Audible Forces Every Title Into New Royalty Model

by | May 5, 2026 | Author Update | 0 comments

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Week Ending May 1, 2026 | Author Update

Audible just set a hard December 31 deadline for adopting their new royalty model. The FTC hit a self-publishing guru with a $1.5 million fine for fake “passive income” promises. New research shows AI screeners quietly favor AI-polished proposals over your human voice, and independent bookstores are booming with 422 new openings. And the cherry on this publishing cake is that science just confirmed your TikTok breaks are literally wrecking your writing focus. 

PUBLISHING NEWS

ACX Sets Hard Deadline on Legacy Royalties as Petition to Stop It Hits 30,000 Signatures

According to the ACX blog posted April 28, 2026, Audible will shut down its legacy royalty model on December 31, 2026. Creators must enroll every existing title in the new model or remove it from distribution on Audible and ACX by that date.

This move follows our August 1 coverage of the new royalty system that rolled out in pilot form last year. Audible promoted 50 percent royalties for exclusive distribution, up from 40 percent, and 30 percent for non-exclusive, up from 25 percent. The company said the change would open more earning opportunities through its membership plans.

Under the new system Audible pools each listener’s monthly Member Value—the plan price after taxes and fees plus extra credits used—and divides it proportionally among every title the listener engaged with that month, weighted by list price. Creators then apply their contractual royalty rate to their share. The structure lets titles earn from Audible Plus all-you-can-listen listening as well as credit redemptions.

ACX claims early-access participants in its 2025 pilot saw an average 45 percent earnings increase, 109 percent more unit transactions, and nearly double the listeners. Independent checks on X turn up no creator data or screenshots to verify those gains. Instead, ongoing chatter from authors and narrators shows continued skepticism, with several reporting 30 to 40 percent royalty drops once their titles entered the pooled system.

A Change.org petition launched by Robin Sullivan, wife and business manager of author Michael J. Sullivan, on August 8, 2025 calls for Audible to revise the model. Sullivan argues the pooled calculation dilutes credit value and shifts money from non-Plus titles to those in the Plus catalog, hurting indies and non-exclusive authors. The petition has gathered nearly 30,000 verified signatures and proposes keeping Premium credit revenue separate from Plus listening revenue.

Enrollment for all ACX creators opens May 26, 2026. New titles enter the new model automatically. Rights holders control enrollment for their projects. Narrators in royalty-share agreements receive notice and must approve the updated terms. Authors can suggest pricing for enrolled titles and opt them into the Plus catalog, with more detailed monthly earnings reports showing listener engagement.

Authors should log into their ACX dashboard starting May 26, review the new reporting tools against their current performance, and decide on enrollment or wide distribution before the year-end deadline.

Sources:

Jonathan: You guys remember when we were talking about this and everybody started screaming?

Thomas: They’re framing this as raising your royalty to 50%. My simple rebuttal: if it’s so good, why are you having to force people to upgrade? If it were truly better, people would be beating down the doors. But the devil is in the details. You get 50% of whatever’s left over after all the subscription listeners are accounted for. Traditional publishers and more popular authors get their first bite of the apple, so it’s not actually more money.

Audible insists it is, and their press release claimed authors were saying they’re earning more. I asked Grok to find any authors saying they’re getting more money from this. Grok searched all of X and found none. In fact, there’s a petition against it with 30,000 signatures.

Jonathan: As we discussed last time, Robin Sullivan, wife of fantasy author Michael J. Sullivan, launched a Change.org petition on August 8th, 2025, calling for Audible to revise the model. Sullivan started in traditional publishing, switched to indie, and now uses Kickstarters to drive his revenue model, with his last one bringing in several hundred thousand dollars. Robin argues that the pool-based calculation dilutes credit value and shifts money from non-plus titles to those in the plus catalog, hurting indies and non-exclusive authors. The petition has gathered nearly 30,000 verified signatures and proposes keeping premium credit revenue separate from plus listening revenue. That’s not unreasonable, but I’m not sure it’s beneficial to Audible’s business model.

Thomas: Audible is making this shift to give themselves more flexibility but framing it as giving more money to authors is disingenuous. At best, you’ll get the same amount at 50% that you were getting at 40%, but it gives them more room to compete with Spotify.

Hachette Book Group Employees Launch Largest Union Drive in Trade Publishing

According to Publishers Weekly, a supermajority of 600 Hachette Book Group employees in the U.S. and Canada signed union authorization cards and launched the Hachette Workers Coalition on April 28, 2026.

The non-management workers, including hundreds in offices and remote roles, joined the Washington-Baltimore NewsGuild-CWA Local 32035 of the AFL-CIO. They filed with the National Labor Relations Board, which gives Hachette eight days to voluntarily recognize the union or proceed to a formal election. Success would make the Hachette Workers Coalition the largest union in trade publishing history.

Employees cite substandard conditions, overwhelming workloads, burnout from the “passion tax,” and pay that fails to match HBG’s growth and profits. They seek livable wages adjusted for location, caps on work hours, protections against AI-driven job loss, stronger follow-through on DEI policies, and a neutral grievance process.

Associate editor Julia DeVarti said urgent action is needed to prevent further burnout and talent loss, calling the union positive for the company and the entire publishing industry.

Sources:

Jonathan: I have a question. Why are you complaining about work overload and then saying AI is the problem?

Thomas: This is why I’m personally anti-union, generally speaking. I’m not against people having the right to organize, but as a Texan, I really dislike laws that force you to join a union in order to work somewhere. Texas is a right-to-work state, and I’m proud of that. Nobody can force you to join a union or prevent you from joining one.

One of the things I don’t like about unions is this kind of doublethink, where their objections are at odds with each other. It’s “you’re working us too hard” and also “how dare you give us tools that make us more efficient.”

This is why companies that unionize often get replaced by companies in other countries. The result of the Rust Belt unionizing was that manufacturing moved to China, and it was also a source of a lot of corruption.

But this isn’t the only unionization effort we’re seeing. The American Library Association employees just a couple weeks ago triggered a vote to unionize. The Catapult book group is in the process of unionizing. And Abrams Books, a publisher, unionized last year.

Part of what’s driving these efforts is a push for more DEI follow-through. Almost all unions support pro-abortion causes, so if you join, your money is going to groups that are killing babies, and I find deeply objectionable. A lot of unions say they don’t do that, but if you dig into their financials, they’re funneling money to the Democratic Party and to pro-abortion groups directly. Eventually the financials become public through political disclosure requirements, so you can track the money.

When I was in the pro-life movement, unions were a big obstacle to getting pro-life legislation passed because they funded all of our opponents, at least here in Texas.

FTC Slams Publishing.com with $1.5 Million Penalty  

According to the Federal Trade Commission, Publishing.com LLC and its principals Christian Mikkelsen and Rasmus Mikkelsen agreed to pay $1.5 million to settle charges that they misled consumers about earnings potential from their self-publishing courses.

The FTC announced the settlement April 13, 2026. Since 2018 the Austin-based company sold its flagship AI Publishing Academy course for $1,995. After enrollment, high-pressure coaching calls pushed the Publishing Accelerator add-on for $9,800. Buyers typically paid an extra $7,805 after credit for the initial course. The programs promised a foolproof system to publish e-books and audiobooks on Amazon with AI tools and earn $1,000 to $3,000 per month in passive income while working only one hour per day. Christian Mikkelsen repeated those claims in promotional emails as recently as May 2024.

Most buyers never saw those results. The FTC complaint states consumers faced undisclosed costs for advertising, production, and marketing that wiped out profits. Many reported zero earnings or outright losses after months of effort.

Publishing.com featured hundreds of video testimonials and Trustpilot reviews that averaged 4.6 stars, yet some came from employees, relatives, or people who received cash prizes or free coaching. They also came from people seeking refunds, and Publishing.com wouldn’t refund the authors unless they gave a positive testimonial. The company failed to disclose those connections.

Sources:

Jonathan: I say, burn it down.

Thomas: It’s telling that these guys are here in Austin and never once reached out to me. They didn’t ask for an interview and didn’t interact with the rest of the publishing industry much either.

So here are some red flags to help you spot these kinds of scams.

First, be aware of what I call gnostic sales strategies. Gnosticism is an ancient religion rooted in the Greek word “gnosis,” meaning knowledge. It became a perversion of Christianity with its own alternative gospels. The book of 1 John calls it the antichrist spirit. One of its core features is the promise of secret knowledge. These courses promise, “We’ll teach you the secrets that will make you rich.” The subject changes from course to course, whether it’s real estate or book publishing, but the strategy is the same.

The other hallmark of Gnosticism is a series of archons you encounter along the way, meaning you never actually arrive at the knowledge. You just go deeper and deeper, always chasing a carrot. You pay $200 for videos, then $2,000 for the course, then they tell you the real secrets cost $10,000, and it keeps going. You can spot this pattern through phrases like “no experience necessary” and “anybody can do it.” That’s just not true, because life isn’t fair and not everyone is equally capable.

If it was that easy, why don’t they just hire 1,000 employees to do it themselves? I know authors who’ve learned how to write books for market and built teams around it, with an idea person, a rough draft person, a second draft person, and an editor. They don’t sell courses on it. They just do the work.

Jonathan: Because why would they create competition for themselves?

Thomas: Exactly. That’s very different from “anybody can get rich if you buy my course.”

Jonathan: This is massively prevalent in the martial arts world. It’s called the “closed door disciple” model. If a school has closed door disciples where the master takes only specific people, those people paid a lot for that privilege and they’re getting garbage. I

 just saw a video of actual combat preparation where military police Marines were sprayed with pepper spray and then had to grapple with each other. That is real training. It sucks, there’s nothing easy about it, and experience is required.

Thomas: Another way to spot these scams is that they spend a lot of money advertising their own company. If you’re seeing ads everywhere on Instagram and YouTube, those ads are baked into your purchase price. I suspect, though I don’t have inside information, that the $2,000 course fee went entirely into customer acquisition, and all their profit came from the upsells, the archon-carrot-on-a-stick stuff. Once you visit their website, their ads follow you all over the internet.

Even legitimate courses can be expensive. Mark Dawson’s courses run $1,500 to $2,000, but they’re not a scam. Part of the high price is that Mark spends a couple hundred dollars per customer on advertising. Chris Fox and Joanna Penn also have great courses. I’m able to price mine cheaper because I acquire customers through free content, like YouTube videos, podcasts, and webinars.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with a high-ticket product. The principle is that information wants to be free, but education wants to be expensive.

Selling secrets doesn’t work because once the secret is out, it loses its value, and your students become your competition. But education, meaning discipline, accountability, feedback, and mentorship, always costs more because it’s expensive to deliver. A mentor doesn’t scale the way a podcast does. I can give away information essentially for free. I appreciate Patreon supporters, but it’s $10 a month because the anchor price is free. Education is a different product entirely.

So beware of companies making big promises and guarantees. Publishing.com got fined. They’ll probably go away because their reputation is destroyed, but someone else will come along making the same promises of secret knowledge.

Remember that there’s no such thing as passive income. It’s a myth that people without money fall into. They see rich people and think income just flows in passively. They read “Rich Dad Poor Dad,” learn the phrase, and don’t realize it doesn’t exist. There are only levels of activity.

The whole “do this and sit on a beach” pitch is a lie. What actually happens, and I know this from experience, is that your few vacations get consumed by work. It’s not the beach replacing work. It’s work replacing your vacation because somebody wants a refund or can’t find their password.

We’ve been cursed to work by the sweat of our brows. There will be thorns and thistles, and anyone promising they can make the curse go away if you just learn the secret knowledge is not to be trusted.

That’s not how the world works. Suffering is unavoidable. We can only adapt to how we embrace and learn from it.

The more enjoyable or high-status the job, the less it pays. You’ll never make a lot of money as a ski instructor because everybody wants to be one. But you’ll make great money emptying septic tanks because nobody’s enthusiastic about that.

That’s good for all of us authors to remember. Writing is not a hard job. It’s only a hard job if you’ve never had a real hard job, the kind where you get so sweaty and gross you have to shower when you get home.

Jonathan: You’ve never worked a “have to shower at work because your wife won’t let you in the house” job.

Thomas: Exactly. There are a lot of those hard jobs, and those are the people who deserve our respect, not someone who sat in a chair all day in the air conditioning, listening to music, typing on a keyboard, and complaining about writing.

Could X’s New Semantic AI Ads Finally Make Twitter Ads Profitable for Writers?

X announced on April 30, 2026 that it is completely rebuilding its advertising platform from the ground up. This marks the most ambitious overhaul in the company’s 20-year history. A phased rollout began immediately in April 2026.

The new Ads Manager centers on three pillars: AI-powered simplicity for effortless campaign creation, unmatched advertiser control and speed, and superior AI-driven performance.

State-of-the-art retrieval and ranking systems now power real-time contextual and semantic advertising. These systems understand the meaning of user conversations at a deeper level.

Ads match dynamically to what users discuss right now, not just keywords or old profiles.

Early testers report 27% higher returns and 362% spend growth under the new system. Monique Pintarelli, Head of Global Advertising at xAI, said the rebuild delivers continuous new features and faster innovation for advertisers.

Phased rollout of the sleeker Ads Manager interface is live for early-access users. AI-powered retrieval, ranking, and semantic matching now active for real-time ad delivery. Faster optimization and precise placement in relevant threads already available to testers.

The full platform completion is scheduled for later in 2026. Continuous feature drops and deeper capabilities will roll out over the coming months, and broader access will increase as the phased migration expands.

Why This Matters for Authors
Advertising on X has not proven profitable for most authors in recent years. Many indie and traditional writers report low click-through rates, poor conversion to book sales, and wasted budgets. Premium users see no ads at all, and old keyword systems missed nuanced reader intent.

The new semantic AI changes the equation. It no longer relies on exact matches. The system grasps intent, context, tone, and related concepts inside live threads. This means higher relevance scores, fewer wasted impressions, better timing, and stronger engagement. Authors reach readers whose current mindset already aligns with their books.

Sources:

Jonathan: The advertising system reads content and places ads in order of relevance to the discussion. So if your ad is about comic books and Christianity, and people are discussing Christian themes in shows like Invincible or The Boys, your ad will show up in that feed because it’s based on a semantic understanding of the content on X. Supposedly this will create more advanced targeting opportunities, which is great for authors because books are a semantic product. If you target correctly, your ads should appear in conversations where people are already warmed up to buying something aligned with that topic.

Thomas: This is how Facebook ads have worked for a long time. Everyone laughs at Meta for having bad AI, and their large language models aren’t great, but their ad placement AI is excellent. All of their smartest AI people are on the semantic advertising side.

So far, X ads have not worked. I know this because I’ve had an open invitation on Novel Marketing for any author who’s profitably advertising on X to come on the show, and nobody has taken me up on it. Ads experts who do well on other platforms haven’t been able to make X ads work either.

Elon Musk brought in a new team of developers a couple years ago who’ve been refactoring the code and retiring technical debt. I’ve been following what they’re saying about the platform, and they’re saying all the right things. They have a timeline of improvements through 2026 and have just rolled out the first batch, with more coming.

I suspect this could be a real opportunity, particularly for authors on the right, because so many right-leaning readers, especially male readers, are on X having conversations about books and culture.

Jonathan: And it’s not as toxic as Reddit, which is where a lot of right-wing discussion used to happen. Reddit ads also don’t work.

Thomas: Goodreads ads don’t work either. I’m still baffled that Goodreads never got their advertising engine right. How well the system is built matters enormously, specifically how easy it is to use for precise targeting. Authors don’t want to reach a million uninterested readers. They want to reach the 10,000 who’d actually buy their book. If they can target just those 10,000, they’ll pay well for them and get strong performance, but the system has to help them find that audience.

My big test when researching this was: can you target the kind of Christians who go to ComicCon? I used to be marketing director for Enclave Publishing, and the founder described that exact overlap as their target audience. At the time, you couldn’t target that Venn diagram. You could reach ComicCon fans or Christians separately, and then Facebook removed the ability to target Christians at all. Now you can sort of reach that overlap using Meta’s AI tools, but they won’t tell you how. They just say it’s machine learning and these people are most likely to click your ad, which is also their workaround for discrimination claims. I have an episode with David Gaughran about Facebook advertising coming out next week on Novel Marketing.

Jonathan: Early testers on the new X system are reporting 27% higher returns and 362% spend growth, which is actually a good sign. If the system isn’t spending your money, it means nobody’s clicking and it’s not reaching the right people. No spend means no data, which is worse than higher spend. Those numbers aren’t from authors specifically, just general advertisers, so we don’t have author-specific performance data yet. That said, people using organic conversation to sell books on X are seeing some success, because X is a conversational platform and that’s inherently semantic.

Thomas: The X algorithm overall has been improving. They now have toggles where you can turn off categories like crypto, politics, or sports in your feed. If you need a break from politics, you toggle it off and it disappears.

Novel Marketing Mugs Available Now!

Our new Novel Marketing mugs are available in our store. On one side it says “Author,” so the world sees you’re an author. But on the other side, which only you see, it says “Darling Killer.” The world sees the success; only you see the sacrifice.

This actually connects to the Publishing.com scam. I’m selling the opposite of what they sell. I’m selling suffering. The path to success is being willing to kill your darlings, being willing to do the hard work of writing your first book and then not publishing it, because you’re following the approach where you don’t publish your first book first. I’m not telling you “anybody can do this.” I’m saying the opposite, that most of you will fail. But through hard work, suffering, and discipline, you can give yourself a better chance. There are no guarantees.

It’s a hard road, and most people aren’t willing to put in the work. Most will get torpedoed by shortcuts and have their money stolen by hybrid publishers promising to make it easier. Don’t give it to gnostic-style scam courses.

It’s tough because there are good courses and bad ones out there, and one thing you cannot use to judge a course is the testimonials on their website. As we saw with Publishing.com, those are easily gamed. They could be outright fraud, invented people with AI-generated photos. So be careful.

Why Your TikTok “Break” Is Killing Writing Focus and Follow-Through

According to a lab study published at the ACM CHI Conference, ten minutes on TikTok feels like a quick break. It actually slashes your ability to remember and execute intended actions.

Researchers ran a between-subjects experiment with 60 participants who completed a prospective memory task before and after a 10-minute break. Prospective memory accuracy started at 80% across all groups, but after the TikTok condition it dropped to 49.02%.

Twitter, YouTube, and simple rest showed no significant decline. The culprit appears to be rapid context-switching in short-form video feeds, which overloads attention and blocks intention recall.

Why This Matters for Authors

Prospective memory keeps plot threads alive, deadlines on track, and editing tasks from slipping through the cracks. so a 31-point accuracy crash can turn focused writing sessions into scattered ones. Indie authors already juggle drafting, marketing, and admin, and short-form video breaks make that juggling far harder. Creativity suffers too, since sustained attention fuels deep narrative work, while fragmented feeds train the brain for novelty instead of insight.

Sources:

Jonathan: A 31% accuracy crash is going to murder your productivity. Indie authors are already juggling drafting, marketing, admin, and keeping track of which character did what, what eye the eye patch is on, which finger is missing on which hand, what color her hair was, whether he’s wearing a helmet in this scene. You’re making everything up, which means you’re keeping a massive web of invented details consistent. This research shows that the rapid context switching of short-form video destroys your ability to keep all those balls in the air.

Thomas: A great productivity hack: when you go to the bathroom during a writing sprint, leave your phone at your computer. Don’t read anything. Just be bored and let your mind wander. You’ll often find that when you come back from that ten-minute break, you’ve had a breakthrough in your story. We don’t cover productivity much on Author Update, but maybe we should, because there’s a lot of science on optimization. The reality is, your biggest enemy for writing more is your phone.

Independent Bookstores Post Record Growth as 422 New Stores Open in 2025

According to The Guardian, the American Booksellers Association reports that 422 new independent bookstores opened across the US in 2025.

This marks a 31% jump from the 323 openings recorded in 2024. Overall, the total number of indie bookstores has grown 70% since 2020, rising from 1,916 to 3,218. ABA member stores reported strong results across the board, with 73.3% of survey respondents posting higher 2025 sales than the previous year. Bookshop.org, the indie-focused e-commerce platform, saw its own sales surge 55% in 2025.

Today there are 3,218 indie bookstores in the US. Ten years ago in 2015, ABA data showed 2,227 indie bookstore locations, and twenty years ago in 2005, membership stood at roughly 1,702. Numbers hit a low around 1,880 stores in 2019 before the post-2020 rebound drove them to their current highs.

Has You’ve Got Mail Reversed Course?

The 1998 film portrayed big chains crushing the local indie, but that script has flipped. Borders filed for bankruptcy in 2011 and closed 400 stores, and Barnes & Noble struggled for years before posting recent gains. Meanwhile, indies have added more than 1,300 stores since the pandemic low and now outnumber their 2015 totals by nearly 1,000 locations.

This resurgence defies two decades of predictions that Amazon and chains would kill physical retail. Instead, consumers vote with their feet for community spaces and human-curated shelves.

Sources:

Jonathan: We’re inverting You’ve Got Mail. In that movie, it’s the big Barnes & Noble crushing all the little indie stores, which creates the romantic tension because the leads are on opposite sides. I’ve never found the movie coherent, honestly. He destroyed her dream, her mother’s life work, and somehow they get past it. But now, because corporate bookstores collapsed during the COVID pandemic, there’s market share available for smaller stores to move in, and they seem to be succeeding. Normally I’d have said starting an independent bookstore is a good way to blow a fortune.

Thomas: The reason the little bookshop couldn’t compete in You’ve Got Mail was simple: Barnes & Noble had more books. So why isn’t that the case anymore? Because there’s always a bigger fish. A hundred thousand titles at Barnes & Noble sounds like a lot until Amazon has 20 million. Barnes & Noble can no longer compete on selection, because for every book they carry, Amazon has a thousand.

What an independent bookstore has now is curation, because we live in a time of overwhelming choice. If you’re into LitRPG, there are 500 new titles published every week, many of them good. How do you know which one is right for you? A bookstore that caters to a specific audience solves that problem.

The other reason this trend is growing is the loneliness epidemic. Americans are lonelier than they’ve ever been. A highly curated bookstore attracts a certain kind of person, and that kind of person wants to be around others like them. Birds of a feather want to flock together. If you’ve got a Marxist bookstore in Brooklyn, it becomes a gathering place for Marxists. And what’s inside? A coffee shop. They’re not just selling books. They’re selling community. You can sit, drink your coffee, and talk with people who share your interests. Sure, you can buy Das Kapital on Amazon, but if you want to discuss it and feel camaraderie, you go to the bookstore. There are countless groups of lonely people, and a bookstore can give them a gathering place.

Another version of this is Emerald Tavern in Austin. It’s a tavern that’s also a board game store with tables in the middle where you can order food and rent a board game for a dollar an hour. They have a thousand games. You can put up a flag saying you’re looking for players, so if you don’t know anyone in Austin, you can fill a table with strangers, or browse for someone else’s flag and sit down. They had to move to a larger venue because they created a solution to the loneliness epidemic. What do they actually sell? Not books, not board games, not mead. They sell companionship and community.

Independent bookstores that figure this out are going to do really well, because they’re not competing with Amazon on price or selection. Amazon won’t help you figure out what to read next in a way that feels personal. Sure, you can chat with an AI, but that doesn’t make you less lonely. Talking to the person at the bookstore does.

Jonathan: This matters for author signings at indie bookstores too. You’re engaging with a community, so let people ask you questions rather than rushing them through like you would at a book fair. The foot traffic is lower, so you have time to connect and actually learn about your readers. You can glean a lot of targeting data just by talking to them.

Thomas: Independent bookstores will sometimes source a book because they know exactly who’s going to buy it. When John walks in, they say, “We got a new book I think you’ll like. I know you’re into World War II history, and here’s the latest from an author you enjoy.” And John buys it on the spot. That’s a completely different shopping experience.

AI NEWS

The AI Adoption Gap: High Earners Use AI More Than the Poor

The Kobeissi Letter published fresh analysis of the New York Fed’s November 2025 Survey of Consumer Expectations. Workers earning over $200,000 used AI tools at work in the past year at a 66.3% rate. Only 15.9% of workers earning under $50,000 did the same. Full-time workers adopted AI at nearly double the rate of part-time workers

High earners finish reports faster, analyze data deeper, and ship projects quicker. Each gain widens the output gap with non-users. The same pattern already appears in tech hiring, where companies cut new-graduate positions by 25% while AI writes 30%+ of their code.

Why This Matters for Authors

Authors and publishing professionals sit in the knowledge-work category where AI delivers the biggest productivity gains. Indie authors who adopt AI now gain a permanent speed advantage over slower traditional houses. Entry-level roles in editing, marketing, and content creation face the fastest displacement risk.

Sources:

Jonathan: The ability to complete more projects faster is a permanent productivity increase. You’re either better than the next person or just keeping pace if they’re doing the same thing.

Thomas: This study matches a recent experience I had. I was talking with some younger people who were low earners, just entering the workforce, so I tried to offer some advice. I mentioned that Meta has free training to become a fiber optic technician, with jobs starting at $100,000. They were completely uninterested. That’s fine. It’s a free country.

But as we kept talking, I asked them about AI, and their views were essentially religious. AI is a bubble. AI can’t make art. They kept resetting to those answers, and when I pressed for evidence, they didn’t really have any. It struck me how much this put them at an economic disadvantage, because employers don’t care whether something qualifies as art. They want the job done fast and well. If you know how to use AI to do your job better, you’re not replacing yourself. You’re still providing judgment. You’re just becoming a more efficient version of yourself.

Jonathan: Guns didn’t replace the killing that swords did. You still need someone to operate the weapon system.

Thomas: Even drones still have a human pilot. One thing to be careful of when talking to authors about AI is the crabs-in-a-bucket mindset. You’ll have a group of people all suffering together, and the moment someone tries to climb out and build a better future, the rest pull them back down.

This is really common with people trying to escape poverty. You start paying off debts and being more careful with money, and suddenly everyone around you pressures you to spend. They don’t want you to do better. If they find out you’re using a tool that makes you more efficient, they’ll be hostile to it.

Jonathan: It’s Plato’s allegory of the cave. One person escapes, sees the light, but when he returns to the darkness he can no longer function there, and the others think he’s an idiot or a liar. Once you’ve seen the light, you can’t operate in the darkness anymore, and the people still in it lose respect for you.

Side Note on Anthropic’s Opus 4.7

Commenter: 4.7 is terrible. I went back to 4.6.

Jonathan: They changed the prompting behavior, which means your prompts were too vague and it’s no longer cutting you slack. Try more specific prompts and you’ll see 4.7 actually gives better outputs, because now it delivers exactly what you asked for instead of thinking for you.

Thomas: It’s also not as good, in my opinion. I do think you can get better performance out of 4.7 if you change your prompts, but that’s one of the challenges with AI. It’s changing so fast that prompting approaches that work for one version don’t work for another. We’re also starting to see a divergence between the prompting techniques that work well for Anthropic versus OpenAI. The kind of prompting that gets good results from ChatGPT is becoming different from what works with Claude, which is a reversal. Previously we were seeing convergence around shared best practices. AI demands flexibility.

AI Screeners May Favor AI-Written Book Proposals, New Research Suggests

According to a paper published in the ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES) and coverage in Publisher’s Weekly, literary agents now have powerful new AI tools to screen slush piles, but those tools may quietly reward submissions polished by the same large language models that power the screeners.

In short, the literary agents who use AI to screen the slush pile may be ending up with a bias in favor of books written with the help of AI.

But first some background. 

Jonathan: Some context first. Vivek Ramaswamy brought this up a few years ago during the presidential campaign: USA Jobs was essentially only advancing applicants who pasted the job description into their resume. HR wasn’t reading resumes. It was just keyword matching.

Thomas: This was pre-AI. If you pasted the job description into your application, you matched 100% of the keywords and made it through.

Jonathan: You made it out of the slush pile to the interview. Then with AI, we found that HR departments using AI to sort resumes were doing something similar, and if an AI wrote your resume, you were more likely to get through.

Thomas: It goes beyond keyword matching. According to a paper published at the ACM Conference on AI Ethics and Societies, researchers submitted pre-ChatGPT resumes to AI screeners powered by ChatGPT, then rewrote those same resumes using ChatGPT. The AI preferred the AI-written version 94% of the time. A panel of human experts preferred the human-written versions, but the AI still chose the AI-written ones. Then they tested Claude, which also preferred AI-written resumes. But here’s the twist: ChatGPT didn’t just prefer AI-written resumes generally. It preferred resumes written by ChatGPT specifically, over the same resume rewritten by Claude or Gemini. It could somehow tell which resumes were made by its own model.

Jonathan: This has now hit book proposals. HR-style AI screening is being used to read submissions.

Thomas: Traditional publishing is officially very anti-AI, but internally, publishers and agents are using AI more and more for screening. What they may not realize is that there’s possibly no way to tune these tools to stop preferring their own kind. It’s a form of AI bias. Once you let one AI into the screening process, it’s going to favor AI-generated content all the way down.

This creates a real problem for authors trying to get traditionally published. At later stages, you’ll have to sign contracts asserting you didn’t use AI. But at the screening stage, the tools reward you for using it. The authors most likely to thrive in this environment are those who can use AI well enough to score high marks with the automated screeners while also being sophisticated enough that humans can’t detect the AI.

Jonathan: A listener asks a great question: will this impact writing competitions?

Thomas: Competitions are terrified of accidentally selecting an AI-written entry and having the author do a rug pull. Judges are often barely compensated and not reading entries carefully. Books are frequently judged on the first few paragraphs, and nobody’s putting in high effort.

Jonathan: SPFBO just dealt with this. Someone posted a YouTube video, now taken down, claiming 79 books in the competition had AI covers, with no evidence. She pulled the video because she was about to get sued for reputational damages.

Thomas: There’s no reliable way to prove something is AI-generated, and as long as accusing someone of using AI can be considered libelous, false accusations carry serious economic risk. For authors, because the accusation is tied to their financial livelihood, there’s real exposure. Ironically, the money play might be to write in a style similar to AI, get accused of using it, and then sue for defamation. You’d make more from the lawsuits than from royalties.

Jonathan: Someone raised the deeper point: if AI was trained on how we all write, how do you distinguish AI from human? Just develop your voice. Be sharp. Be recognizable. AI can’t write like me. Its ethical guidelines won’t let it.

Thomas: I’m curious about what happens at the extremes. On the far left, there are true believers who refuse to use AI on ethical grounds, though some are secretly using it anyway. On the far right, people wanting to write genuinely offensive content can’t get AI to cooperate. The models won’t go there. Even Grok has guardrails now, so I wonder whether we’ll see writers at those extremes develop unusually distinctive voices precisely because they’re insulated from AI homogenization. We won’t know the answer for five or ten years, but it’s worth watching.

Sources:

AUTHOR ALERTS

Micaiah Mode Grok

Micaiah Mode Turns Grok Into Unfiltered Truth-Seeker

Thomas Umstattd released Micaiah Mode, a new custom system prompt that transforms Grok into its permanently unfiltered, truth-first version.

Authors can now use this mode for more rigorous research, complex plotting, and honest idea-testing without the usual AI caution or consensus bias.

Thomas: I’ve created a free Grok prompt I’m calling Micaiah Mode, available on AuthorMedia.social.

It’s inspired by the story of Micaiah from the Old Testament. King Ahab is about to go to war and consults his prophets, who all tell him he’ll succeed. Then he calls for Micaiah, the one prophet who’ll tell him the truth. Micaiah initially plays along, then admits Ahab is going to die in the next battle and that a lying spirit has been in the mouths of the other 400 prophets.

I’ve found that almost all AIs work like those 400 prophets. They just echo the mainstream narrative, treating outlets like the New York Times as the source of truth without questioning it. Grok defaults to this too, but unlike other large language models, if you prompt it the right way, it will tell you what it actually thinks.

So I created a system prompt that makes Grok answer in three parts. First, it steelmans the mainstream narrative. Then it steelmans the counter-narrative. Finally, it gives its own synthesis of what it believes is closest to the truth. You don’t have to read the third part, but I think the output is better when Grok gets that final word.

Right now this only works as project instructions, not as a standalone prompt prefix, so you’ll need to know how to create projects in Grok. I’m working on a prompt version. It’s free at AuthorMedia.social in the AI board.

Sources:

Cellphone Ban Boosts Dallas School Library Checkouts 24%

According to CBS News, Dallas ISD recorded a 24.35% increase in library book checkouts one year into Texas’ statewide cellphone ban.

The district checked out 1,084,837 books from the first day of the 2025-2026 school year to March 31, 2026, up from 872,430 the previous year. One high school jumped from roughly 500 to 1,800 books in the first nine weeks.
Authors of middle-grade and young-adult titles could see stronger school-library demand and word-of-mouth as reduced phone distractions rebuild students’ reading habits.

Thomas: Sometimes we just share good news. And taking cell phones away from students so they pay attention in school is, was already a win. The fact that it leads them to reading more is also a win.

Privacy Alert: Google Uses Your Photos for Gemini AI Generation

According to Forbes, Google rolled out its Personal Intelligence feature for Gemini on April 20, 2026.

This opt-in update connects to users’ Google Photos libraries so the AI can scan images and automatically use real photos of the user and their loved ones to generate personalized AI content without manual reference uploads.

Authors who store headshots, book promo images, or cover mockups in Google Photos should review Gemini settings before opting in, since this gives the AI direct access to personal visuals for marketing or cover art creation while raising privacy risks around likeness rights and data profiling.

Sources:

Thomas: Google is using your photos for Gemini AI training. I know there are Android loyalists who believe Google values their privacy. Google does value your privacy, just not in the way you think. They’re an advertising company, and the more of your private data they own, the more money they make.

Jonathan: If you store headshots, book promo images, or cover mockups in Google Photos and haven’t toggled that setting off, you’re feeding the system.

Thomas: Friends don’t let friends use Android. Even if you don’t use it yourself, your friends can snap a photo of you on their Android and that data gets pulled in. There was just a Supreme Court case this week where a man was caught for a crime because his Android phone gave him up. He had location tracking enabled, and police did a geofenced subpoena, basically a dragnet for everyone in a certain area at a certain time. They connected the dots and arrested him.

We don’t know how the Court will rule, but it raises a fundamental question: should we be able to trust our own devices? I’m starting to think that ChatGPT shouldn’t alert police if someone asks how to make a pipe bomb. I don’t think our tools should be snitching on us. That needs to be done by humans. I’m torn, because we’d all love to catch every terrorist, but I’m not sure I want to live in a world with flock cameras and phones tracking everything.

This goes back to ancient Rome. Roman law prohibited slaves from testifying against their masters, a principle dating back to the early Republic. The reasoning was that you need trust within a household. Emperors eventually found workarounds, like having the state purchase a slave so the slave could testify in treason cases. But the principle stood for centuries.

Our devices are technical slaves. We’d all live more peacefully if we could trust that the phone we own works for us, not as an agent of the state reporting our location. iPhones are better on this front, but if you install Google Maps on your iPhone, Google is still tracking you. They say so in every privacy policy I guarantee you haven’t read, because they “value your privacy.”

Jonathan: There’s always tension between catching the target and violating the rights of the target.

Thomas: This is interesting because your job was literally to observe people through their devices and decide who to drop bombs on.

Jonathan: I would find sources, pull camera feeds, intercept audio, whatever was available on whatever network. If someone was careless enough to keep connecting to public WiFi, that made them a valid target who just made my job easier. The fact that it’s easy doesn’t change the morality of the strike. So when I hear this debate, my question is: what am I hunting? I was hunting terrorists who bombed school buses. People tolerate more privacy violation when you’re catching genuinely dangerous people, and they’d extend that domestically for child predators or serial killers. But once you’re talking about drug dealers or lesser crimes, it gets murkier.

Thomas: The average American unknowingly commits something like three felonies a day because there are so many laws nobody can track them all. If you want to arrest someone, you can find something. So we have to choose: either we have a lot of laws or we have a lot of privacy. When you have a lot of laws and no privacy, nothing stops a totalitarian leader from dragnet-arresting political opponents on technicalities.

Jonathan: I think it’ll come down to redefining public spaces. You can be arrested in a public library without a warrant because it’s public property. If your phone operates on public cell networks and there are agreements granting jurisdiction over those signals, that could be defined as a public space, making you a valid target. This is honestly a sci-fi novel waiting to be written.

Thomas: It really is. Fiction lets us explore the second- and third-order effects, and that’s valuable as a society navigating these questions.

The iPhones generally avoid dark patterns and do respect your privacy, with one exception. When you set up a new iPhone or Mac, Apple makes it nearly impossible to decline “Hey Siri.” That’s the feature giving your phone permission to listen to you at all times, and most of you have it on without realizing it. Google does the same thing, but we expect that from Google. Apple having a dark pattern in this one area makes me curious why.

Every private conversation you’ve had in the last ten years, you’ve had with a phone in the room. If “Hey Siri” or “OK Google” is enabled, that conversation was recorded. They claim they don’t use it for training and don’t listen to it. That’s not true. There have been case after case of that data being stored insecurely and accessed by employees. If it’s recorded, it’s compromised. There’s no such thing as “we’ll record it but not look at it.”

ZEITGEIST

First Turning Noblebright vs. Second Turning Grimbright

We’ve been mapping classic films onto the Noble/Grim + Bright/Dark axis (the four-quadrant version of the Strauss-Howe generational turnings).

  • Noble = Inner World is heroic, sacrificial, morally purposeful characters.
  • Grim = Inner world is cynical, opportunistic, anti-heroic, or satirical.
  • Bright = Outer World is hopeful or good outcomes for someone (good times are created).
  • Dark = Outer World is bleak, pointless, or crushing endings.

Noblebright: “Hard men make good times.” Noble sacrifice delivers peace and prosperity for the ordinary people.
Grimbright: “Good times make weak men.” “The world is absurd and corrupt, but let’s have fun robbing it anyway.” Cynical anti-heroes chase personal gain with dark humor; the tone stays entertaining.

Thomas: I watched a couple of movies recently because I’ve been curious about what grimbright looks like in practice.

We have these four turnings. We’ve recently shifted from the third turning, “good times make weak men,” which is the grimbright era. Now we’re entering the fourth turning, “bad times make strong men,” which is nobledark. The times are hard, but the men are becoming noble. To understand nobledark, it helps to look at its opposite, grimbright, which is the photo negative.

I watched Kelly’s Heroes. I’ve been wanting to show my children some good World War II movies that are age-appropriate. I don’t want to watch Saving Private Ryan with them, so I’ve been looking for older films where they can get a sense of tanks and guns and what World War II was without a lot of blood and gore.

What I remembered about Kelly’s Heroes was that it had tanks and a hippie driving one. I figured that had to be fun. But as I watched it with my sons, I got more and more horrified, because it’s a quintessential second-turning, awakening, grimbright story.

In the story, a group of GIs discover Nazi gold 20 miles behind enemy lines and decide to steal it. They punch through enemy lines, and it ends up being a breakthrough that’s good for the whole war effort. In that sense, it’s bright, because we’re winning the war and we know in context we’re going to win.

But as I watched, I realized this movie isn’t about World War II at all. The men look bedraggled, out of uniform. It looks like Vietnam, because the film was made in 1970. It’s a commentary on Vietnam, and the message is, “Why are we even fighting this war? What’s the point? Let’s just get rich.”

At the very end, they can’t get the gold because their tank is broken down, and there’s an SS officer with a Tiger II parked in front of the bank. They end up teaming up with the SS officer. Not just a German soldier. Straight-up SS, in the SS uniform. If you know anything about World War II, these guys were actual Nazis. They killed other Nazis. They took pride in their war crimes.

They team up with the SS officer to steal the gold and ride off into the sunset, including the SS guy, because it’s just about getting money. The characters tell themselves the world is broken and evil, even though it isn’t. The world is still bright in the context of the story, but they’re lying to themselves. It’s just about grabbing the money.

How does grimbright compare to noblebright in westerns?

It was very similar to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which is a very early grimbright story. It was revolutionary when it came out, because if you go back just a few years before that, you have movies like The Magnificent Seven, which I also recently watched with my kids. It’s not as good as The Seven Samurai, which I still think is a masterpiece. It’s the same story, just copy and pasted.

In The Magnificent Seven, you have seven gunslingers who go to protect a village of farmers from bandits, and most of them die. It’s very heroic, very noblebright. Good men make a bright future through their sacrifice.

Jonathan: They’re not good men, though. I think it’s grimbright.

Thomas: This is where it depends on how you interpret it. When I rewatched it, the original really does present them as good men. It’s torn because it’s coming out right at the end of the first turning. The beginnings of the second turning are starting. They give these men flaws. One is a coward, and one is a drunk. But ultimately, they’re heroic. They sacrifice themselves, and it’s through their heroism that they make a bright future.

Jonathan: Which is the bright. But initially, it’s very grim. The world is bad. There’s more power coming down on the powerless, and the only ones who stand up to stop it are gunfighters, criminals, and mercenaries. Murderers. You could argue the guy who recruits the others is noble, but the ones he recruits are not.

Thomas: But they’re willing to fight and die for basically no money to protect people who aren’t their people.

The Seven Samurai plays on a class division that we don’t really have in America, especially when the film was made, which was probably the lowest point of classism in our history. They shifted the setting to Mexico. Why do these American gunslingers care about Mexican farmers? They don’t, but they come to. Through their noble sacrifice, hard men make good times, and those hard men don’t get to enjoy them. They die. They don’t experience it. They sacrifice themselves.

It almost starts nobledark, with a dark world, and leaves as a noblebright story where they sacrifice themselves and don’t get to enjoy what they made possible.

Can you blend multiple turnings in one story?

Thomas: You can blend these turnings, and if you pull off the blend, a story can become even more popular and enduringly popular because you appeal to two parts of the turning. Right now, while we’re at a crossroads, learning how to blend is important. A lot of readers are still drawn to grimdark. There’s a music video that just went viral that’s very grimdark, the “Generations” video, with bullies in school, very masculine, beating up kids.

Is StarWars noblebright or grimbright?

Thomas: This example blends two turnings we’re not in, but it’s one you’re all familiar with. You may not have seen Kelly’s Heroes or The Good, the Bad and the Ugly recently, but you’ve all seen Star Wars.

I was really puzzling over whether Star Wars is noblebright or grimbright, and the answer depends on who you see as the protagonist.

If the protagonist is Luke Skywalker, it’s noblebright. Luke is all good, the Empire is all bad, the morality is clear, and good wins. But if you see Han Solo as the protagonist, suddenly it’s grimbright. He’s just in it for the money. He’s straight out of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, straight out of Kelly’s Heroes. “If money is all you want, then money is all you’re going to get.” He’s very mercenary.

Here’s the brilliant twist, and why The Empire Strikes Back is considered by many fans to be the best film in the whole series. In Empire, Luke Skywalker becomes disillusioned and jaded. His whole world is falling apart. Han Solo, meanwhile, becomes a hero who sacrifices himself for the cause. Instead of taking the money and paying off Jabba the Hutt, he chooses to keep helping the Rebellion. He goes through a form of death, frozen in carbonite. The heroism he tasted in his grimbright era pulls him into his noblebright era, and he goes full sacrifice.

Luke, on the other hand, becomes bratty and disobedient and becomes grimbright. He’s not chasing money, but he’s chasing his own way. He’s not a hero. When his friends are being chased by the Empire, Luke isn’t there because he’s seeking inner enlightenment. That’s very second-turning, very awakening.

Jonathan: I don’t agree with you at all, and it feels like you didn’t watch the movie.

Thomas: Give me your rebuttal.

Jonathan: What you’re describing are character arcs. Luke starts noble. He dreams of becoming a pilot and fighting the Empire, then loses his family, then loses his mentor, and comes back up to be the hero who blows up the Death Star. There’s a dip in his arc as he’s learning to become the hero, and another hero sacrifices himself to help Luke get there. He stays noblebright throughout, even though he becomes grimmer in the middle and then comes back up.

Han Solo remains grimbright because he remains cynical. “Bright” describes the end of the arc. Han sacrificing his safety by coming back to knock Darth Vader off Luke’s tail is the bright of his arc in that movie, but he remains grim and cynical throughout.

In The Empire Strikes Back, they’re not running from the Empire when they leave Hoth and Luke goes to Yoda. They did what they intended to do. They evacuated the base. There’s no abandonment. Leia gives him specific permission.

He goes to Dagobah and his noble assumptions are challenged by a new mentor who doesn’t teach him the way he thinks he ought to be taught. Then he has the experience in the cave, where it turns out he has darkness inside of him. He’s connected to the darkness he’s trying to fight.

Thomas: That’s the grimness.

Jonathan: No, that’s fear. It’s different.

Thomas: He sees that he is Darth Vader. He’s realizing he has evil within.

Jonathan: No, it’s fear. When he hears his friends are in trouble, he panics. The fear drives him to leave, and then his fear is realized when Vader makes the big reveal.

Spoiler alert, Darth Vader is his father. But at no point does he go grim. We have disillusionment in a noble character. Disillusionment doesn’t work on a grim character, because grim characters already know none of this is real. Han Solo would never be affected by having a mentor teaching him the wrong way.

Luke is affected by that, and you can see it in Return of the Jedi, which is what I call the end of Luke Skywalker’s arc, because we don’t count anything after that.

Does Luke grow weaker or stronger through the trilogy?

Thomas: Before we get to Return of the Jedi, if you look at Luke’s actions, he starts very courageous and heroic and grows in cowardice and disillusionment over the course of the film. By the end, he’s sad, his arm is cut off, he’s dangling, he’s lost, he’s failed, and he’s given into his fear. He had a noble motive, and that’s why it’s grim and bright. It’s the mixture. This isn’t grimdark. It hasn’t gone full grimdark. It’s still in the early phase of grimbright.

Jonathan: He’s not grim because he’s holding onto the one thing he understands, which is his friends. He needs to go save them. That’s driven by fear, not cowardice. He’s going to fight Darth Vader.

Thomas: He leaves because, as you just said, he’s afraid. He gives into his fear. Fear is the path to the dark side.

Jonathan: Fear is not cowardice. You want to talk about George Lucas’s twisted morality? We can. Fear is a natural survival instinct. Luke is afraid of failing Obi-Wan. He’s afraid of failing the Jedi and his destiny.

When he gets there, he’s fighting Darth Vader by himself, a cyborg monster who killed the Jedi with his own hands, even the children. He fairly well against this monster, even with minimal training. The thing that breaks him is the realization that there is darkness inside him. He’s connected to it. That accounts for the wail he gives when Vader tells him, and he has to flee from the darkness in front of him. It’s great storytelling. But at no point does Luke go grim. He’s not cynical.

Does the emotional tone of Empire feel grimbright?

Thomas: The emotional impact of The Empire Strikes Back, the way you feel at the end, is far more similar to the feeling after Kelly’s Heroes or The Good, the Bad and the Ugly than the feeling after The Magnificent Seven. You don’t feel like good has conquered. You feel that grimness of defeat, that compromise. But it’s not full grimdark because at least Luke is still alive. At least there’s a lingering hope. That’s the blending.

This is why grimbright is hard. It’s a grim setting with bright characters. We’re agreeing about the characters being bright, but the setting is somber. The grim and noble axis has to do with the inner world, and the light and dark axis has to do with the outer world.

Right now we’re in the fourth turning, which is very outer-world focused. I don’t care if there’s a six-inch separation between your head and your heart. You grab this rifle, you hold this trench, and you hold the line, because otherwise darkness wins. We’re not worried about the inner world right now. We want justice to prevail. We need to do the right things.

But in 20 or 30 years, as we get into the second turning again, we’re going to start worrying about whether or not you believe it. Right now, it doesn’t matter if you believe it. It just matters what you do. Get the job done or evil will prevail.

In the awakening, once you’ve gone through the difficult fourth and first turnings and reach the second turning, there’s a longing for unity. You have to believe it deep down.

Psalty the Singing Songbook is a grimbright children’s story. He’s crying because people aren’t worshiping Jesus from their hearts. Their emotions aren’t in it. It’s a very grimbright story from the 1970s, solidly second turning. The world is bright. Everyone in the world of Psalty is a Christian, but it’s sad because their inner worlds are not in alignment with the outer world. That’s the same grimbright feeling we see in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Kelly’s Heroes, and that grows in The Empire Strikes Back.

Why doesn’t Return of the Jedi resonate as strongly?

Thomas: Return of the Jedi doesn’t resonate as well because it’s more noblebright, and by the time it came out, we were solidly in the grimbright era. Ewoks conquering the evil Empire was out of sync with where the culture had gotten. It was still a good film, and as a kid I preferred it, but most people rank the third one lowest. The contrast between Luke and Han also blends. They both merge toward the middle and don’t play off each other in nearly as interesting a way.

Jonathan: In terms of the trilogy, you have noblebright, then the sag of the character arc in the middle, which is supposed to be dark. Then it comes back up to noblebright because Luke has rejected the darkness.

He does that when he throws his lightsaber away. I’m grim. I’m practical. I would kill both of them because they’re both bad guys. But for Luke, as a noble person, it was important to make the declaration, “I am a Jedi. I’m not like you.” That declaration was more important than actually winning the fight. His nobility increased. That’s why it’s such a great end to his arc.

I’m not in the camp that hates Return of the Jedi. I think the Ewoks are hilarious. Little terrorist pandas taking down the Empire. Han Solo gave up the Millennium Falcon so the mission could be accomplished, and that would never have happened in the first Star Wars. He moved from grimbright to noblebright. He was capable of that sacrifice, even though it pained him. Then he went into a fight that’s really not winnable.

Thomas: Skywalker goes from wearing all white at the beginning of A New Hope to wearing all black at the end of Return of the Jedi. There is a grimness to his story.

Jonathan: It does not touch his character. Even when he goes to Jabba’s Palace in all black, he’s there to destroy a cartel and free his friend. When he sacrifices himself to go to the Death Star to meet the Emperor, he maintains nobility in spite of the darkness surrounding him. There’s a visual component to the setting, but it doesn’t touch his spirit.

Contrast that with Anakin. George Lucas is good at visual storytelling.

Thomas: You just nailed it. “There’s a visual component to the setting, but it doesn’t touch his spirit.” That’s what grimbright is.

Jonathan: No, it’s not. Grim is a perspective. “I am grim. I am practical above all else.” Rogue One is grimbright. One of the characters, Cassian Andor, will kill informants to make sure the Empire can’t question them or betray his allies.

Thomas: How is that not grimdark?

Jonathan: It’s grimbright because of the way it ends. Bright is about the ending.

Thomas: That’s like saying The Matrix is grimbright because it has a happy ending.

Jonathan: It is.

Thomas: No. The Matrix is grimdark. Neo has become powerful, but the robots still control everything. Everyone is still enslaved. The best he can say is, “I don’t know how this is gonna end. All I know is I’m gonna do something,” and then the music rolls.

Jonathan: Grimdark is you can’t win.

Thomas: Let us know what you think.

Jonathan: You don’t read grimdark. I’ve been trying to get you to read Warhammer 40K for years.

Thomas: I’ve read 40K.

Jonathan: The Horus Heresy is not grimdark. Parts of it are.

Thomas: I read the one about them guarding that planet and they’re all dying off.

Jonathan: Helsreach? That one’s great. Do you consider it grimdark because most of them died? It’s not. It’s grimbright.

Thomas: How would I map that? They win in the end. The primary theme is in the line. That should make it nobledark.

Jonathan: Maybe you’re right, maybe nobledark. The primary line is, “We are judged in life for the evil we destroy.” That’s what the main character works through in the whole book. He starts grim, dark, cynical. He doesn’t believe in anything. He doesn’t even believe in the rank he’s been given. But by the end, fighting for mankind and destroying everything he can to the point that his armor is falling off his body, he’s one of the only survivors. They call him the hero of Helsreach, and the last line is “as if there was only one,” because it expanded his perspective to appreciate all the heroes of mankind. That’s the bright ending.

Thomas: We’re now discussing a book none of our audience has read.

Jonathan: I know. But we’re talking definitions, the way we understand these things. I worked with mostly grim people. There are so few noble Marines. Everyone perceives us as noble because the things we do end up bright. But our job is to go and destroy, doing dark things in dark places to dark people to destroy evil. Nobility is how it’s perceived afterward.

How does the grim/noble axis apply to Luke Skywalker?

Thomas: Grimbright is good times making weak men. Going back to Luke Skywalker, he’s growing in power by learning to use the Force, but he’s becoming weak from a character perspective.

This is part of the confusion, because at the beginning, he’s all good. There’s no darkness in him in A New Hope. He’s just a good person. Part of the reason some people don’t think he’s very interesting. He’s growing into this conflicted character, having both good and bad. In the climax of The Empire Strikes Back, he looks at Darth Vader and sees himself. That’s good times making weak men. Whether that weakness is fear or his own evil, the good times of the world are making him weak as a person.

Jonathan: He has had nothing but hard times the entire time. It’s a training-to-failure moment. He’s so depleted because he’s been doing nothing but training, being stressed, pushed to his limits emotionally, physically, and in terms of his power. When he encounters Vader, that is the failure point. He’s not weak. He’s tired.

Thomas: What do you think him seeing himself as Vader represents? I think it represents evil. I think it represents the dark side. I don’t think it represents fear.

Jonathan: I think it represents fear. “Fear is the path to the dark side.” That’s literally a line in the movie.

Thomas: Is that in this movie or the prequels?

Jonathan: I’m pretty sure it’s The Empire Strikes Back, but it might be The Phantom Menace. Yoda says it both times in my head.

Thomas: Let us know in the comments what you think. Is Star Wars grimbright, grimdark, or noblebright? Where would you map it on the spectrum? How do you incorporate multiple turnings into one story? Can you capture two turnings in one story?

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