Author Update: Publishing News, Analysis, and Advice
Here’s what you can expect from Author Update:
- Publishing News Stay in the loop on what’s happening in the industry.
- Advice That Matters – Learn how to make your book irresistible to readers.
- Zeitgeist Analysis – Get insights on changing reader preferences.
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Stay Informed with Every Episode
Meet Your Hosts
Thomas Umstattd Jr.
Author Media CEO
The founder of Author Media and the host of the Novel Marketing Podcast, the longest running book marketing podcast in the world. Thomas has worked in the publishing industry since 2007.
Jonathan Shuerger
A Marine Corps veteran and author with a passion for telling stories and making people laugh. He lives in Tucson, AZ, with his wife and daughters, who moonlight as domestic terrorists in their free time.
Latest Episodes
Amazon Review Purge: The Author Survival Guide
Explore recent publishing news on imprint closures, bestseller challenges, and AI’s influence on the future of books.
Draft2Digital Confirms: Amazon Sales Reports Are Off by 50%
KDP dashboard errors, Chrome’s secret AI install, a Harvard prompting hack, the AI book flood, and how global nationalism is changing what readers want.
Audible Forces Every Title Into New Royalty Model
Audible set a hard deadline for its new royalty model. The FTC fined a self-publishing guru $1.5M for fake promises. AI screeners favor AI-polished proposals over human ones. Independent bookstores are booming with 422 new openings. And science confirmed your TikTok breaks are wrecking your writing focus.
Price Fixing at Amazon
Amazon price-fixing emails unsealed by California’s AG, a banned-book campaign that backfired into a bestseller, proposed copyright fee hikes, the latest AI model drops from OpenAI and Chinese rivals, new cover design tools from Author Media, and surprising data on where the money and readers actually are. Here’s what it all means for your writing career.
Amazon Kills Store Access for 2 Million Kindles
Draft2Digital levies a tax against the “poors,” Amazon kills millions of old Kindles and the Windows 10 Kindle app, and Barnes and Noble Press drops three policy bombs that could wipe your books from sale. Plus, an AI artist just hit number one on iTunes without a single human voice, Ukraine’s robots won their first solo battle with zero casualties, and fresh Pew Research data maps exactly where your readers draw their moral lines.
Huge Legal Wins for Authors
The Supreme Court confirms you own your AI-assisted writing, a bestselling thriller author loses his entire YouTube channel to a copyright scam but gets it back, Amazon finally ends the practice that let counterfeiters slip fakes into your book sales, and for our zeitgeist segment we’ll analyze the new movie Project Hail Mary.