows AI Fiction Takes 27.5% of Amazon’s Genre Catalog and Attract Readers
According to a study posted on arXiv, researchers led by Tuhin Chakrabarty at Stony Brook University analyzed 14,419 self-published genre-fiction ebooks released on Amazon between January 2023 and March 2026. They matched every title to daily sales records through June 2026 and ran the full text of each book through Pangram AI detection software. None of the books disclosed AI use. The team classified books with more than 25% AI-generated text as “substantial AI.” Those books make up 20% of the sample and account for 12.1% of sales and 11.3% of revenue.
Light-AI books make up 17.1% of the sample and account for 16.2% of sales and 16.2% of revenue. Books with zero detected AI text form 62.9% of the catalog and capture 71.7% of sales and 72.5% of revenue.
Market Grew Faster than the Money
The number of books that recorded at least one sale in a given quarter rose 19.2-fold from early 2023 to early 2026. Quarterly revenue rose only 8.9-fold. Revenue per selling book fell across most genres. The drop hit books with no AI text in seven of eight genre groups. Fantasy and horror formed the single exception, where human-authored titles still gained ground. In genres with heavy Kindle Unlimited participation the sales-share advantage held by no-AI books shrank by 8.5 percentage points.
AI Titles Reach Commercial Scale
Substantial-AI books moved from near-zero sales share in early 2023 to roughly 20% by mid-2026. They now claim a rising portion of the scarce top-25 rank slots once dominated by human work. One pen name generated $1.7 million in gross revenue across eight substantial-AI titles in the twelve months after release. The single highest-earning AI-heavy book brought in $643,000 on 80,431 copies. Each of the top 15 substantial-AI books cleared more than $220,000 in its first year. Authors who adopted AI and kept publishing accelerated their output, and three out of four of them released titles faster than before.
Why This Matters for Authors
Discoverability collapses when the catalog expands almost twice as fast as total revenue. Per-book earnings for purely human work fall even when AI titles sell fewer copies on average. High-KU genres amplify the pressure because subscription readers sample more titles. And top ranks once reserved for human books now cycle in AI competitors that reuse distinctive language from existing works at higher rates.
This week, audit your main genres for AI density by watching new-release volume and rank volatility. Strengthen every non-Amazon channel that still rewards human signal, such as email lists, direct storefronts, and reader communities that value provenance. Treat cover, blurb, and sample as differentiation tools that AI mills rarely match at scale. Track whether your books sit in high-KU categories and test pricing or exclusivity moves that limit exposure to the flood. Document your process so you can prove human authorship if platforms or retailers ever require it.
The study shows volume alone moves the market, and authors who control distribution and reader relationships keep the leverage the catalog no longer provides.
Sources:
• arXiv: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books
• New York Times: How A.I. Books Sneak Their Way Into Stores
Commentary
Jonathan: Off the bat, I do not agree with these findings, and the reason is that the numbers are deceptive. It runs on Pangram AI, and we’ve already talked about how Pangram gets things wrong.
Thomas: Where it gets it wrong is false positives. If somebody writes in the style Pangram associates with AI, or their brain just works that way, it flags them.
Jonathan: That’s exactly it. The majority of books released on Amazon come from a couple of major categories, romance and mystery, thriller, and suspense, all of which have sounded the same for the past 30 years. An AI that learned to read on material that’s been largely the same for 30 years is going to flag new work by people repeating that same process, because that’s what it learned to read in the first place.
Thomas: The numbers may be overstated, but it’s still notable that only 72% of the dollars now go to books scoring 0% on Pangram. There’s been this big denial that nobody reads AI books. People are reading AI books. I know authors making a lot of money across many pen names. This gets framed as money going to AI instead of to human authors, but there’s a human author running that pen name collecting the money. Sure, that author paid for tokens and subscriptions, but they’re still making money. SkyNet isn’t making money off this. It’s not AI making money instead of authors. It’s authors using tools making money over authors who don’t use tools.
This is still a working paper. It hasn’t been published in a journal yet, but we cover working papers on this show, because with AI, by the time a paper clears the full academic process it’s often referring to models you can’t even use anymore. AI moves so fast you have to use the working papers.
One other issue. They said none of the books disclosed AI use. As far as I know, while Amazon demands that you disclose AI to Amazon, it doesn’t pass that disclosure on to readers. Checking the “I used AI to write this book” box doesn’t change your sales page at all. It’s purely an internal Amazon tool, with no public tag or flag, so the claim that they don’t know whether authors disclosed will probably get worked out in peer review.
Snapchat’s AI Scanned a Private Joke and Triggered an Arrest in Under an Hour
According to WAND-TV and Central Illinois Proud reporting on the Tazewell County case, 22-year-old student teacher Kristen Volpe stood in a classroom at John L. Hensey Elementary School in Washington, Illinois, on January 29, 2025, when a student closed her laptop and wiped the lesson plan she had open. She opened a private Snapchat group with her boyfriend and two roommates and typed a frustrated question about whether she should “shoot” the student.
Snapchat’s automated safety systems classified the message as a potential threat and transmitted an emergency report. The FBI received it and forwarded the tip to the Tazewell County Sheriff’s Office. Deputies walked into the school roughly one hour after the message left her phone.
Body-camera footage and police documents released under public records laws confirm the tip originated from Snapchat’s systems, not from any recipient of the chat. Officers searched Volpe, found no weapons, and recorded her immediate statement, that she called the message a bad joke made out of exasperation with zero serious intent. Deputies and school officials both concluded she posed no threat. Prosecutors charged her with disorderly conduct. She spent the night in the Tazewell County Jail and was released the next day. Washington District 50 Superintendent Chad Allaman told parents in writing that Volpe would not return to complete her student-teaching placement. Later court handling moved toward a deferred prosecution program.
According to Snap’s published safety and law-enforcement guidance, the company may voluntarily disclose user information when it believes an emergency poses a threat of imminent death or serious bodily injury. Emergency disclosures can occur before a court order. Police records in this case do not show that a human moderator reviewed the message before the automated report went out. Volpe received no notice that her private chat had been flagged or reported.
Why This Matters for Authors
Authors run private writing groups, beta-reader chats, and marketing conversations on Snapchat, Discord, Signal, and similar apps every day. Dark humor about rejection, plot ideas involving violence, or frustrated vents about industry players travel the same private channels. Automated systems that scan for keywords and escalate without human context create a new operational risk. One flagged message can pull law enforcement into a school, a workplace, or a writing session before any human recipient even opens the chat.
Treat every private group on a major platform as potentially monitored by algorithm. Prefer tools with end-to-end encryption and no automated threat scanning for sensitive discussions. Assume the platform’s definition of “risk of harm” controls what leaves your device, not your intent or the private nature of the conversation.
Sources:
• WAND-TV: Illinois student-teacher allegedly commented about shooting student
• Snapchat Support: How Snap Inc. Works with Law Enforcement
• Snap Values: Safety Enforcement and Emergency Disclosure
Commentary
Thomas: Don’t use Snapchat. But this is a real concern, so I want to read the Fourth Amendment to get to the principle. “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.”
This is the amendment most under threat right now, because the current workaround is, “It’s not the government doing it, it’s a private organization,” often at the government’s secret request. The government can quietly tell a private company to snitch on its users, the company snitches, and someone’s life gets ruined. This poor woman lost her job, spent a night in jail, and may never work as a teacher again, all because she got frustrated with a misbehaving student, which is a normal thing. The teachers’ lounge is full of teachers venting about students. There’s a principle here, that you need to be able to correspond privately and have some degree of privacy.
Was the Fourth Amendment violated? Not under the current interpretation, because they engineered around it. It wasn’t the government doing the monitoring. But we know from the Meta files that the government pressures Meta to report on its users, and there’s a lot of pressure to control the algorithm.
This may actually be a Fourth Amendment violation, but it would be very hard to prove, because the evidence you’d need is kept secret. More and more government operations happen in secret, using clearance to hide things that aren’t secret to protect operatives in the field, they’re secret to protect bureaucrats doing evil things.
Jonathan: Whoever authorized these operations.
Thomas: You have to be careful as an author. The author who lost the $2 million used a local model specifically so he wouldn’t get flagged, because you can’t trust anything you send out over the internet. People say to use Signal, and I’m not sure how secure Signal really is. The CEO of Telegram was recently arrested in France, essentially to pressure him into opening backdoors so the CIA could spy on people. That’s a different flavor of spying than this case, but it’s the same kind of automated surveillance.
Zeitgeist
Why Gen Z Is Abandoning Hip-Hop Radio for Country Music
Thomas: There’s a massive vibe shift among kids. They’re listening less to hip-hop and more to country music.
Jonathan: According to Billboard, for the first time in the 68-year history of the Hot 100, country songs hold all five of the top spots. Ella Langley’s “Choosing Texas” is sitting at number one for a 16th week. Morgan Wallen’s “Been By Now” debuts at number two. Taylor Swift’s “I Knew It, I Knew You” holds number three. Langley and Wallen’s duet, “I Can’t Love You Anymore,” is number four, and Stella Lefty’s “Boston” rounds out the top five.
Thomas: You know country music is hot again when Taylor Swift has rediscovered that she’s a country artist.
Younger streaming listeners, especially Gen Z and younger millennials, turned country into the dominant commercial force on the all-genre chart. The songs that reached the summit feature clear narrative, specific place, acoustic textures, and direct emotional language. Listeners are rewarding music that feels rooted and story-driven, and the same young audience is showing appetite for sounds and stories that are coded as more traditional.
What is “Black fatigue”?
Jonathan: There’s a term that’s been circulating a lot on social media, and it’s now bleeding into music and what kind of things are being consumed. It’s called “Black fatigue.”
Coverage in Rolling Stone and Know Your Meme documents the phrase appearing frequently on X, TikTok, and Reddit as an expression of exhaustion with certain Black cultural products or media focus.
Thomas: We’re not advocating for anything, we’re describing what’s happening. We’re covering this in music right now because music often hits these trends earlier than other media, and you can see it quickly because Billboard now tracks streaming, which means a song that didn’t exist two weeks ago can start trending fast. Charlie Kirk died on a Tuesday, and by that Friday, Tom MacDonald had a song about him on the Billboard 100 the next week.
It’s a very fast barometer, and it picks up early signs of big cultural movements coming down the road.
Jonathan: If you’ve seen videos of fights in Waffle House or in airports, it’s normally tied to this idea of Black fatigue.
As an intel professional I know that you have to understand that many of those clips are placed. Use the X feature that lets you see a poster’s country of origin. If you see the person is posting from Malaysia or Serbia, what you’re looking at is an attempt to adjust the culture of the United States and poison it with toxicity to further divide it and reduce the strength of unity.
It’s now affecting the music charts, because R&B and hip-hop, which are primarily Black-artist-dominated, still lead absolute on-demand audio volume, accounting for roughly one in every four streams. It just so happens that listeners are shifting to more traditional forms of entertainment like country.
Thomas: This is a movement among young people. If you’re over 30, you’ve probably never heard the term Black fatigue before. In general, generations change together. I come more from the four-turnings perspective, where cultural change is like the weather, and it affects everyone the same.
But there is a generational element on some topics, and the biggest one is race. Younger people are far more likely to be racist than their parents, on both the left and the right, and who they’re racist against differs based on which side they’re on.
There’s a much stronger racially charged energy to Gen Z, partly because they were brought up in school to look at everything through a racial lens. They came up through the anti-racist movement and the DEI movement. Whereas older people were taught to be colorblind, younger people were taught that colorblindness itself is racism. So you have to always be cognizant of race.
Jonathan: When you’re taught that something is more valuable because it’s created by a person with a different skin color, students recognize that as logically incoherent. When these kids grew up, they rejected it, and now it’s swung way too extreme in the other direction. Because it all happened at the same time for a lot of people, it created a momentum that’s now self-propagating. People are seeing it and imitating it.
How does that phenomenon affect your book?
Thomas: Today, diversity for diversity’s sake can actually be negatively impactful for your book in a way that wasn’t the case ten years ago.
Jonathan: The pendulum is swinging back to the other side.
Thomas: It used to be very common for a book cover featuring five faces to make one of those faces diverse simply for the sake of diversity, because diversity was seen as a potential benefit to sales. Depending on who you’re targeting, that may still be the case.
For older people who aren’t interacting with younger people, this is going to come as a complete shock. Whey they were growing up, the younger generation was always less racist than the older one. You’re embarrassed by how racist your parents were, and they’re embarrassed by how racist their parents are. Those same people are now embarrassed by how racist their children are.
This has an impact on what characters you pick for your stories and what covers you pick. It’s hard to know exactly what that impact is, so we’re covering this as a heads-up.
There’s a racial storm brewing. It’s like looking at the forecast and seeing that a big storm is coming. It’s not here yet, this is the calm before it, but we can see the indicators.
The temperature is rising, the barometric pressure is falling, the wind has changed direction, and you’re like, “But it’s not raining yet.” There’s every indication that Gen Alpha is even more so, and it’s not something they’ll grow out of. There’s an increasing longing for tribalism, to be in a tribe, because there’s a sense that if you’re not in a tribe of some kind, you’re not safe. The tribe doesn’t have to be racial. It could be a gang, a motorcycle club, a church.
Jonathan: Race is just the easiest one, because the lowest form of visual recognition is skin color. It accounts for most of what you see.
Thomas: There’s a lot of body cam footage driving this too. It used to be there’d be a shooting, and everyone would pile on the cop, saying, “How dare you shoot this person?” Then the footage would come out, and it turns out the woman who was shot was charging at the officer with a knife. He was backing away, and she was coming at him, and then he shot her. That was a justified shooting, and the press that said “cop shoots unarmed Black woman,” but that was factually inaccurate.
As more of those stories start hitting the feed, this term picks up steam. There’s a lot of it on X, but it’s also on TikTok. I think “Black fatigue” may have started as a TikTok term.
Jonathan: It’s definitely mostly a foreign-agent term from what we can see, because it’s so trigger-happy. As soon as you hear it, you have a reaction, because there are white people out there who have trouble saying the word Black with a capital B, because of the way we’ve been programmed through decades of media treatment. Much of it came during the Obama era, given how race was treated then. We’ve been programmed to react to certain triggers.
This is something I used to track when I was tracking Muslims. The guy in that Oxford discussion about Islam in the UK triggered everyone in the room by saying he had a drawing of Muhammad, but he didn’t. He was just displaying the triggers that had already been implanted culturally.
Now foreign actors are constantly hitting this trigger on social media by using the term Black fatigue, either recycling footage that’s already been used or out of context, or generating it with AI.
Thomas: When you see a clip from body cam footage that makes you angry, realize that somebody had to watch hours of very boring footage to find that one minute. They had to be motivated or compensated enough to find it. But you can’t just say “this is foreign interference, therefore it’s not real.” It is absolutely real.
Somebody’s anti-data-center view might be influenced by the CCP, which doesn’t want us to build data centers here. They want the data centers in China. Coal-powered data centers in China are better for China than natural gas or nuclear data centers in the United States. Is that better for the air? No. Better for the environment? No. Better for America? Absolutely not. Better for China? Yes. So there’s a lot of that. But that doesn’t mean somebody doesn’t genuinely believe in their heart of hearts that a data center in their county will be a force for bad. The same is true with the racial animus being spurred.
A lot of the anti-Jewish sentiment I’m seeing online seems to be coming out of the Middle East. I saw this with the invasion into Spain by Moroccans, at Ceuta, and people were blaming Jews for it. There are no Jews in Spain. There are no Jews in Morocco. How is this Israel’s fault? It’s misdirection, it has nothing to do with them.
As an author, you’re writing for a culture that’s having foreign influence pushed on it from all these different directions. How do you navigate that?
How do writers navigate writing for readers who are being impacted by foreign influence?
Jonathan: There’s a fault line or a seam between what the truth is and how people interpret the truth.
I taught this concept in children’s church using the resurrection of Lazarus. No one in that story knew the truth, even though Jesus was flat out saying it, “I am the resurrection and the life.” They said, “Oh, you mean later on, in the future.” Then he raised Lazarus from the dead, and no one actually understood what he was doing.
There’s a gap between the truth, such as that a data center uses a thousand liters of water and not a thousand cubic meters, and the understanding and amplification of the misunderstanding, which preys on a person’s good intentions. This person’s good intention is that we should preserve our water. I live in Tucson, water is a big deal for us. So when we hear that a data center is going to use millions of gallons and pollute it beyond use, that matters to us. The confusion would never have happened if they’d used American units. There are people rightfully angry about a fact that was misrepresented to them.
That’s how you have to understand a lot of these people. Somebody may be turned into your enemy through a misunderstanding of a truth.
When I was hunting ISIS, I worked with a lot of Muslims, super religious ones, and I learned Arabic from them. I got along better with them than with the atheistic and agnostic military professionals I was with, because we shared more of a cultural background, including the same sexual ethic and the same idea of protecting people.
There are a lot of people who disagree with us here, and see that in the YouTube comments all the time. But we don’t go after you because we believe you want good things too. We disagree on how to get there and on the truth or the understanding of it.
The issue you want to deal with in your books is that you don’t want to attack someone who has a misunderstanding of the truth. You want to expose the truth, manifest it, bring it into the light, and let people have the opportunity to make the correct judgment. If you attack and come out swinging, they’re going to raise their arms and probably swing back. That’s how people with survival instincts are wired.
Thomas: It can cause people to grab onto the lie even tighter.
Jonathan: Correct, because now they’re being attacked, which means what they have is a value.
Thomas: This is very risky. Let’s say you have kids who are starting to get more racist, and you’re hearing racist things from their perspective. I think the first step is to understand why. It’s not all just CCP programming. They may have had experiences they haven’t told you about that are driving those views. But some of it may be straight-up lies they’re believing, or a distorted view of the world.
There’s a saying that goes, “The media isn’t very good at telling you what to think, but it’s really good at telling you what to think about.” People really did believe there was an epidemic of policemen killing Black people, when the reality is that eight or nine out of ten Black men who get shot are shot by other Black men. Fact-check me on the exact number, but it’s the vast majority. The actual number of police shootings is really low. It doesn’t feel low because of a cognitive heuristic called recency bias, where we judge how common something is by when we last heard a story about it.
A classic example is shark attacks. People have a much higher perception of their frequency because shark attacks make the news, and the movie Jaws made it stick. You’re far more likely to be killed by a deer while driving than by a shark. We’re now living out in the country after losing our house to a flood, and if I stay on the road and hit a deer, I live. If I swerve to avoid it and hit a tree at 40 or 50 miles an hour, I could kill myself and my kids, because the tree isn’t going to move.
That’s the recency heuristic. In 2020, five or six officer-involved shootings got replayed over and over all year, and it gave the impression these were happening constantly, like there was another one every week. Mostly it was just those. But the fear people had was genuine because corporate media and foreign actors were directing people’s attention.
If the media wants to cover a story and you can help them cover it, they’re more likely to put you on screen to talk about your book. Are you being a force for good if you’re helping a media misinformation campaign? No. Will it help you sell your book? Yes.
Jonathan: Is that good for your career?
Thomas: Maybe not. We’re trying to give you a couple of different threads here to guide you. I don’t think you should write a book to take advantage of this phenomenon, but you need to be aware of it.
If you’re writing for younger people, realize they didn’t grow up with Martin Luther King. For a lot of them, the version of Cesar Chavez and MLK they’re hearing is the “rapist” version, not the civil rights hero version. Their whole interpretation of everything that happened is completely different from the one you got. That’s going to affect how they interpret your narrative beats.
The best guidance I can give is to know your Timothy. You may be writing for an anti-racist who has a “Free Palestine” bumper sticker and views the whole world through an oppressor-oppressed lens, and they’re going to read your book through that same lens. Get to know your Timothy in real life. Don’t invent an imaginary version, and don’t write for yourself at their age, because the world you lived in isn’t the world they live in.
Jonathan: When I was watching Spider-Man: Brand New Day yesterday, there was a trailer at the beginning for an all-Black fantasy film about magic, called Children of Blood and Bone. I don’t know how well it’s going to do because of this phenomenon, even though it looked interesting.
When you put something out there, be aware of the chatter on social media, because right or wrong, it’s going to influence your real-world sales.
Viewer question: will a diverse cast sink a middle-grade book?
Thomas: Doats is asking if her book is killed because she’s got a Mexican American girl and a Jewish girl as her sidekicks.
Jonathan: Middle grade’s probably fine.
Thomas: I’d be careful, though. Your framing of the story is a very 2011-or-2016 framing, where their primary identification is their race. You didn’t tell us how tall they were, how old they were, anything about their personality or character, whether they’re virtuous or not. They are their races, and that’s their identity. We’ve reached peak of that kind of framing around 2023, 2024. We’re still close to it, so the water is still really high, this is like 20 minutes after high tide, but you’re chasing a diminishing tide where people are fatigued of that kind of racial identity driving everything.
Jonathan: This is a marketing question. If we were in a zeitgeist where race mattered more, you’d emphasize it for practical results. You don’t have to change the book, just the marketing. It’s not necessarily the book itself that’s the issue; it’s the perspective through which it’s viewed.
Thomas: Also, writing for men and women is very different. Women want to see themselves represented in your story. Men don’t care about that.
Jonathan: Men want to be Batman.
Thomas: Girls want Batman to have a tea party with them.
Find your Timothy and make sure she’s in your book as clearly as possible. What used to happen is people would write books for little white girls featuring non-white characters, to sell to those girls’ moms, who wanted to feel virtuous for buying a diverse book. That marketing strategy isn’t working as well as it used to. The tide’s going out on it. The mom isn’t feeling as virtuous anymore, and she’s getting pushback she doesn’t understand from her daughter, who’s more resistant to reading the book. The daughter has a hard time articulating why she doesn’t want it.
Jonathan: If you follow that general principle, and I know the comments are going to be filled with anecdotes, please discard anecdotes when you’re looking at data. I already saw someone in the thread say, “I live with a nice Black man.” Great, I’m glad you do, but that doesn’t inform statistics in any way. It contributes nothing to the interpretation of statistics.
Thomas: And how you feel doesn’t tell you anything about how readers feel.
This is why these cultural analyses matter. As the wind changes and the flock floats from one idea to another, you could be writing a kind of book that’s really popular, and suddenly it’s not. I’ve coached authors who had this happen, books that were popular with an excited readership, and then suddenly falling off despite the writer getting better, not worse.
This is part of what inspired this Zeitgeist segment. These authors were experiencing a culture change where the flock was flying away from what they were writing, and they had to choose: close the series and end it well, then start writing something more in keeping with where the flock has flown or take the series and move it to where the flock is going.
There’s no universal right answer. A lot depends on how established the series is and how much things have changed.
For one author I’m thinking of, the right decision was to end the series well, take the skills she’d developed over ten years of writing bestsellers, and go write in a new flavor.
Why is country music landing the way it is right now?
Jonathan: Getting back to country music: why is it landing this way? Is it the traditional messaging, the return to a community-focused format, singing about your boyfriend and your dog and how you feel about your state?
Thomas: Have you heard “Choosing Texas”?
It’s had the longest run of any female song on the Hot 100, maybe ever, or at least this century. Some songs last century did better. It sounds like something you’d have heard 30 years ago.
There’s nothing innovative about it. The music video is low-key, a woman in a modest dress at a bar table with a glass of Jack Daniels she’s not drinking, though she sings about drinking it alone. In the background, indistinct in a smoky haze, a couple two-steps. It’s a girl from Tennessee singing about the guy she likes choosing a girl from Texas.
It’s been so long since there’s been middle-of-the-road country without the four-on-the-floor beat and the pop sound and poppy lyrics, that this old-sounding song is hitting a generation that’s never heard anything like it. An old joke is a new joke to a new audience. Granddad’s cracked that joke a million times, and your kids laugh genuinely because they’ve never heard it.
Jonathan: If you pay attention to when certain characters come on screen in a movie or show, the music that plays for their introduction says something. Characters introduced with Western or country music are more likely to be hospitable and nice to the main character. There’s a perception of country music as the hospitality music of America. Everyone wants to go to Cracker Barrel, or what we remember it being fifteen years ago, and get that North Carolina or Georgia accent from someone who calls you sugar and treats you like they love you even though they’ve never met you. Europeans experience this when they visit the Deep South and ask why people like them just for existing. It’s called hospitality.
We’ve already talked about the rise of tribalism, but tribalism isn’t a negative phenomenon, even though we tend to treat it that way. It’s about belonging to a community and a family again.
Thomas: Country music is actually very similar to hip-hop in that it’s music from a tribe for a tribe. It’s not trying to be generally popular, it’s being specifically popular.
Malcolm Gladwell did a fascinating analysis on this, citing research that country and hip-hop are much more lyrically deep than pop music because of that specific focus. They have a broader emotional range and more meaningful, narrative lyrics. Pop music, trying to appeal to everyone, gives you lyrics like “Tutti frutti oh rooty” repeated three times, and that’s the whole song. It’s meaningless vapor because it’s from everyone to everyone.
You’d never see that in hip-hop, which is unbelievably lyrically dense.
That’s the takeaway for you as an author.
If you’re willing to write for a specific audience, to the exclusion of everyone else, you can write a deeper, more meaningful book, and dominate the charts, because nobody is a generic person. Even Californians, the supposed home of generic pop culture, want stuff made specifically for them. Everybody wants something specifically for them.
Write books specifically for your reader.
Jonathan: One of the great successes of the new Spider-Man movie is that they brought back New York City culture by making Spider-Man very Queens-esque. He argues with the Punisher, and they’re yelling at each other in that classic New York style. It’s great to watch. You feel like you’re part of it even if you’ve never set foot in Queens. That’s one of the best parts of New York, everyone yelling at each other while secretly liking each other.
Thomas: There’s the friendly-and-nice versus unfriendly-and-not-nice matrix. You get a flat tire, and people will pull over, make fun of you for having a flat tire, call you an idiot, while they’re getting out the jack and changing your tire.
Jonathan: Yeah, “Such a loser, how could you be so stupid as to run over a nail,” but then, “Now, get out of the way, I’m gonna do this for you.”
Thomas: Dotes points out that country music’s heritage is Irish and Anglo-Saxon poetry, particularly Celtic music. I used to go to the Celtic Music Festival here in Austin, and I’m a big fan of the genre. My grandfather used to sing old cowboy songs, we called them country and western, but they have no resemblance to what comes out of Nashville today. They were often cattle songs, meant to work by. I still sing one to call the cattle on this ranch, and it includes yodeling, so it’s Celtic but also German. A lot of old country music had yodeling in it, and it actually works, you can train cows to come when you yodel. I will not, however, yodel for you.
I remember listening to Celtic music and finding a song I was sure was a Western cowboy song, since my grandfather sang it about a cowboy, but it turned out to be a much older song about a guy in Aberdeen. About 90% of it was identical, just the locations and a few details changed. The same people moved and brought their music with them. It’s like Fiddler on the Roof, the fiddler travels with the Jews as they leave Russia.
Jonathan: Thomas has been listening to Marine Corps cadence music at the gym.
Thomas: It’s produced by the Marine Corps itself, not some guy who used to be a Marine trading on the name to sell books. When you’re working out, you’re doing something you associate with the Marines doing, and it motivates you.
Jonathan: He’s listening to music the Marines put out for doing the thing they’re known for doing best. He said he should’ve made different life choices, because it’s convincing him to join the Marine Corps.
What’s the marketing lesson in all of this?
Thomas: There’s a powerful marketing principle here. How does the Marine Corps advertise itself? We have intense physical training. We are going to make you suffer.
You take what’s distasteful to most people and make it the most tasteful thing for your specific audience. It’s the famous example of the ski resort that features its one-star reviews about how difficult the trails are, on a t-shirt.
All the AI labs are doing a version of this too. The current way to prove your AI is the best is to show how many felonies it’s committed. There’s an ongoing benchmark chart for it.
You can do this with your book. Take whatever feature is most distasteful to your non-audience and lean all the way into it for your audience. The mushy-gushiest romance. The bloodiest zombie book. Cozy horror. Jonathan really plays up how violent his books are, which is a genuinely useful marketing technique.
Jonathan: It keeps all my negative reviews away, because the people who’d leave them never read the book.
Thomas: If there’s nothing offensive about your book to anyone, you might be making generic pop music, and that can work, but the song itself has to be so good you can’t get the tune out of your head. “Tutti Frutti oh rooty” isn’t going to sell on lyrics alone.
Some of you have that tune stuck in your head right now, and that’s a 60-year-old song, because the tune is just that good. But the same musician wrote dozens of other songs where the tunes weren’t as good, and those didn’t stick. Thousands of other musicians tried and failed around him. What you see is the one survivor with the one catchy tune.
Jonathan: There are songs I know by heart that you’d never expect, because I’m a dad of silly little girls. You know the song I sing most in my house? “I’m a Goofy Goober, yeah,” From the SpongeBob movie.
That applies to the generation I’m talking to, because they’ve watched the movie with me and we’ve both enjoyed it, me out of nostalgia, them because they enjoy sharing things with me. Now we sing it to each other. Looking at what I produce, you’d never assume that about me. But if you put that same dynamic into your novel, you’re going to reach people in a way they’re not used to, having someone understand them like that.
Thomas: We have now talked about country music for an hour. I’d encourage you all to give country music a chance. Listen to the top songs on Spotify, for free, just to get a sense of it.
