For Week Ending October 30, 2026

This week, authors are reporting steep drops in their Kindle page counts and estimated royalties after Amazon’s Kindle+ reporting update, but do those disappearing numbers mean disappearing income?

We’ll look at new audiobook distribution opportunities through Chirp and Hoopla, and explain why you should download your old ACX statements while you still can. We’ll also cover Discord’s plans to make public conversations searchable on Google, the latest AI writing tools, and a way to sell print books without filling your garage.

Publishing News

Authors See 40-70% KENP Drops After Kindle+ Reporting Migration

According to the KDP Community thread opened October 21, authors logged in to find their Royalties Estimator and KENP reports suddenly lower by 40-50% for the current month and for prior months. The same day, another thread reported overnight losses of 117,148 lifetime pages, with 77,186 cut from 2025 totals and 39,962 from 2026. Multiple authors described historical charts rewritten, daily figures reduced retroactively, and the new Kindle+ Pages Listened column showing zero for September and earlier despite prior Audible Plus activity.

What Happened

Amazon’s official announcement, posted October 22, rebranded Kindle Unlimited as Kindle+ and brought eligible audiobooks into the U.S. subscription. Virtual Voice titles enroll automatically when the matching ebook is in KDP Select. ACX titles need exclusive distribution, Whispersync for Voice, and the Pay for Production model. The announcement states that listening is paid by page from the KDP Select Global Fund, that Amazon is adding money to the fund for the new activity, and that a subscriber is paid only the first time they read or listen to a given page. Reports were updated so the KENP report separates pages read from pages listened, with consolidated Kindle+ royalties appearing in Prior Month’s Royalties.

Authors say the migration did not simply split the numbers. In the main October 21 thread, the original poster noted that Prior Months’ Royalties statements and payment records still showed the higher totals, while the estimator and KENP charts had dropped. One reply from JP Reedman reported that support called it a glitch tied to the Pages Listened change and said a fix would take one to three days. Other authors in the same thread and in a parallel thread described support saying the figures were correct, or that tickets had been escalated with no public notice. Daily KENP drops of 80-90% after October 21 were reported by some. Lifetime totals fell for others, including one author who saw 413,131 pages disappear overnight. On Reddit’s r/KDP, one author described September KENP falling from 1,070,076 to 310,018 and lifetime 2026 totals collapsing, with the new Listened column showing a single page. Several noted that Pages Listened remained at zero even after the split.

X posts from October 23 restated the same pattern. Matt Drabble wrote that he had lost over 70% of October KENP royalties and tagged Stephen King. Daren Hatfield described a book order that produced no processed order, no pages read, and no estimated royalty. An earlier post in a thread about the rebrand itself noted authors already worried that Virtual Voice titles would dilute the pot.

As of October 29, one author posted that August royalty payments had arrived accurately and matched the pre-migration figures, which suggests the glitch has not yet altered actual disbursements. October trackers and historical views remained understated, and no banner or community-wide statement from KDP had appeared.

The confirmed facts are the reporting migration around October 21, the separation of pages read from pages listened, the appearance of widespread dashboard and estimator reductions, historical rewrites, and mixed support responses. Speculation that the underlying page-read volume has collapsed, that the per-page rate has already changed, or that audiobooks are currently diluting the fund cannot be verified from the public record. The October Global Fund figure, normally released around mid-November, will be the first official data point on whether the added listening money keeps pace with the new activity.

Why Authors Care

Screenshot your current KENP reports, Royalties Estimator, and Prior Month’s Royalties now, including the new Pages Listened filter, so you have a baseline if numbers shift again.

Compare those screenshots against the finalized Prior Month’s Royalties statements and against any earlier downloads you already have.

Contact KDP support with the screenshots and ask whether the reduction is a temporary reporting migration or a permanent change in how listening is attributed.

Watch the October KDP Select Global Fund announcement around mid-November; that number is the first hard evidence of whether the fund increase covers the added listening pages. Sources:

Commentary

Thomas: Jonathan, is this the apocalypse?

Jonathan: It's always the apocalypse. I've lived through about five of those by now.

People were already worried that Virtual Voice titles would dilute the pot of money everyone gets paid out of. It looks like that happened, but not because of Virtual Voice.

Thomas: I see this from an entirely different perspective as a tech guy.

Anybody who has done a system migration knows the drill. You successfully migrate 99.9% of authors, and who makes a huge stink? The 0.1% who weren't migrated. They're losing their minds, and the engineers are saying, "It's okay, we've got the data, we just have to restore it. Give us some days. Do you realize how many millions of records this is? Do you know how overworked I am?"

Jonathan: When migrations happen, the network engineers don't sleep. When our crypto went down in Iraq, we had guys come over and work 96 hours straight.

Thomas: At the last tech company I helped run, I tried to create a superstition that it was bad luck to launch new websites on Fridays. I don't believe in luck, but for the love of your weekend and mine, don't launch anything on a Friday.

Clients always wanted to launch on Fridays and on the first of the month. We launched new things on Mondays because there are always little bugs.

So when you see a chart showing the wrong information, don't panic. In fact, I wouldn't panic at all until the actual payment from Amazon has the wrong information. It's very common for data to display incorrectly. I can't tell you how many times I've dealt with these exact issues.

Jonathan: The Royalties Estimator is not accurate, especially the more copies you sell.

When I worked at a publishing company, I checked the Royalties Estimator while our operations planner sent me the actual bookkeeping numbers for the checks being cut. We spent an hour or two just reconciling the discrepancies in book sales.

The Royalties Estimator is an automated tool that's guessing based on your sales rank. It isn't touching the actual numbers processing through the system.

Novel Marketing Conference

The Novel Marketing Conference is hands-on book marketing for authors who want to sell more books while spending less time on marketing. It is not a typical writers conference. January 22–23, 2027 at the Fickett Center in Austin. Leave with a written plan, a writers group of seven similar authors, and interactive workshops. Super Tickets are sold out. Only 8 Standard Tickets are left at NovelMarketingConference.com.

Commentary

Thomas: We are down to single-digit tickets remaining for the Novel Marketing Conference. I'm happy some are still left, because last year I dealt with some very unhappy authors who wanted to come and couldn't get a ticket.

Go to NovelMarketingConference.com to see how many remain. We also have 10 gallery tickets, which are our cheapest option. Those are the slowest to sell out.

Beventi and Bookvault Stock-Free Fulfillment

According to Jane Friedman's The Bottom Line newsletter (paid edition of October 28, 2026), Beventi, a direct-sales platform for self-published authors, has integrated with Bookvault so authors can use print-on-demand to fulfill Beventi orders without holding stock or shipping books themselves. For events, authors can order through Bookvault and ship books directly to the event's shipping address instead of their home. Authors who sell direct or table at events can now avoid tying up cash in inventory and skip the hassle of packing and mailing books themselves. Log into Beventi to learn more.

Commentary

Jonathan: If you've ever ordered stock for an event and then had to drive the books there yourself or mail them to yourself at the event, Beventi will now handle that for you through Bookvault.

Novel November: Write a Novel This Month With Authors Who Check the Count

A draft that sits unfinished through November is easy to ignore when no one else sees the number.

I set up Novel November as a space on AuthorMedia.social for authors at any stage, especially anyone with a stalled project or a series that needs momentum. Commit to writing through the month, aiming at a 50,000-word draft or your own target. At the start of each week you post the goal (word count, scene outline, or next step). At the end of the day you post the actual count, what helped, and what fought you. You cheer on other members. At the end of the month you reflect and set a next step such as edit, publish, or series launch. It works as a community companion to bigger challenges like ProWritingAid’s Novel November. The point of ours is the progress posts and the accountability from other authors.

A $9 one-time fee joins you for life. Or become a Novel Marketing patron starting at $4 a month and you are in for life, plus a patron badge. Participation itself costs nothing extra.

Join, open the Novel November space, and post your goal for week one. The pinned welcome post is Let’s Write a Novel this Month!.

Sources:

Commentary

Thomas: NaNoWriMo died. We reported on it. But it turns out NaNoWriMo was in our hearts the whole time.

You can write a novel in a month, in community, without spending a lot of money.

Jonathan: Because it works as a companion to bigger challenges, you can plug it in even if everybody is jumping into different challenges at the same time.

My Author Arsenal people are already in the Discord crying about their stuff. They're in their last week, and everyone is desperately trying to hit their targets.

Thomas: The fee gets you into all the main parts of AuthorMedia.social, but there are plenty of ways in for free. Many of you are already patrons of the podcast, and if you're a patron for even one month, you get lifetime access to AuthorMedia.social. Signing up for the conference also gets you in for free.

The purpose of the fee is to verify your humanity. It's not a revenue source. We don't let in any poor bots. If an agent wants to join AuthorMedia.social, it has to pay just like a real human.

Voices by INaudio Auto-Sends Existing AI-Narrated Titles to Chirp and Hoopla

According to an October 26, 2026 author email from Voices by INaudio (subject: “New: Chirp and Hoopla now accepting digital voice narration”), starting that day Chirp and Hoopla began accepting audiobook titles from Voices by INaudio that use digital voice narration (DVN), bringing the total number of retailers accepting DVN to 11. Existing DVN titles on the platform are automatically opted into distribution to both Chirp and Hoopla. Authors can opt out any time in their dashboard, and INaudio’s existing policies continue to apply to DVN content at participating retailers.

What Happened

Voices by INaudio, the independent successor to Findaway Voices, already limited DVN titles to partners that accept digitally narrated content. Its Digital Voice Narration (DVN) FAQs (last edited August 3, 2026) define DVN as audiobooks created with AI narration, text-to-speech, synthetic or virtual voices, or cloned voices. Authors must submit an unmodified LPF package from an approved provider—Google Play Books, ElevenLabs, or Spoken Press. The platform automatically embeds narrator credits and prepends a disclosure to the description that the audiobook was created using Digital Voice Narration. Titles submitted as human-narrated when they are not can be rejected or removed; repeated misrepresentation risks account restrictions.

The October 26 email is the public announcement that Chirp (BookBub’s audiobook deals platform) and Hoopla (the library lending service) now count among the accepting partners. The email states existing DVN titles are automatically opted in, with opt-out available in the dashboard. INaudio’s help center does not publish a full public list of the 11 retailers. Authors see the current eligible partners inside their account. One confirmed exclusion remains: Audiolibrix does not currently accept Digital Voice Narration titles distributed through Voices.

Hoopla’s own pages emphasize library control rather than blanket acceptance. Its February 2026 transparency post explains that Hoopla asks content partners for clear identification of AI-generated or AI-narrated materials, runs human review on flagged titles, and gives libraries a Collection Management Tool so they can view or remove AI-narrated content by genre, format, or publisher. In January 2026 alone Hoopla declined nearly 20,000 titles flagged as AI-generated or low-quality. Delivery to Hoopla does not guarantee every library will surface the title.

Why Authors Care

Library reach: Hoopla gives AI-narrated titles a path into public library borrowing that ACX/Audible does not offer. OverDrive/Libby and Hoopla remain the main library routes for non-exclusive indies.

Chirp deals: Chirp is the primary discount-deal channel for audiobooks. Promotional placement is editorial, but everyday catalog availability and deal eligibility expand the promotional toolbox for DVN titles.

Auto opt-in: Existing DVN titles move unless the author opts out. Check the dashboard this week.

Contrast with Audible/ACX: ACX audio submission requirements (updated April 15, 2026) state that a submitted audiobook “must be narrated by a human unless otherwise authorized” and that “unauthorized use of text-to-speech, AI, or automated recordings in ACX titles is prohibited.” Amazon’s own Virtual Voice and Voice Replica programs are invite-only exceptions.

Contrast with Spotify: Spotify for Authors accepts digital voice narration. Authors tick “This audiobook uses digital voice narration” and Spotify adds a disclosure sentence. Spotify currently does not share those titles with referral partners.

This week: Log into Voices by INaudio, open any existing DVN project, and review distribution settings for Chirp and Hoopla. Opt out if you do not want the title on those channels. For new titles, use only unmodified LPF packages from Google Play Books, ElevenLabs, or Spoken Press, and expect the automatic disclosure. Audible remains closed to unauthorized third-party AI narration; the wide route just got two more doors. Sources:

Digital Voice Narration (DVN) FAQs – Voices by INaudio
Why isn’t my audiobook at one of the retailers I selected? – Voices by INaudio
Transparency by Design: How Hoopla Supports Libraries in Navigating AI-Generated Content
ACX audio submission requirements
Digital voice narration – Spotify for Authors
October 26, 2026 Voices by INaudio author email (“New: Chirp and Hoopla now accepting digital voice narration”)

Commentary

Jonathan: The title does need to be identified as DVN. You cannot say it's human narrated and then distribute a DVN title. That gets you slapped on the wrist and possibly banned.

The Real Payoff on Your Ads Starts in Month Three

You send readers to Amazon and Meta never sees the sale.

In our latest Novel Marketing episode with Greg Keogh, co-founder of Curios, he explains seasoning the pixel. Any marketing you do yourself, paid or unpaid, should land on a direct store that captures the buyer's contact info and reports the completed purchase through the Pixel and the Conversions API. Ads still work early. The bigger return often shows up in months three to five once Meta can find more people who actually buy.

We also cover what Curios costs, including a free tier, the merchant-of-record setup that handles sales tax, and my pushback on selling direct if no one knows your name yet.

This is for authors who market their own books. Listen to Is Curios the Shopify Killer for Authors? or read the blog version before you send your next reader to Amazon.

Commentary

Thomas: This week I interviewed Greg about Curios, a new direct sales platform. The most interesting thing about it didn't come out until I'd been interrogating him for an hour: you as the author get read-through statistics on your book! You can see what percentage of readers finish your book and at what point they bail.

Amazon has had this information on Kindle forever, and no one has ever shared it with authors. He didn't even think of it as a big feature. If you watch the episode, my jaw drops to the ground, and I ask, "Why didn't you lead with this?" The lead got entirely buried.

Jonathan: I don't understand people who build software and reporting for authors without talking to authors.

If you look at your KENP dashboard, you might see 79 page reads. Was that one person reading 79 pages? Two people reading 39 and a half pages each? Or 79 people reading one page because my page is so bad that nobody keeps going? Kindle doesn't offer that.

Knowing where people jump off the train is important.

Thomas: Even if it only comes from 10% of your readers, it's still useful information. The best you can get on Amazon is figuring out your read-through rate from one book to the next. Getting it chapter by chapter is so helpful, and I don't know why he doesn't make a bigger deal about it.

At Curios, you keep the vast majority of the money, and they're the merchant of record. It's like somebody listened to my Shopify trap episode, heard all my complaints about Shopify, and built the anti-Shopify. That's why as soon as I saw Curios, I knew I had to get them on the show.

It's a young platform, so it's not super mature, and they're making a lot of changes. In the episode, he's changing the platform as I'm giving him advice. It will be interesting to see how it matures, but that one feature makes it worth checking out.

Technology

Discord Puts Public Server Messages on Google by Default in December

According to Discord’s October 27 blog post, the company is making discussions from its largest public communities easier to find on the open web. Starting November 16, every Discoverable Server gets a public Server Web Page. From mid-December, selected messages from eligible public channels can appear word-for-word on those pages and in search results such as Google. A Malwarebytes post on X the same day drew more than 1.3 million views in its first day by summarizing the change.

What Happened

Discoverable Servers are the most public spaces on Discord. They require at least 1,000 members, must be at least eight weeks old, must meet activity and safety requirements, and their admins must have chosen to list them in Server Discovery so anyone can join without an invite. Discord says there are more than 63,000 such servers. Private servers, direct messages, and group DMs stay completely excluded. Only public channels visible to everyone in the server are eligible. Role-restricted private channels inside a Discoverable Server are not.

On November 16 every Discoverable Server receives a Server Web Page. If the admins have not built one, Discord publishes a default page built from the existing Server Profile. Those pages may include automated Channel Summaries of active public-channel discussions. Usernames and avatars are not shown in the summaries. Starting mid-December, Channel Messages roll out gradually: answers and other messages posted from that point forward in participating public channels can appear in the poster’s own words on the Server Web Page and in web search. Messages sent before mid-December are not included. Discord has already piloted the message feature with Discoverable game communities including NBA 2K, Rust, and Dead by Daylight; in the pilot the posts came only from admins and moderators.

Controls went live October 27. Server admins go to Server Settings > Web Presence (desktop or browser only). Both Channel Summaries and Channel Messages are on by default for public channels. Admins can deselect individual channels, deselect all, or leave the features off. They can also turn off Discoverable under Server Settings > Access, which takes the Server Web Page down. Individual users go to User Settings > Data and Privacy and turn off “Show my message content from Discoverable channels on web pages.” One switch covers every Discoverable Server. Outside the EU, UK, Canada, Brazil, Australia, and South Korea the setting is on by default. In those regions it is off by default. Teen accounts are excluded entirely and cannot turn it on. Deleting a message removes it from Discord’s pages, but search engines keep their own caches and may require a separate removal request.

Why Authors Care

Private or invite-only author servers, small writing groups, street teams, and ARC channels stay private. Only Discoverable Servers of 1,000-plus members are affected.

If you run a large public reader community, writing group, or fandom server that is listed in Discovery, spoilers, unreleased manuscript discussion, ARC details, or member chatter in public channels can appear on a public web page and in Google results starting mid-December.

Public discoverability can also surface your community to new readers who search for the book, series, or genre and land on the Server Web Page.

This week as a server owner: open Server Settings > Web Presence, turn off Channel Messages and Channel Summaries for any channel that discusses unreleased work, spoilers, or private member information, or turn Discoverable off entirely under Access if you want the page removed.

This week as a member: open User Settings > Data and Privacy and turn off “Show my message content from Discoverable channels on web pages” so future messages stay off the web. Channels that can be published will carry a label so you see it before you post. Sources:

Commentary

Thomas: Discord is putting public server messages on Google by default in December so the AI can digest your data, and everyone is panicking. It’s like every private server was just converted to a nudist community. Is this true?

Jonathan: No. There's a difference between your private server and public servers. Discoverable Servers are the most public spaces on Discord, and there are only 63,000 of them.

If you have more than 1,000 people in your server, good for you. That's amazing. But this does not apply to you.

Thomas: The authors most nervous about this are those using Discord for a reader group or a launch team, and those groups will all be under the 1,000-member threshold. Even if you have over 1,000 members, the server has to be public to be eligible, and you have a month to opt out.

This is good for certain communities, like the ones where people help each other troubleshoot an HP printer. More and more of the conversation about any given topic is moving to Discord servers, and right now search engines can't see it. Once that information is visible to agents and search engines, it will help people find answers.

So for certain kinds of Discord servers this could be really helpful, but it doesn't impact basically any authors, and it won't impact you if you don't want it to. Everybody can calm down.

Spotify Free Redemption Codes

According to Jane Friedman’s The Bottom Line newsletter (Oct. 28, 2026 edition), Spotify for Authors now offers up to 1,000 free redemption codes per audiobook. Self-published authors generate the codes in the Spotify for Authors dashboard; traditionally published authors need their publisher to enable them. Listeners in 22 countries (including the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and much of Europe) can redeem once each at authors-direct.com/spotify, and authors see which codes were used, but earn no royalties on the free copies. Use the codes for launch-team ARCs, newsletter giveaways, or reviewer copies—Spotify’s own blog notes they unlock the book even before release day—and track redemptions so you know who listened.

Sources:

Jane Friedman’s The Bottom Line (Oct. 28, 2026 edition)
Spotify Redemption Codes help
Spotify for Authors blog on redemption codes

Commentary

Thomas: We have the next volley in the audiobook wars. Spotify is now giving away 1,000 free redemption codes.

Jonathan: You could also use them as table giveaways if you're trying to sell physical copies of your book. Or you could sell them. The codes are free, which means your cost is zero.

Thomas: You could also sell them on Kickstarter. This is a wonderful way to give your Kickstarter backers a Spotify code alongside the BookFunnel option for the audiobook. If you have 1,000 codes and 200 backers, it doesn't cost you anything. You can get an AI to help generate the emails so everyone gets a different code, because you'll have to do it that way. You can also sell them at conventions.

This is a huge shot across the bow, because there is no good way for an author to sell an Audible audiobook. Last week it was Kindle+ and the free audiobooks, and now it's 1,000 free codes you can sell. You never know what will happen next.

Jonathan: Thomas, are you going to make a Spotify Quill that takes the redemption codes and puts them into printable business card form?

Thomas: It's on the timeline. I'm putting together a whole timeline of Quills, and I'm going to start theming each collection of three. The next theme is social media, where you can build Grok bots that run your Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest for you.

The current plan is for December to be a health and home collection like meal planning, family budgeting, and health. It will be unrelated to publishing that month.

Jonathan: It's your no-more-excuses-for-not-writing toolbox.

Instagram Tests 90-Minute Videos After Years of Fighting Long-Form

According to TechCrunch, Instagram announced on Monday, October 26, 2026, that it is testing "Features," a new format for horizontal videos up to 90 minutes long. This comes after years in which Instagram and nearly every other social platform chased short-form vertical video.

What Happened

Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, said in the announcement video with vice president of product Tessa Lyons that he had been against long-form video on Instagram for a long time. Shorter content such as Reels drives more shares and direct messages among users, and he worried longer videos would weaken the friend-to-friend connections the app was built on. Lyons had pushed for the change. The pair described the goal as making short-form and long-form "symbiotic" so people who watch a clip can stay on Instagram for the full piece instead of leaving for another app.

The Hollywood Reporter reported that the test already ran with creators in Brazil and expanded that Monday to a small group of U.S. creators, with plans to reach tens of thousands of U.S. creators. The videos show up in the main feed and on the Explore page. Creators can attach up to eight Reels clips that link viewers straight to the full Feature. Early participants include podcast host Emma Grede, beauty creator Monet McMichael, interviewer Preston Rakovsky, and football creator Donald De La Haye. No exclusivity is required; creators can still post the same video elsewhere.

Instagram is also pushing the format onto its television app, which already runs on Samsung, Fire TV, and Google TV and added Apple TV in the U.S. the same day. Lyons told The Hollywood Reporter that the best viewing experience for long horizontal content is on a big screen, and the company expects most deep watching to happen there over time. Viewers can save Features to watch later on the TV app.

On monetization, Instagram has not matched YouTube. A Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch it is "too early to share a long-term monetization model," though the company is exploring ways for creators to earn from brands, fans, and Instagram, including performance-based incentives. Existing brand deals carry over. Mosseri posted on X the next day that Features is not fully launched, access is ramping slowly, and "we understand the economics matter a ton, and are exploring multiple options to help long-form creators get paid."

YouTube's model is the contrast. Creators in the Partner Program receive 55 percent of the ad revenue on long-form videos. YouTube announced in September 2025 that it had paid more than $100 billion to creators, artists, and media companies over the previous four years.

This is Instagram's second major attempt at longer video. It launched IGTV in 2018 for vertical videos up to an hour, then shut the product down in 2022 as it shifted focus to Reels.

Why Authors Care

Authors who already record book talks, writing-process videos, live readings, interviews, or podcast video now have a possible home for the full horizontal file on Instagram instead of only short clips. The linked-Reels tool is designed so a three-minute excerpt can send viewers to the complete piece without leaving the app.

Access is still limited. The test covers select creators in Brazil and a small U.S. group, with a slower ramp planned. Most authors will not see the upload option this week.

Platform money is not yet comparable. YouTube still pays a published share of ad revenue. Instagram's primary creator income remains brand deals and fan payments, with any new long-form incentives still undefined. Do not move primary distribution off YouTube until Instagram publishes a clear payout.

Practical step this week: keep recording the longer version you already make for YouTube or a podcast. Export a clean horizontal file. When Features reaches your account, upload the full video and cut up to eight short Reels that link to it. Use the same clips you already post for discovery. Watch Mosseri's account and Instagram's creator blog for the next update on access and pay. Sources:

Commentary

Jonathan: For context, Instagram has hated long-form video pretty much since it started. They don’t want people leaving Instagram for another app to watch the full piece, but that’s exactly what happens now.

Thomas: Right. People clip Joe Rogan and put it on Instagram. Viewers want to hear the next part of the interview, so they leave Instagram for YouTube, and now YouTube is making money off that user instead of Instagram.

Jonathan: They're seeing user behavior and adjusting to it, which is the right way to do it.

Thomas: You can understand a tech company like this, especially an algorithm-driven one, by its success metric, because that metric drives its decisions. Instagram's big success metric is time on site. If a video can hold your attention for 90 minutes, they want it on Instagram rather than somewhere else.

All the platforms are stealing features from each other, convinced that the grass is greener on the other side. In some ways that's a strategic disadvantage, because they lose their technical differentiation. What ends up differentiating the platforms is who's on them.

X skews toward nerdy dudes. If you want deep-cut inside jokes about Emperor Diocletian and people who get them, X is where you go. I don't think those people are on Instagram. Instagram has a very different vibe, as do TikTok and Facebook.

Jonathan: The problem is that Instagram has been in the middle of the road for so long. TikTok dominates short-form content, YouTube dominates long-form content, and Instagram has been trying to find a personality that isn't just in the middle, doing it not as well as anyone else.

Thomas: Long-form content involves more than simply allowing users to upload longer videos. YouTube has built an entire platform around making long-form content work, and it will take Instagram a long time to become competitive because so much happens behind the scenes that YouTube gets right.

For example, look at the experience you're having right now. We're 30 minutes into this episode, and it's a dynamic environment. We have a live chat, audience comments appearing on screen, and a third-party integration that makes all of this possible. People can even donate. All these interactive features become part of the recorded video, which will likely run longer than 90 minutes.

It will be something to watch, but I'm not optimistic. I'm not a big fan of the Instagram algorithm. I feel like it leads people down a dark path of depression and despair, and I don't think long-form is going to fix that. But it could be a place to put speeches or podcast episodes if they open it up to more people.

Jonathan: You also have to look at what users expect from a platform. I

f I go to a frozen yogurt shop, I'm going for frozen yogurt. We have a place in Tucson called Frost, and I go there for gelato, not cheese fries. I love cheese fries, and I order them whenever a place has them, but I'm not ordering cheese fries at my gelato shop.

I wonder if Instagram is making that mistake, because people go to Instagram for short-form doomscrolling, not to park on one video for a while.

Thomas: It's a very different kind of experience.

Download Your Old ACX Statements Before the Temporary Link Disappears

According to an email ACX sent authors on October 28, 2026, the company is refreshing its sales Insights and Statements experience and recommends authors download any older statements they need for tax or accounting records now. The new view adds year-over-year sales comparisons, filters by author, series, or category, earnings at a glance, and title-level pre-order tracking so you can see performance before launch day, but it only shows sales insights from April 1, 2024 onward and statements from 2022 onward; older data stays reachable for now through an in-product link to the old experience that ACX says it will remove later with advance notice, as groundwork for a faster, more intelligent ACX. Authors should open the Earnings Statements tab this week, download every historical statement they still need, and keep a local copy before that temporary link disappears.

Sources:

How do I check my sales information
How can I view my monthly earnings/royalty report
ACX author email, October 28, 2026 (“New ways to explore your sales data on ACX”)

Commentary

Jonathan: Every time I log into ACX, I have to switch back to the legacy view so I can find anything.

If you have statements from before 2022 that you need for audit purposes or just for your records, download all of them before they go away.

Thomas: The current state of Audible statements and reporting probably couldn't be worse. If you've ever looked over an Audible statement, it's just about indecipherable.

Jonathan: There's no granularity.

Thomas: It's very difficult to do anything with it. I was trying to build a tool for the patron toolbox to help analyze royalty statements, and when I looked at Audible statements, I despaired of ever making that tool decent. I don't think humans or robots could make sense of these statements.

Then I found a company, which I interviewed on Novel Marketing, that had figured out how to read the tea leaves and make an Audible statement make sense.

I hope the new reporting system will be better, and my suspicion is that it's connected to the Kindle+ integration. The Kindle team has been building great reports. People in Kindle land have much deeper, richer reports and a better sense of what's working, and they're bringing that expectation over to Audible.

It wouldn't make sense for Audible to give the good reporting only to Kindle+ users. If you build the better interface to bring Kindle up to spec, why not bring it up to spec for everybody?

Jonathan: They also need that tactical reporting themselves, because they're in a war with Spotify, and now YouTube is entering the audiobook realm.

The best way to get granular tactical reporting is to outsource the analysts. Give better reporting to third-party analysts, which in this case are self-published authors. They'll digest the reports and post about them, because tons of authors do this, and Audible can scrape that chatter off social media to see how it's competing with Spotify and YouTube.

Thomas: This is another audiobook war story. Amazon won the ebook wars against Barnes & Noble. They won the first round, and now they're resting on their laurels. They don't see the barbarians in the Black Forest ready to flood over the Danube: all these indie authors selling direct. I don't think they understand the threat BookFunnel is to their platform.

But they have not won this phase of the audiobook wars.

Jonathan: They thought they did.

Thomas: They were growing and growing, and they said, "We've defeated the Gauls. We've won." Then, ding-dong, hello, Persia is here, and we are not the Gauls. We have an entirely different way of fighting. Crassus loads up his army to take the Persians down, thinking this will be easy-peasy, and they pour molten gold down his throat because he's so rich. That's how he dies, rich as Crassus.

Spotify is very much Persia. They have their own base of power, and they're from far away. They're from Music Land, which is very far from Amazon. Sure, Amazon dabbles in music, but nobody thinks of Amazon as a music destination.

Because Spotify comes from Music Land, they're savvy in the ways of audio. They're also well-funded. Unlike Barnes & Noble, with its low retail margins, Spotify is a tech company. It can raise money at tech company valuations, and it's tech savvy.

Barnes & Noble struggled because it wasn't run by tech people. It was run by retail people. The tech people never seemed able to make good decisions, because they were always constrained by the corporate overlords. I think they gave up on the Nook. It might still exist as some cheap Chinese clone they slap a label on.

Jonathan: Which is funny, because they paved the way and didn't keep up with the momentum they generated.

Thomas: I wouldn't be surprised if Spotify and Audible end up a lot like Rome and Persia. Neither could conquer the other. The desert in the middle was so impenetrable that they took turns conquering Armenia, and those wars went on for 600 or 700 years without a decisive victory.

OpenAI Opens Holiday ChatGPT Ads to $25-a-Day Spenders

According to the OpenAI webinar page, OpenAI is inviting advertisers to a 45-minute session titled “Your 2026 ChatGPT Ads Holiday Playbook” on November 4 at 5:00 p.m. to 5:45 p.m. UTC. Speakers are Michael Iselin from Customer Success and Julie Towns from Product Marketing. The page tells advertisers to prepare early, create relevant holiday ads, and measure and optimize performance through peak shopping periods so they can reach holiday shoppers inside ChatGPT. It ends by pointing people to create an Ads Manager account.

What Happened

OpenAI’s October 21 announcement says the company has now expanded ChatGPT Ads to 89 countries and that more than 100,000 advertisers have run campaigns since launch. The same post confirms ads appear only on the Free and Go plans; Plus, Pro, and Enterprise stay ad-free. OpenAI’s engineering post from the same day states the ads business reached a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate in less than 200 days after launch. An earlier August 31 post first announced that $1 billion milestone and noted that the introduction of Ads Manager in May opened the platform to small and medium-sized businesses.

Self-serve buying runs through Ads Manager. OpenAI’s Help Center page on creating campaigns lists a $25 minimum daily budget for USD accounts. The same Help Center material describes a relevance-weighted, second-price auction and recommends starting CPC bids at $3 to $5. Ads appear as a labeled sponsored unit below the response. OpenAI’s October 5 post adds that ChatGPT reaches 1.2 billion people each week and introduces a visual ad format being tested during image generation for Free and Go users in the US. That post also shares early partner measurements: WeightWatchers’ attributed cost per acquisition on ChatGPT Ads was 15.3 percent lower than its blended paid-search benchmark (DV Rockerbox), and wellness brand Dose saw statistically significant lift with 67 percent of incremental purchases from net-new customers (WorkMagic).

OpenAI’s Help Center states that ads do not influence ChatGPT’s answers, that advertisers never receive chats, chat history, memories, names, emails, or precise location, and that ads are not shown to accounts identified as belonging to people under 18. Targeting uses conversation context and advertiser-supplied context hints rather than exact keywords. Separately, PPC Land reported that OpenAI told advertisers it would turn on creative enhancements around October 29–30, allowing the system to rewrite headlines and descriptions, resize images, change destination URLs, and translate text without per-version approval unless the advertiser opts out.

Why Authors Care

An indie author or small publisher whose business is based in a supported country can open an Ads Manager account and run a campaign at the $25-a-day floor. That is low enough for a short test, but the inventory only reaches Free and Go users. Paid subscribers never see the ads.

Amazon Ads still sit at the point of purchase with established book-specific targeting and reporting. BookBub remains a dedicated discovery channel for readers. Meta offers broader demographic and interest targeting plus full creative control. ChatGPT Ads currently sit next to an organic answer and rely on context hints rather than keywords or lookalikes.

OpenAI states that ads do not change the answers ChatGPT gives. A reader who asks for book recommendations still receives the model’s organic suggestions; the sponsored card appears below them. Authors chasing organic visibility in ChatGPT should treat that separately from paid placements.

Early measured results are selective and come from larger brands. No public book-specific case studies appear in OpenAI’s posts or the major trade coverage. Treat any holiday test as experimental spend, keep proven channels funded first, and check the creative-enhancements setting if you do run ads so the system does not rewrite your copy without review. Sources:

Commentary

Jonathan: Shopping inside ChatGPT is going to grow. How do I want to shop? Not by going out onto those crazy roads with all those crazy people. I'd rather do it at my computer, listening to music in my headphones.

Thomas: The vast majority of people use the free version of ChatGPT, which is where you’ll see the ads.

Jonathan: So that's a huge advertising market. A $1 billion run rate in less than 200 days means many advertisers are jumping on board for this opportunity, and you want to be there first.

But $3.00 to $5.00 a click is high. That had better be a good click. I'd better be able to hear that click from where I'm sitting at my desk. I'm used to paying 79 cents, $1.25 at most, on Amazon advertising, and on Facebook it had better not be anywhere near that high.

Thomas: At that pricing, this probably isn't something most authors can pursue. Even if your book is $6.00 and the click is $5.00, not everyone who clicks will buy. You'd need an insanely high read-through rate, an insanely high conversion rate, and a really long series to justify that cost per click.

I could see it working for a really high-intent purchase, because someone has been chatting with ChatGPT and the ad is laser targeted. But it's early days, and that pricing only makes sense for big-ticket items. If someone is researching which Instant Pot to get for Black Friday and buys a $100.00 Instant Pot, a $5.00 click could make sense. It certainly makes sense for a car or another big-ticket, high-consideration purchase.

Purchases fall on a spectrum. High-consideration purchases are very expensive, like a car or a house. Low-consideration purchases are like pretzels at the mall. You didn't go to the mall intending to buy pretzels, but you walked past the pretzel place, smelled the pretzels, and bought some.

Most authors are shocked to realize that books are low-consideration purchases. Someone is walking through the airport, a cover catches their interest, and they grab it and buy it. Or they're scrolling Amazon, a cover catches their interest, and they click it. Some readers put a lot of consideration into the purchase, but not nearly as many as you would think. For low-consideration purchases, these research tools aren't as useful.

Jonathan: I do see the nonfiction market benefiting from this, especially if you pair the book with a course or a speaking tour, where your book isn't the main product you're selling. Many people use ChatGPT for their nonfiction needs, like how to adjust their diet or what to do in a mental health situation.

There's also potential for middle grade authors with sets. Moms often ask, "What's the next thing I should get my boys or my girls to read that reinforces this particular thing?" For example, "My girls need to learn how to stand out in a world dominated by men." That gets searched a lot.

If you follow our advice and make your website readable by AI, with those tropes listed as priorities in your book, ChatGPT will scrape your website. Your advertising and your website will work together to feed ChatGPT the answer it's looking for and pass it to a potential customer. If you're selling a 5 to 10-book series and making a $50.00 sale, then a $5.00 click could really work for you.

Thomas: Another place this could work is if you can target decision-makers. A $5.00 click for a reader isn't worth it. A $5.00 click for someone designing a curriculum who might make your book required reading for thousands of students is totally worth it.

Jonathan: Influencers are doing much of their searching through AI right now. Instead of contacting an influencer directly, you could reach them indirectly through targeted ChatGPT advertising. If you could target your influencer's keywords so their outputs match you, that would be pretty cool. I'd like to see that happen.

Thomas: Ridgelight Ranch says in the chat, "I bet the Tuttle Twins could make a $3 ad work." They probably could, and I'll tell you exactly how.

The Tuttle Twins don't really sell books. When you go to their website, you're buying the complete Tuttle Twins collection, which is a $60.00 or $80.00 purchase. They're selling it direct, which means they keep most of that money. Even if they pay $20.00 or $30.00 to acquire a customer, they can still turn a profit because their margins are so solid.

Jonathan: And they can do that because of the way ESAs work. Tuttle Twins counts as curriculum, so you can use ESA funds to make an $80.00 purchase, and you don't feel the sting at all. The customer wins because they aren't spending their own money, and the seller wins.

Thomas: If you're eligible for an ESA in a state that offers one. An ESA is an education savings account. If you're a homeschool parent, it's a way for lucky homeschool parents to get their education costs offset. I applied, and I didn't get anything.

Is the AI Bubble Bursting?

October ended in a bloodbath. On Friday the Nasdaq fell 2.9%, its worst day since June 5, and closed out its worst month since March 2025. Intel lost 28.6%, its worst day since 1974.

Over the last twelve months, Amazon spent $42.4 billion more than it brought in. A year ago it had $14.8 billion left over. That is a $57 billion swing at the company that sells most indie authors' books and runs most of their ads. On Friday, Nasdaq futures slid more than 2% as Amazon signaled bigger spending next year and Intel warned it would burn cash. The day before, Alphabet had its worst day since Google went public in 2004, losing roughly half a trillion dollars in market value. Wall Street isn't asking whether AI works. It's asking who is left holding the bill when the next wave of data centers switches on.

What a Pop Actually Looks Like

Jonathan: Bubbles don't kill technology. They kill balance sheets. Railroads went bankrupt in the 1870s. The tracks stayed, and nobody went back to wagon trains. What dies are the companies that borrowed to build capacity before the customers paid for it.

Thomas: So the question isn't whether AI survives. It's whose finances survive the gap between paying for the build and getting the money back.

Amazon: Record Profit, Record Burn

Jonathan: Amazon spent $77 billion on property and equipment in one quarter. It's holding at $220 billion for the year, and it told Wall Street that next year goes higher. To pay for it, Amazon took on $115 billion in new long-term debt in nine months. Long-term debt went from $66 billion on New Year's to $173 billion. This is the company that used to pay for everything out of its own pocket.

Thomas: And it has never been more profitable. Operating income is up 61% to $28.1 billion. The 13.9% margin is a company record. AWS grew 39% to $46 billion. AWS is sitting on $578 billion in signed backlog, and Jassy is projecting AWS growth over 40% in both 2027 and 2028. That's not a company running out of money. That's a company that can't build fast enough.

Jonathan: Projecting. Backlog is a promise. Free cash flow is a receipt, and the receipt says negative $42 billion.

Buyouts and Pink Slips

Jonathan: Now check payroll. On Monday, Microsoft opened a buyout to about 60,000 employees, roughly a quarter of its workforce. Reuters says the goal is to contain costs and help fund its AI investments. It isn't the first round. Microsoft cut more than 15,000 jobs in 2025 and ran a retirement buyout this spring. Amazon cut about 1,000 retail jobs this month, then about 250 in devices on Wednesday, weeks after rolling out new Kindles. That's on top of 14,000 cuts in October 2025 and 16,000 in January. The data center contracts are locked. People are the cost you can still cut.

Thomas: Look who's not on the list. Microsoft's data center teams can't take the buyout. And Microsoft itself expects few takers. Comparable programs lost about 5 to 6% of eligible staff. Amazon's total headcount is still up 4% from a year ago, to 1.64 million, and operating income is up 61%. Trim devices and retail, pour it into the business growing 39%. That's reallocation, not a fire sale.

Jonathan: It's reallocation while the bet pays. Ask the Kindle team what it's called today.

Where Your Ad Dollars Went

Jonathan: Here's the number authors should circle. Amazon's ad revenue grew 12% this quarter, excluding currency. Last quarter it grew 26%. Amazon blames Prime Day moving to July and expects high-teens growth in Q4. Maybe. But Amazon's own filing counts authors among its ad customers. Every dollar of operating cash, including what you spend on sponsored ads, is now going into data centers. And then some.

Thomas: Amazon also just launched Ads Agent, an AI that plans, runs, and optimizes campaigns for advertisers. [NEEDS SOURCE: whether Ads Agent is open to KDP author accounts.] The data centers are coming for your ad dashboard.

Google's Worst Day Ever

Thomas: Google's problem was different. Search advertising grew 12% and still missed estimates. People are using AI search, and it isn't earning as much ad money. Then Alphabet's earnings took an $8.2 billion hit, mostly an unrealized loss on its SpaceX stake.

Jonathan: Google lost money on Elon's company in the same year it is reportedly paying Elon's company $920 million a month to rent AI computers. Hold that thought.

Chinese Models vs. Jevons Paradox

Jonathan: Cheap Chinese open-weight models are the threat. They're good enough, at a fraction of the price, or they run on hardware you already own. Every token that runs on your laptop is a token nobody gets to bill you for.

Thomas: Jevons paradox. Make something cheaper and people use more of it. It happened with coal in the 1800s and with computing for sixty years. Amazon says token volume on Bedrock, its AI service, grew nearly 17x in a year.

Jonathan: And whose tokens are those? Amazon now sells Chinese models on Bedrock. Moonshot's Kimi K3 and Z.ai's GLM 5.3 sit on the same shelf as Claude and GPT.

Thomas: Which proves my point. Amazon doesn't care whose model wins as long as it runs on AWS.

Jonathan: It cares about margins. Renting out a cheap open model doesn't pay back a $220 billion build the way a frontier model does.

The Redwood Problem

Thomas: Coast redwoods grow 250 to 300 feet tall on roots only 6 to 12 feet deep. They stay up because their roots interlock with their neighbors. Now look at the AI grove:

Amazon has put about $18 billion into Anthropic. Anthropic committed more than $100 billion to AWS, about $110 billion according to its draft IPO prospectus.

Amazon's Q2 profit of $62.6 billion included $53.4 billion in pre-tax gains from marking up the value of its Anthropic stake.

Anthropic's draft prospectus lists $518 billion in compute and infrastructure obligations. About 80% of that must be paid whether the capacity gets used or not. Anthropic's 2025 revenue was about $4.6 billion.

Nvidia agreed to buy CoreWeave's unsold capacity through 2032 and may backstop up to $125 billion of a $500 billion financing platform.

Google owns SpaceX stock and reportedly rents SpaceX's computers.

Jonathan: That's not a forest. That's a group chat where everybody owes everybody money. Interlocked roots carry the stress along with the support. If one big player can't refinance, the support network becomes the path the losses travel.

The Guppies

Jonathan: Last Sunday, Musk said more than 200 neoclouds, the outfits that buy chips and rent them out, face "guppy-level death and consolidation" because lenders won't fund them. CoreWeave's bonds have traded around 15% yields. And markets now expect the Fed to raise rates by more than half a point by mid-2027.

Thomas: The same week, SpaceX lined up a $40 billion debt package for its own AI gear.

Jonathan: Guppies die. Sharks refinance.

Thomas: And Intel is apparently a guppy now. It fell more than 25% premarket, and its CFO said positive free cash flow probably won't come next year either. To be fair, not everyone is bleeding. Microsoft beat expectations on cash flow this quarter.

Why Authors Care

If your series lives in Kindle Unlimited, your paycheck lives on Amazon's balance sheet. Nobody has reported changes to ad pricing or KU payouts. Our read is that a $57 billion cash swing is the kind of pressure that eventually shows up in both. Watch the next two quarters.

Your tools could die with the guppies. If an AI tool you depend on runs on a small, debt-financed cloud, export your work now.

Cheaper AI is coming either way. Chinese open models and local inference push down the price of research and marketing tools, whoever wins the margin war.

The tracks stay. AI isn't going anywhere. The open question is who owns the railroad when the bill comes due. Sources:

Commentary

Thomas: If you look at where the sell-off was, it's mostly in tech companies with high AI exposure, which is leading many people to ask, "Is the AI bubble bursting?"

For this segment, I've written a pro and a con for each argument, and we're going to go back and forth. I've given Jonathan all the con sides and myself all the pro sides, which doesn't necessarily mean that's what we believe.

The real answer is we don't know if the bubble is bursting. But I want you to hear a version of the debate that's happening in the stock market and among tech people.

First, I want to explain what a bubble bursting means, because there's a lot of misinformation about this. The AI bubble bursting doesn't mean AI goes away, any more than the railroad bubble bursting meant people went back to wagon trains, or the internet bubble bursting meant people went back to sending written letters.

There's almost always a bubble with new technologies, and the bursting is the market sorting the winners from the losers. Not every ecommerce company had a good business model. Pets.com had a bad business model, and it died when the dot-com bubble burst. Amazon.com had a good business model, and it did not. In fact, nobody even calls it Amazon.com anymore. It's just Amazon.

Everybody's in a lot of debt, and it's the debt that ultimately kills a company. The one company you know won't go out of business in this possible bubble, is Apple, because they don't have debt and they haven't spent any money on AI. They're zigging where everyone else is zagging.

Jonathan: Amazon's long-term debt nearly tripled this year.

Thomas: What Jonathan is describing is a negative cash flow cycle. Part of the reason Amazon has been a darling of Wall Street for so long is that it always had a positive cash flow cycle.

Customers pay Amazon right away, but Amazon doesn't pay you for 60 days, because it pays 30 days after the close of the reporting period. Amazon holds that money while it waits to pay you, and it can reinvest that money in growing the business. That's a positive cash flow cycle, and Amazon doesn't have one at the moment. Maybe for the first time, it has a negative cash flow cycle. On the flip side, it's more profitable than it has ever been.

There's a difference between cash flow and profitability. Going back to my accounting classes, under GAAP standards you use accrual-based accounting, which means you can book income for something even if you haven't received the cash yet. So while Amazon's cash flow is negative, its income is positive.

That's the give and take. If someone's a doomer, they can give you only the negative side: Amazon's cash flow is negative. If they're a blue-sky optimist, they can give you only the positive side: Amazon is having record profits. The reality is that two things can be true at the same time, and we see the same thing with Microsoft.

What we're seeing is a shift from white collar to blue collar. Microsoft has frozen all the blue-collar people out of the buyout. If you work on the data center team and want to quit Microsoft, you're doing it on your own dime. They're not going to pay you to quit.

Jonathan: It's also happening in conjunction with the State Department's H-1B movement.

Thomas: Part of me put on my conspiracy hat, and I wondered, "Is this just a way to get around the State Department's injunction?" None of the H-1Bs are going to take this buyout. They're all going to stay.

The whole goal is to bring more Indian workers into Microsoft, which has been the trend. Over the last 10 years, Microsoft has been laying off American workers and replacing them with H-1Bs, and now you have Indians top to bottom. I think even the CEO of Microsoft is Indian.

It's been a slow-moving conquering of Microsoft, because the Indian employees have what's called an in-group preference. They tend to hire other Indians. This is a well-documented phenomenon. It's also a way of saving money, because H-1Bs are cheaper. They can lay off the expensive Americans and bring in cheap Indians.

But now the State Department is saying, "The purpose of the H-1B program was not for you to lay off Americans and bring in cheaper replacements. The purpose was to give you access to brilliant talent you can't get in America, not cheaper talent." The idea was to bring in people so smart you can't find anyone smarter, the next Elon Musk. That's not what's been happening.

So if they can't lay people off, they say, "We'll pay you to leave," knowing only the Americans will take that buyout, and they'll be able to keep replacing Americans that way.

That's the conspiracy slant. I will say companies have a lot of other motivations, and they love blaming layoffs on AI, because the stock market loves AI layoffs.

Jonathan: AI is easy to blame.

Thomas: The market hates layoffs caused by management incompetence. If you're an incompetent manager who hired way too many people, like Square did, you don't say, "We were incompetent. We don't know what we're doing. We hired way too many people during the pandemic, and now we're laying them off." You say, "We found new efficiencies with AI."

So AI is getting unfairly maligned in many cases, as corporate suits use it to protect their own reputations.

Jonathan: They're just reallocating their funds and resources. They're not dumping it all.

Thomas: We're also moving into a new era of the internet where people aren't going to websites anymore. They're sending their agents to websites. I have a really deep analysis of this in the Curios episode.

Instead of going to Amazon to buy a new Instant Pot, people are saying, "Muse, do some research on Instant Pots and find me the best price on the internet." That's an existential threat to Amazon's retail business, specifically the ad side of it.

Amazon selling ads to the customers it has already acquired is found money. The margins on Amazon selling ads to its own vendors have to be insanely high. When you buy ads on Amazon, you're effectively reducing your own royalty rate, because you're giving some of your royalties back to Amazon.

But do you know who doesn't click ads? Agents. The Muse agent or the Grok Bot agent doing research for you isn't clicking ads, which is why Amazon is blocking those agents for now.

But that means those agents are swimming around Amazon and helping their humans find non-Amazon retailers to buy from, which long term isn't good for Amazon.

Amazon has to find a solution to this agents-making-purchases problem. It's just beginning, but Muse already has about 20 million users. It went from zero to 20 million faster than any technology in the history of the internet. Facebook people are going crazy for Muse, and sophisticated people are going crazy for Grok Bot. It's a thinking man's agent.

This is really bad for any company that makes money from advertising, which is why Google just had its worst stock market day in history. Google took an absolute bath. If you're a Google investor, now may be a time to buy, not sell, but I'm not giving financial advice.

Google has the same problem we just described for Amazon, except it's also doing it to itself. When you do a Google search, what's the first thing you see? It isn't ads. It's Google's own AI summary. Google pays for AI to summarize the results, which pushes the ads down and in some cases makes the experience worse.

Some people don't care for the AI summary, then they have to scroll past the ads, and two pages down they finally get to the thing they want. That's leading people to just go to Grok, Perplexity, or ChatGPT to do the search, because it gives them the thing they want.

Jonathan: Ridgelight Ranch is jumping ahead to the real question in the chat, asking, "If AI agents are shopping and reading emails, what will become of email marketing? Content marketing?"

If AI has access to the emails going out, it can read what you're promoting your books in. If your newsletter is structured well enough to be readable by ChatGPT, Grok, Muse, or whatever, the bot can read it.

How many people are reading your newsletter? What are your open rates? You don't know. But bots will read every email if they've been told to. Then when somebody asks their bot, "What's the next book I should buy?" or "What interesting things showed up in my inbox from all these author newsletters I signed up for?" it can give them a good answer.

Thomas: How did I open this episode? I said, "Ladies, gentlemen, and agents," and you all thought it was a joke. It was not. Who is consuming this episode? Not just the ladies and the gentlemen, but other people's agents. People are too busy to watch the show, but they want their agent to summarize the episode for them.

Jonathan: And we're populating their reporting, because we have well-structured blogs, audio, and transcriptions that AI likes to read.

Thomas: So your marketing is going to have to adapt. It's like dealing with an aristocrat in feudal Japan. You go to meet with the shogun, and he doesn't speak to you. His assistant speaks to you, while the shogun sits on his throne, scowling at you. That's a very common way for powerful people to interact with other powerful people.

You even see it in the Bible when Paul and Silas are in, I think, Ephesus, and the people think Paul is Hermes and Silas is Zeus. Paul does more of the talking, so they assume he's the lower-status mouthpiece, and the quieter Silas must be the more powerful person.

We're moving back to that. Now between you and the human is the human's agent. You may think that's a terrible thing, but it's actually better than what we have right now, which is some big tech company's algorithm that's the same for everybody.

A person having an agent they control, filtering the internet for them, is better than that person suffering under an algorithm some big tech company controls. It's a huge shift in the power structure of the whole internet, because now, as an individual, you can effectively have your own personalized algorithm that you influence.

The social networks are already adapting. X already lets you tweak the algorithm just by talking to it. Facebook now lets you do that too, because they realize that if they don't give you more control, you'll bounce and use your own agent to filter the internet for you.

I think the biggest debate comes on this next one: will the cheap Chinese models flood the market and kill all the expensive American models?

This is the case not just with the Chinese models but with the American models too. Some are getting cheaper, and the cost of intelligence is getting cheaper. It's about 17 times cheaper than it was this time last year. Doing the same task or thinking the same thoughts costs much less. The cost of tokens is going up, but the cost per task is going down.

The rebuttal is Jevons paradox: for certain things, as they get cheaper, demand goes up enough to surpass the savings. So even though they're cheaper, usage is going up. The classic example is coal. As coal got cheaper, people burned it in more places and used coal power for more things. We're seeing that with AI. As it gets cheaper, people are doing more with it.

This is the trillion-dollar question. We don't know the limits of demand, because so far, every time we've increased capacity and lowered price, demand has risen beyond that. But the demand for coal isn't infinite, and the demand for AI isn't infinite. At some point we will hit market saturation. That could be now, or it could be 10 years from now. We don't really know. People have theories, but I haven't found any of them particularly compelling.

Next is the redwoods problem. If you listen to the doomers, they'll say these companies are all interconnected, they don't have deep financial roots, and they're all in debt to each other.

The rebuttal is that they're interconnected the same way redwoods are. Believe it or not, the tallest trees in the world have roots that only go down six to 10 feet. So how can such tall trees have such shallow roots? In the most California way possible, they're all connected to each other. While the roots don't go down very far, they go out 100 or 200 feet. For the metaphor, the specific number doesn't matter.

As the roots go out in all directions, they connect with other redwoods, and the redwoods share resources with each other. The whole redwood forest is an integrated ecosystem that rises and falls together. That means a virus that infects one tree can spread to the next, but it also means the collective can help the injured tree.

That's very different from a Texas cedar, which is its own stubborn thing with its own root system.

One more argument for and against the bubble. Elon Musk is predicting that many of the neoclouds will go out of business in what he calls guppy-level death. Guppies are teeny-tiny fish, and they're all going to die off.

What that really looks like is the bigger players buying them out, because demand isn't going away. These companies are running out of cheap capital. The current ramp-up of AI has been funded by cheap loans, and the cheap credit is running out.

There's so much credit going to AI that governments around the world are having trouble borrowing money for their own national debts, because all the governments in the world are in insane amounts of debt. So the governments have been raising their interest rates to keep getting credit, and that's making these risky AI companies look worse and worse.

Lenders are saying, "Why should I give Amazon 8% when I can get 6% from the United States federal government?" Amazon looks way riskier, and the 2% difference isn't worth it. And a neocloud that has only been around for three years wants a 10% loan? That's super risky. There's no way I'm giving them credit at that rate anymore. That's an argument for the buyouts.

But the big companies seem to be well capitalized. Anthropic seems well capitalized. OpenAI seems well capitalized. SpaceX is now profitable. Everyone was stunned: "Surprise, we're profitable already." Never bet against Elon Musk.

Jonathan: Flying cars, dude. Flying cars.

Thomas: It's just mind-boggling. They turned an actual profit, and I think they're cash flow positive too, but I'm not certain about that. They may be building out like the rest.

Kimi K3.1 Pro Scores 81.5 on Fiction Bench, Open Weights Due November 4

According to Fiction Bench, the public leaderboard that has every model write the same 20 genre stories and scores them with AI judges plus blind human votes, Moonshot’s Kimi K3.1 Pro just landed in fifth place with an 81.5 AI judge score. That puts a model whose weights are promised by November 4 within a few points of the closed frontier models that still cost two to five times as much. For authors who use AI for drafting, revision, or brainstorming, the gate this week is no longer pure quality. It is cost and whether you can run the model yourself.

What Happened

Moonshot released Kimi K3.1 Pro on October 23 as a post-trained version of its earlier K3 model. It is available now through the Kimi apps and API at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. The company says full weights will ship by November 4. On Fiction Bench it ranks fifth overall (Story 77.1, Intelligence 83.7, Prose 85.2). Its human rating sits at 967 from 93 votes. Moonshot also shipped a Highspeed variant that it claims runs two to three times faster at double the price. Coding scores exist (65.7 percent on Terminal-Bench 4.0 in company tests), but the fiction numbers are the ones that matter for this audience.

DeepSeek’s V4.1-Flash-1017 is already open. The Hugging Face model card lists it as a minor update with 763 billion parameters under an MIT license. It is live on the DeepSeek API at roughly $0.15 per million input and $0.60 per million output off-peak. On Fiction Bench it ranks 20th with a 70.5 AI judge score (Story 66.9, Intelligence 71.6, Prose 74.8) and a human rating of 994 from 109 votes. The company describes stronger agentic and coding results plus shorter outputs at the same price. For pure volume drafting it is the cheapest option on the board this week.

Google’s Gemini 4 Argon reached general availability on October 13. The official post lists an introductory API price of $2 per million input and $10 per million output through November 30, then $4 and $20. It is closed weights. Fiction Bench puts it 12th with a 73.7 AI judge score (Story 70.1, Intelligence 78.3, Prose 73.5) and a human rating of 1,060 from 107 votes. It is available to paid Gemini API users and to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers in the Gemini app.

OpenAI launched GPT-6.1 Terra on October 26 as a cheaper mid-size model. SiliconANGLE and The Next Web report standard API pricing at $1 per million input and $5 per million output, half the prior Terra rate. It is closed. Fiction Bench ranks it 10th with a 77.1 AI judge score (Story 70.1, Intelligence 78.8, Prose 84.8) and the highest human rating of the four at 1,102 from 97 votes. OpenAI positions it for routine computer-use tasks such as reading screens and moving between apps.

Model	Fiction Bench Rank	AI Judge Score	Prose	Human Rating	Price (in/out per 1M)	Open Weights
Kimi K3.1 Pro	5	81.5	85.2	967 ±69 (93)	$2 / $10	Promised Nov 4
GPT-6.1 Terra	10	77.1	84.8	1,102 ±70 (97)	$1 / $5	No
Gemini 4 Argon	12	73.7	73.5	1,060 ±65 (107)	$2 / $10 (intro)	No
DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017	20	70.5	74.8	994 ±63 (109)	~$0.15 / $0.60	Yes (MIT)

Why Authors Care

Kimi K3.1 Pro is the clear quality pick among the four if you want near-frontier prose without paying Opus or Astra rates. Its 81.5 score and 85.2 prose number put it ahead of the other three new models, and the November 4 weights date means local runs become possible next week (hardware demands will be high).

GPT-6.1 Terra is the practical mid-price option. Its 77.1 score and top human rating among the set, plus the $1/$5 price, make it worth a trial if you already pay for ChatGPT Plus or Pro and want agent help with outlines or revision passes.

Gemini 4 Argon sits mid-pack. The introductory pricing ends November 30, so any long-term use needs the higher rate in the budget. The higher human rating (1,060) is a point in its favor for authors who care more about reader preference than the AI-judge average.

DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017 is the volume tool. At roughly a tenth the token cost of the others and already downloadable under MIT, it is the one to test for first-pass generation or bulk scene work if your budget is tight. The 70.5 score is lower, so plan on heavier human editing.

Try Kimi K3.1 Pro this week if your goal is better prose at a lower closed-model price. Check the November 4 weights drop if you want to experiment with local runs. For pure cost, run a side-by-side of DeepSeek against whatever you already use and measure how much extra editing the lower score costs you. Sources:

Commentary

Thomas: Another week, more new models. Kimi K3.1 Pro is a cheap, open-weight model from China. Google released Argon on October 13, and Carbon, its latest, isn't released to the public but is currently topping all the benchmarks.

You may not realize what a big deal this is, but in the AI world, Google has been trailing significantly for half a year. In many people's tier lists, which run from S tier all the way down to F tier, they've created a separate G tier below F just for the Google models.

Google just went from its own special G tier of awful back up to S tier, and we have a new top player. They're not going quietly into that good night. Everyone's losing their minds.

The new Gemini models are scoring really well on Fiction Bench. GPT-6.1 Terra also came out this week, and it scored 1,100 on the human rating, which is the rating I give the most weight. Gemini Argon scored 1,060, and I think those are the top two on Fiction Bench right now. According to the humans judging the fiction, they're beating all the Claude models in fiction writing.

Jonathan: You have to understand the way they did this. They tested every model on the same 20 stories and had human evaluators judge them.

Thomas: If you go to Fiction Bench, you get two versions of a story written from the same prompt. You vote for the version you think is more compelling, and then you find out which model wrote it. You're blinded to the model until you pick the winner, which is a good way to do it.

They also have AI judging AI, which is really hard to make work, because AIs are biased toward their own models. Claude will typically pick Claude as the winner, and GPT will typically pick GPT.

Jonathan: I ran an experiment once while I was drafting. I had ChatGPT generate a segment from some prompts I gave it, and then I wrote my own scene but included some of the AI writing in it. I gave it the scene and asked, "Developmentally, how do you think this one is progressing?"

It said, "All this stuff was good, but this one part right here was amazing." It was the AI part. I thought, "Man, I got you."

Thomas: AIs are very biased in their own favor.

Story Hacker OS Adds Genre Templates and AI-ism Cleanup

According to Jason Hamilton’s October 28, 2026 YouTube video, Story Hacker OS is the proprietary writing software that members of his Story Hacker AI Skool community receive. It is a project workspace built for fiction authors who want AI assistance tied to structured genre guidance rather than a blank chat window.

What Happened

Hamilton, who runs the channel The Nerdy Novelist, first showed the tool in July 2026. The October 28 video covers the updates that have landed since then and notes that the community’s quarterly Book-in-a-Month challenge closed that same day.

Inside the software an author keeps the pieces of a book: a story dossier, character files, world-building notes, an outline, and chapter drafts. Any of those can be toggled into the AI chat so the model sees them as context. Built-in personas change the chat’s behavior. One brainstorming assistant walks the author toward a finished story dossier. Another handles character roleplay so the model answers in a character’s voice. Writing and character assistants are also present. Members can create their own personas by writing custom instructions.

The feature Hamilton spends the most time on is the genre guides and templates. The Story Hacker AI community page claims more than 200 of them. Broad categories include Christian, comedy, cozies, fantasy, historical, horror, LitRPG, mystery, romance, sci-fi, thriller, and young adult. Opening a specific guide, such as space western or billionaire romance, shows character arcs, typical demographics, common tropes, and plot templates sized for short story, novella, novel, or sequel. Hamilton says these were produced by analyzing actual bestsellers rather than by prompting a model for a generic list. An author can duplicate any guide and edit it, or use the new template builder to start from scratch, modify an existing guide, combine two genres, or generate a style guide from up to three writing samples.

Book-builder automations still run multi-step pipelines that turn a dossier into expanded characters, world-building, and an outline. An AI edit mode now scans text for AI-isms, dialogue-tag issues, sentence length, and other polish problems; the author can accept changes one at a time or all at once. Visual options include light and dark mode plus a choice of serif or sans-serif fonts. Hamilton says a formatting tool that exports EPUB and PDF and uploads to Amazon is still in progress, along with a series and world builder.

Access is not sold separately. The community about page lists the price at $67 a month and states it rises at 1,900 members. Current membership is near that number. Hamilton claims hundreds of authors have finished books in prior challenges and that the total number of books produced with the process is now in the thousands. He also says the workflow can be done in roughly one hour a day even for beginners.

Why Authors Care

Story Hacker OS is an AI-assisted book project workspace with genre scaffolding and context controls, not a general-purpose word processor or a full formatting suite.

The bestseller-derived templates and the AI-ism edit mode are the concrete differentiators if an author wants guided structure for categories such as LitRPG or thriller and a way to reduce model-sounding prose.

The software requires the ongoing $67-a-month community membership; the price increases at 1,900 members.

Token costs for the underlying models sit on top of the membership. Earlier comments mentioned roughly $45 to $50 per book via OpenRouter.

Formatting and series tools are incomplete. Authors who already use Scrivener, Novelcrafter, Atticus, or similar tools can compare the template and edit features before deciding whether the subscription is worth it.

Sources:

Commentary

Thomas: This is a really cool idea. Jason Hamilton is building what's basically an IDE toolkit for writing with LLMs. He's taking a coding approach and building a wrapper for different models. You can swap in whichever model you want, and it helps the AI avoid the common mistakes AI writing falls into.

If you want to write with AI, this sort of approach seems like the way to go, unless you're going full Git, running a Git repository through Codex. That requires a level of sophistication I think most authors don't have.

Zeitgeist Report

BC Conservatives Win First Majority in 98 Years in British Columbia

According to The Globe and Mail, British Columbia elected a Conservative majority government on October 24 for the first time in nearly a century. The Conservatives under interim leader Lorne Doerkson secured 63 of 93 seats. The New Democrats fell to 28 seats and the Greens held two.

What Happened

Turnout sat near 48 percent, down more than ten points from the prior election. The Conservative raw vote did not surge; the NDP vote collapsed as many of its supporters stayed home. Final counts are still pending, with the official final count scheduled for early November, but the majority is clear.

The last time the Conservative Party formed a government in the province was 1928. It is also the first time in Canadian history that a party led by an interim leader has won an election. Doerkson took the interim role only weeks before the writ dropped, after internal party turmoil. Eby’s decision to force an early vote, aimed at exploiting that disarray, instead produced the NDP’s worst result since 2001.

On policy, CBC News reports the incoming government pledged to restore letter grades for grades 4 through 9, expand trades training, and repeal SOGI 123—the province’s teaching resource on sexual orientation and gender identity—while adding parental notification and opt-out rights. Conservatives also promised to repeal the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA), double liquefied natural gas production by 2032, cut red tape, and freeze or cut provincial taxes. Doerkson framed SOGI as “an absolute lightning rod for division” and called for classrooms focused on reading, writing, and math.

Why Authors Care

School curriculum is a leading indicator of what the next cohort of readers will have been exposed to. Removing a specific identity-focused resource and restoring letter grades and parental rights reduces the institutional pipeline that has funneled certain themes into children’s and YA shelves.

Authors who write traditional adventure, military SF, progression fantasy, or craft-first stories already serve a readership that has been skeptical of message-first publishing. A provincial government now explicitly prioritizing “core fundamentals” creates a clearer market signal that those readers are not outliers.

Parents with new notification and opt-out rights become more active buyers. Books that treat identity as the plot rather than a character trait face a harder path through school libraries and parent-driven purchases in that province.

Indie authors can move first. Traditional houses that doubled down on institutional preferences over the last decade may see softer demand in markets where parents regain influence; authors who already publish outside those preferences can market the difference without waiting for a sales data lag.

The shift is provincial, not national, and reader preference does not flip on a single election night. It does mark a concrete institutional change in one of Canada’s largest English-language markets. Authors who treat the education pipeline as a demand signal rather than a political talking point can test what their own readers actually want when the institutional default changes.

Sources:

ommentary

Thomas: British Columbia just did something notable. For the first time in almost 100 years, they elected conservatives to run the province.

Jonathan: Turnout was much lower, which tells us the people who voted last time are very disappointed with what happened in the interim.

Thomas: This was a snap election called by the Liberal Party, and it blew up in their face.

This is like Seattle electing a Republican. Seattle and Vancouver are very close geographically, and they're very similar culturally.

Jonathan: The Canadian Conservative Party is not the same as the American Republican party. Every country is different, and every political party is different, especially in other countries. What matters here is that the party that has been in power for the longest period of time lost.

Thomas: Conservative Party is their actual name, but it doesn't really describe their positions. If that party ran for office in Texas, we would just consider them Democrats. They're not that conservative on the issues.

I don't think they're pro-life, pro-traditional marriage, or pro-small-government. They're just more conservative than the Liberal Party or the Green Party.

Since we're doing a tour of countries, the other big news in Canada is that Alberta had a big election on whether to start the process of seceding from Canada. Canada is not particularly united.

Every major Canadian city is culturally closer to its nearest American city than to any other Canadian city. Vancouver is far closer to Seattle. Toronto, I think, is very close to Detroit.

Different regional cultures are more similar to their neighboring regional cultures in the United States. Alberta is more similar to Montana and Wyoming than it is to British Columbia.

Quebec in some ways is more similar to Louisiana than to any of its neighbors. Believe it or not, the French population of Louisiana came from Quebec. They have an old ancestral tie and a common language in French, but both have been separated from France politically for a long time. I believe Quebec, and I know for certain Louisiana, are still under the Napoleonic Code rather than English common law.

The big political challenge in Canada is keeping this fractious coalition together. Each of these big cultural trunks has its own reasons, and sometimes the motivation, to go independent. Quebec is often agitating for independence, and now Alberta is too. They don't like each other, but they also don't like the mainstream Canadian political alignment.

Jonathan: It matters to authors because much of the book industry is connected to Canada. We reported on this about a year ago when we were talking about tariffs. The paper industry is very interconnected with Canada. The more Canada divests from U.S. relations and moves toward Chinese relations, the more this will matter for where books are printed and how we source even the boxes to ship books in.

It's not just the couple thousand people who live within three miles of our northern border. There are economic ramifications for the publishing industry as well as Canadian readers themselves.

Canada has a cold climate. For a good deal of the year, they don't go outside. They don't travel to the U.S. for tourism anymore because of the anti-U.S. sentiment that has been growing during the Trump administration. So they stay home and read.

If you target Canadian readers, you need to know what Canadians are experiencing right now. They're experiencing the dissolution of what they've known and expected for 100 years. I bet many people's heads are spinning right now that they’ve elected the Conservative Party in British Columbia.

Thomas: It's so mind-boggling I don't even know how to interpret it.

Canada has more trees than any other country in our hemisphere. In fact, it has more trees than any other country, period, with the exception of Russia, which cheats because it has Siberia.

So while not many books are published in Canada, a surprising number of books are printed in Canada, and some of the biggest printers in North America are based there. We also have a large Canadian audience, and many Canadians try to write for an American audience.

The perception of Canadians has gone through a dramatic shift in the last few years. The old stereotype was that Canadians were quirky, very polite, and very friendly.

Jonathan: When I was in college, Canadians were just the nicest people.

Thomas: That is shifting radically. Americans no longer see Canadians as nice people. Many of them see Canadians as murderers.

Every week there's some new MAID story. MAID stands for Medical Assistance in Dying, which is killing people who are sick or sad. One in 20 deaths in Canada, that’s 5.1% of people who die, are now killed by the government through this MAID program.

It is very offensive to Americans that the Canadian government is euthanizing so many Canadian citizens, and it's constantly in the news. In the same way American school shootings are constantly in the news around the world, so that when people think of America they think of school shootings, even though they're not nearly as common as the media coverage would suggest, MAID stories are constantly on social media.

There's the grandma who says, "No, I changed my mind. I don't want to die," and the doctor pushes the button anyway, saying, "You're too infirm to change your mind." There's the grandmother who insisted she wanted to stay alive, and while her daughter was on vacation, the doctor killed her. "Oh yeah, she agreed to MAID."

These stories are constantly in the news in parts of the States, at least in the red states.

Today, when we think of Canadians, we think of people who kill grandma, who kill people who are depressed, and even children. Canada has explored extending MAID to what they term “mature minors,” which means children as young as 12 years old. Americans are horrified by this. I'm struggling to find the language for how repugnant it is.

Jonathan: It's so offensive to us culturally that this kind of thing can happen. It has vastly transformed the way we view anyone who even gets close to defending that kind of behavior.

YouTube commentor MM Ward said in the chat, "MAID is terrible. My friend took her life on the anniversary of her daughter's death because they told her the one appointment she could get was put off for two months after she had waited six months for it." That's a horror story all by itself.

Thomas: It's a really common story, though. A common version that spreads in America is that your MAID appointment is quick, but your appointment to see a doctor is slow. "You could see a doctor in six months, but we can kill you tomorrow." Now that's what we think of socialized medicine as well.

Jonathan: This works especially well for dystopian authors. People are living longer now because health care has gotten better, largely due to American investment in medicine.

But people living longer is a problem for a socialist health care system that's required to take care of them. So there's an opt-out program, and the way they're reworking the rules, it isn't even you who makes the decision to opt out anymore.

Thomas: I've seen those kinds of stories, like a doctor prescribing MAID for someone having an episode at a restaurant, and a day later he's dead. It's really out of hand.

Those stories color Americans' perception of Canadians. I'm not saying it's fair, and I'm not saying all Canadians support Medical Assistance in Dying. But it does color how Americans interpret Canadian authors. When you say, "I'm from Canada," the view is different now than it would have been before MAID.

That's not true for all Americans. I'm sure some Americans support it. MAID is probably pretty popular in American urban centers. The American term is doctor-assisted suicide, and there are other euphemisms, like end-of-life care, which is the classic euphemism for killing grandmother. Some Americans support that sort of thing.

A Statement on the Use of the Word Retarded

We did a recent episode where I talked about how Trump voters saw the new trans Aslan as gay and retarded and that failing to create content that appealed to half the country was why this was the reason Netflix stock was down. But I also said that I thought that the trans Aslan was gay and retarded.

I have been chided on AuthorMedia.social for using a politically incorrect word. No one seems offended that I said that creating a trans Aslan was gay but some people think Christians should not use the word retarded even when referring to ideas and actions. It’s offensive and Christians shouldn’t be offensive.

At first I didn’t understand why retarded was a naughty word, it literally means slow and was the gentle medical word until five minutes ago. But the nature of politically correct language is that it is always in flux to show who the insiders are. Colored People is now incorrect, People of Color is now correct. Get it mixed up and you get shunned and canceled.

But what matters more, the words themselves or the heart behind the words?

After looking into it, I think the issue may come from the worldview that means if someone is retarded, you can and should kill them as long as you did it in the womb. For instance, Iceland recently celebrated eliminating Down Syndrome because they killed all the babies with Down Syndrome. Leftists are ok killing retarded babies but they don’t say the word retarded because retarded is a mean word. But killing the baby is the mothers choice and a noble act, or so they say. That looks like some weird pharisaical legalism to me.

The taboo seems to be particularly strong in public school environments where calling someone retarded is a common insult that means “Your mom should have aborted you.” This is why the word has such a slap to it, even though people wielding it may not realize it.

I wholeheartedly reject the world view that people’s value is dependent on their intellect. I refuse to go along with the politically correct word games attached to that world view. Abortion is murder and I’m tired of people using pretty words to describe horrible acts. I’m pro-life.

I also don’t have a lot of respect for people who police each other’s language for political correctness. This is an old Marxist tactic and one we must resist at all times and in all places if we want to stay free. I understand avoiding cussing and swearing, and I try to do that. But banning a normal word because the concept that word is attached to is uncomfortable or offensive is disordered. I roll my eyes whenever someone says “we don’t say that word anymore.” These thin skinned people use getting offended as a weapon to gain political power over the kind hearted.

We must beware of a shallow Veggie Tales Hallmark theology built around being nice, not judging, and loving your neighbor. When taken to its extreme it can become an antichristian religion that puts our love of our neighbor above our love for God.

Fighting this antichristian religion is a key motivation for my life.

If you read the whole Bible you will learn that loving our neighbor is not the greatest commandment. The greatest commandment is to love the God of the Bible, a God who hates a lying tongue (Proverbs 6:16-19). So if you love God, don’t lie, even if you think lying is a form of kindness to your neighbor.

A world full of euphemisms obscures the truth so I am mindful of this and try to avoid euphemisms. Particularly when those euphemisms are to avoid thinking about the truth. It is one thing to talk over the head of a child. It is another to hide the truth from yourself with candied words.

Last week when I talked about my grandmother dying I used the word dead, instead of passed away or some other pretty word for an ugly thing. I find these kinds of euphemisms distasteful. And they are often used to push people away from the truth and toward sin. For example, it is a lot easier to get someone to commit murder if you come up with a pretty name for it like “End of Life Care” or “Abortion.”

I distrust anyone whose mouth is full of euphemistic language.

On Author Update we try not to use candied words. We look at reality with clear eyes. This often means looking at unpleasant realities unflinchingly. A common comment is that this show is “sobering” or “left me a little sad.” Because we don’t ignore things that are uncomfortable just because they are uncomfortable. If you have thin skin or itching ears, Author Update is not for you. My other show Novel Marketing has a different more pastoral tone. Author Update is more prophetic and won’t always be appropriate for children.

On Author Update we don’t just describe what is happening, we comment on it. Or if you want to put it in religious language we judge what is happening. Antichristians love talking about when Jesus said not to judge, often while judging people for being judgemental. But if you read the whole Bible you will see Jesus commanded his followers to judge and when judging to judge with righteous judgement (John 7:24).

That said, we don’t have a habit of passing judgement on specific people. It’s spiritually risky because if you answer a fool according to his folly you can become like him. And you will be held to the standard you judge others by.

So instead I try to judge ideas, memes, and organizations. As for individuals, my policy is and has always been, “you are an adult and it is a free country.” I may think what you are doing is stupid, I may even see you as my enemy, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love you with Christian love.

I try not to insult people as a general rule. There is a big difference between calling an idea retarded and calling a person retarded. I know Aslan seems like a real person, but he is a fictional character. I don’t think insulting fictional characters violates Christian principles.

So is my judgement that making Aslan some kind of gender fluid bisexual is both gay and retarded a righteous judgement? I’ll find out when I stand before God on judgement day and give an account for my actions and whether they be good or evil.

I should say, I’m not a very good Christian and I don’t hold myself out as some kind of an example. I know I will have a lot I have to answer for.

But it is very telling that while people are saying I’m using politically incorrect words, no one is saying I’m wrong. People are more offended about how I pointed out that Netflix has made Aslan gay and retarded than they are at Netflix for making Aslan gay and retarded.

So am I going to call individual people retarded? No, because that would be a retarded thing for me to do. But will I keep using the word retarded? Yes. Because sometimes, ideas are so bad the word stupid just isn’t enough.

Gal 3:1 “"O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth, crucified among you?"”

Commentary

Jonathan: Let's get into the single dumbest thing we have to do today.

Thomas: Of all the things I said in that episode, this was not the thing I thought I would get killed or canceled for.

Jonathan: I thought "pedophile prophet" was going to get you. But apparently this is what triggered people.

Thomas: That worldview says you can kill someone who is retarded as long as you do it in the womb, or in Canada, with Medical Assistance in Dying.

The kids who use the word as an insult is basically saying, "Your mom should have aborted you." And that is why the word has such a slap to it, even though the people wielding the word may not realize it. It's got a slap that it didn't used to have.

It's no longer the gentle medical term it was historically.

Fighting this anti-Christian religion is a key motivation for my life in this season. I'm starting to see it in lots of places, and I am doing my best to fight against it.

Euphemisms are great for talking over the head of a child. But it's a lot easier to get someone to commit murder if you call it choice. You're not killing a baby, you're making a choice.

People will sometimes recommend an episode, but they still say, "It made me sad."

There's a reason Jonathan's wife doesn't watch this show, and my wife watches it on headphones. We try to be family-friendly, but we'll talk about war, and we'll talk about it in detail. We don't use candied words. It's really up to a parent whether a child is ready for the kinds of topics we cover on this show.

If anyone says, "Judge not," just respond, "Judge rightly." Being held to the same standard you judge others by is very scary for me personally.

When I say I judge memes, I don't mean the graphics. I mean an idea that spreads from person to person. And I don't think insulting a fictional character, or even insulting the way a fictional character has been abused, violates Christian principles.

I've never said, "Follow me as I follow Christ," because I don't follow Christ very well.

Jonathan: I'm going to steelman the opposing argument, and then I'm going to present the other side.

Part of being a fighter is playing scenarios through in your head and making your opponent as strong as you can, so your response is as strong as it can be.

The most targeted and relatable part of scripture on using the word retarded is not "Judge not, that ye be not judged." That's taken way out of context, and it's not used in the spirit or intent Christ used it in.

The one that comes really close is where Jesus tells his people not to call someone "thou fool." There's a list of three, and I use the King James, so I'll probably recite scripture in a way you're not familiar with. Look it up yourself.

In Matthew 5, Jesus says if you call someone "raca," you can be taken to the judgment. But if you call someone "thou fool," you'll be in danger of hell fire. Then you're really in trouble.

I did a study on this because I call people stupid all the time. That's a major part of my personality, which doesn't mean it's a good thing. My road rage is crazy. I hate other drivers, I think they're all morons, and I tell them so. My wife has told me several times, "Stop talking, the kids are in the car," because I'm calling someone an idiot for stopping for a right-hand turn, and that bothers me in my soul.

So why is it wrong to call that person an idiot, a moron, or a retard? Because you are devaluing a person who is made in the image of God.

This matters because Jesus also said, "If you hate your brother, you've committed murder." People say, "That just means God's standard is really high." No, it's actually as if you were committing murder, because right and wrong are based on God's standard of right and wrong, which also includes His capacity.

A lot of people think they're good people because they can't hurt other people, either for fear of consequences or because they don't have the ability. If I hate Elon Musk, I can say he should die all day long because I can't get through his security detail to kill him, and I don't want to go to jail for it. That's a problem of capacity.

What Jesus is saying is that the words themselves are a problem according to God's standard, because God can do anything He wants. If God said, "I hate Elon Musk, and I'm going to kill him," Elon Musk would be dead. That's God's capacity matched with God's standard.

When we translate that to what Jesus says the standard should be, also consider the context He was speaking in. Israel was occupied by a brutal military force. When Jesus said, "Love thy enemy," He was not speaking in a combat context. There are plenty of times in scripture when God said, "Kill them all" in combat.

Jesus was speaking of an occupying force when He said, "Love your enemies. Do good to them that hate you. Pray for them which despitefully use you." That's part of making the world a better place outside of a combat scenario. When you live in hatred, you will kill them whenever you can, and that invites retribution, especially when the power scales are so disparate.

Rome proved this when it came back in AD 70 under Titus, burned Jerusalem to the ground, and lined the roads with crosses. The power imbalance was severe, and they kept poking the bear. Don't poke the bear. Very few people have a problem with loving your enemy. But keep poking the bear in hatred, and the bear will eventually turn on you.

Bringing this back to the way we devalue people made in the image of God: Thomas mentioned that kids effectively say, "You should have been aborted." This is common language in video game chat rooms. It's why voice chat has been disabled in a number of video games, and it's why suicides related to cyberbullying, much of which comes through video games, are up. We've allowed our children to be infected with the idea that your value is based on your intellect or what you contribute.

One of the major excuses for MAID is, "They're not contributing to society anymore. Why should we keep them alive? Their experience of life isn't as important as putting these resources toward more valuable people." That's the complete antithesis of how God says a soul is valued.

A soul has value because God values us. God loves us, and that's why our soul has value. So why is it wrong to murder? Because I'm attacking the image of God. I'm attacking another soul that God has determined has value.

If I devalue them by calling them anything, fool, stupid, retarded, moronic, I am devaluing that person to the point of saying they shouldn't be alive.

Have you ever said old people shouldn't drive? I've said it in the Costco parking lot. A lot. I've said certain races shouldn't have access to certain parts of the internet or certain music. These are things we say to ourselves. But if our capacity were increased, what would we actually do?

Now, Thomas said this gay Aslan thing was gay and retarded, and people were more insulted by, and more emotionally engaged with, the word retarded than anything else he said. Which is really retarded to me.

I come from the Marine Corps, an environment that thrived on strength, and we did our best to offend each other. A day did not go by when I didn't yell slurs at somebody. "Hey, Mexican, go take care of this." Or, "Hey, retard, I told you not to do that."

That Marine knew I would die for him. That Marine knew I did paperwork every day to make his life better. He knew I was taking care of him. I have so many stories I cannot tell on YouTube of hilarious interactions we had, because Marines are hysterical. Despite all of that, I never devalued them to the point of saying, "I hate you. You should die."

Someone in the chat touched on this, but if you knew your Bible better, this is the passage you would have brought up: eating meat that offends a weaker Christian.

Paul wrote an entire chapter about going into a temple and buying meat that had been sacrificed to idols. It was the clearance aisle back in the day. The Jews gave sacrificed meat to their priests, but these temples didn't get rid of it. They put it in the marketplace, and it got sold as used meat. It was cheaper, and poor people bought it because they needed nutrition.

Then there was a whole big deal where some people said, "You shouldn't buy meat that has been sacrificed to idols, because now you've invited Satan into your home."

Paul said, "Look, I know and you know that anything sacrificed to idols doesn't mean anything." The idols aren't real. Burning meat in front of a pillar doesn't mean anything. There's no danger. We're not being possessed, attacked, or oppressed.

However, he does say that if there's a weaker brother who lived his entire life dominated by that idol, and you tell him, "This meat was sacrificed to the idol you were enslaved to your whole life, and now you're free," that is where the word offensive applies, because now it's a stumbling block.

That brother is going to think, "I can't touch that. I'm trying to follow this guy, but I can't do that. Am I a bad person? Is he a bad person?" That's what the passage was intended for. Paul is saying there are some people who can't get over some stuff.

If you call a mentally disabled person a retard as a slur, you are in violation of this passage. If they're walking by and you say, "Hey, retard," and start making fun of them over problems they can't fix, you are in violation of this passage, and I will happily turn your face into hamburger.

But by using the term retarded, which means slowed down, or even the term disabled, you may be describing something factual. If it's not used as a slur, it's being used as intended, and refusing to use it is being weak intentionally when we are commanded to be strong. I'm not talking about someone who lived his life in slavery to a particular god, concept, idea, or ideology.

There were people who converted in our church who had issues walking past certain symbols of the religion they had converted from, because they were used to genuflecting or bowing. We removed those symbols because they were stumbling blocks.

That is the spirit of these passages and of Christian teaching on these things. It doesn't mean don't hurt anybody's feelings. Read Jesus. He burned whole cities to ash. He swallowed a dude with a fish. He took places out. It's not about feelings. It's about properly valuing human life and speaking factually.

Thomas: The issue is the heart, not the word. In Galatians, Paul says, "O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not obey the truth?" That's King James for you, but the word foolish is in all the translations.

Paul is using Jesus' naughty word. It wasn't that the word fool can't come out of our mouths. If that were the case, we couldn't read the Book of Proverbs, because you'll say fool every three verses.

Jonathan: Jesus literally said it. He would say, "Oh, fool, and hard of heart," to his disciples.

Thomas: So the issue is not the word, and we give the word too much power. The way you fight a word that gets too much power is to use it.

A good example is the slur the British had for the Americans during the Revolutionary War: Yankee. We took that slur on as a badge of pride. Well, some of us did, in the top half of the country. In the South, not so much. By doing that, we took all the power away from the word.

If a word has that slap to it and you want to take the slap away, the very worst thing you can do is make the word forbidden, because that makes the slap even stronger. The way you take the slap out of a word is to use it so often it has no more slap.

Another example is the word queer. It used to be a slur, and the LGBT community embraced it. I don't think anybody considers it a slur anymore. I may be wrong, but I see it used quite commonly. In fact, I think genderqueer is in the extended version of the alphabet.

Jonathan: Mary Grace has a great point in the chat. She says, “The word Christian was also a slur.” We called ourselves followers of the Way when we first started, and they called us Christians, which means little Christs. It was meant as a slur: "Hey, little Christ, remember what happened to him?" And everyone said, "That's an honor. Do you really think I'm like him?"

Thomas: The same goes for the symbol of the cross. It was a humiliating way to die. A Roman citizen couldn't be killed on a cross, which is why Paul wasn't crucified. But when Peter was to be crucified, he considered it so much of an honor to be crucified like Jesus that he was crucified upside down.

There's a meme of people showing an upside-down cross as a way of offending Christians, and Catholics look at it and say, "Hello, Peter."

I know many people are trying to judge my heart. I'm a public figure, and if you want to cast judgment on me, you're welcome to.

But if you think your judgment of me will change my behavior, you need a different argument. You need to show me that I'm wrong. I may be. I've been wrong before, and I will be wrong again.

Jonathan: My favorite story about this kind of thing is from boot camp. Boot camp is hard, and they say things that hurt your feelings. I tell people now when they review my books, "It's okay. I've had my feelings hurt by professionals. You can't hurt me. You're not even good at it."

By the way, boot is a slur too. It means you're new, and it travels with you your whole life, because every time you change stations, you're the boot at the new station. So if I ever call you a boot, you know it's a slur. Boot camp is a camp for boots.

After boot camp, you get 10 days of boot leave. I was standing in line to buy my ticket home, and I saw a sign. God bless whoever put it up. I know their heart was good.

But I had just spent 13 weeks being obliterated as a person. I had been humiliated, tortured, and called all kinds of names. I had been held to the highest standard of performance and behavior I've ever had to meet, before or since. I was exhausted, and I wasn't sure I wanted to do this anymore.

And here's this sign, just a piece of paper printed from an inkjet printer, in big, bold letters: "Congratulations, Marnies." It was a typo. Someone had just left the old piece of paper there.

I started laughing in line because it was just the last blow. I was going to be a brand-new Marnie in the United States Marnie Corps. I've carried that with me my whole career. Any time we had to do something stupid or something hard, or we were just exhausted, I'd say, "Come on, Marnies, let's do this," and we would go do it.

Why It Matters for Authors

Thomas: Word choice affects all authors. As a writer, you always have a choice between gentler, more oblique language and more direct language, and I would say there's a role for both.

In my experience writing nonfiction, the writing that spreads farthest and has the greatest impact has been the more direct, clearer, more controversial writing. My most controversial blog post had people wishing for my death and ruffled a lot of feathers, and it went viral. The angry people spread the post, and so did the positive people. I'd say one in 10 people were angry, some number were in the middle, and probably 50% were passionately in favor.

After it got about a million views and 800 or 900 comments, many of them very angry, I softened the post a little and took out some of the sentences with the most slap. Basically overnight, traffic to that post dropped to zero.

It was a great learning experience. Being a writer requires courage, and you can't please everyone. You can't always even please your Timothy. You're writing for your Timothy, but sometimes people need to hear a hard word.

Jonathan comes from the military world. The reason they train with hard words, insulting each other and saying things that would be very offensive in other contexts, is partly to grow emotional strength. But it's also to get people used to it, because there are times when you must obey immediately or you will die.

When I first became a literary agent, Steve Laube, who ran the literary agency, had me write some blog posts about my philosophy as an agent. I wrote three posts, which you can still read, and I turned them into episodes of Christian Publishing Show. They covered the three things I was looking for in the authors I wanted to sign and represent.

The first was resonance. I didn't use the word zeitgeist, but it was the same concept: you understand where readers are going and where culture is going, and you can push the swing as it's moving away from you.

My two-year-old really wanted to push my four-year-old on the swing at church on Sunday, and she did not get the resonance down. Wham. To her credit, she kept getting back up and trying again, but she didn't have the rhythm of when to push.

Some authors are like that. They can't get a sense of the vibe of the culture, and they're always out of sync.

That same book would have been great five years ago, or it will be great in 10 or 20 years. It's just not where readers are right now.

Another was courage, and part of courage is being willing to speak clearly. In my statement, I talk about euphemisms, but there are many ways to talk around a difficult thing. You can be so vague and so high on the ladder of abstraction that no one knows what you're saying, so no one can take offense.

That kind of fiction or nonfiction doesn't work, because no one knows what you're saying, and the whole point of writing is for people to know what you're saying. Be so clear that readers know, sometimes immediately, whether they agree, disagree, or need to wrestle with it.

Jonathan: When my publisher got my first draft of Semper Di, he sent it back to me. He's an Army guy, and he said, "You need to cut down the Marine Corps jargon, because the reader won't understand a lot of it. There are other ways to say it." I told him no. I said, "This is the draft you are getting, because it's true to the Marines, and Marines will know exactly what it's saying."

If you read the reviews, people sometimes say, "I didn't understand some of the jargon, but I got the idea of what was going on, so it was fine." Other Marines said they felt like they were back. They got to spend time with Marines again, even fictional ones, and that was the whole goal.

I stood up and said, "No, I'm not going to water this down for people I don't know. I'm going to keep it clear, direct, and true to what we said and what we did." What's really funny is that I did it without profanity, which so many people think is necessary for writing military characters and making them sound authentic.

Thomas: The third thing was hustle: you're willing to do the hard work in the writing, the marketing, and building the platform, and you're not seeking shortcuts. One thing I've found is that shortcut seekers don't make it and don't become professionals, because all of those shortcuts add up over time.

There's a difference between taking a shortcut and taking the best path. People ask about our course, The Five-Year Plan, "Can't you make this shorter?" This is the shorter way. Most people take 10 years because they take wrong turns and have to correct.

It takes most authors about 10 years to find their voice, their platform, and their reader. It takes a lot of hustle. Some can do it faster, and for some it takes longer. I know authors who took 15 or 18 years before they figured out how to write the kind of book people wanted to buy and read.

Hustle is really important, but it's only one leg of the stool. It doesn't make up for a lack of courage. You can work as hard as you want, but if you're still afraid, a lack of courage hurts your willingness to be known, to be famous, and to take criticism. The more famous you are, the more criticism you get.

God blesses some people by cursing their book, because they couldn't have handled the notoriety, all of that public critique and public adulation. Both can be toxic for your soul, and I think the adulation is possibly more dangerous.

Jonathan: No one is designed to deal with that much worship. We're not designed to receive it.

Thomas: My mom was a professional musician, and she taught me a technique I've found really useful. She gave big concerts and performed at churches, and she was also an actress. After a concert or a show, people would come up to her with all these compliments.

She pictured it as people giving her crowns. At the end of the day, she would pray and lay those crowns at Jesus' feet, sometimes with a physical act. She wouldn't say, "Oh, no, I didn't do a good job." She didn't deny anyone the opportunity to tell her she did a good job. She would just say thank you, receive the crown of praise in the spirit in which it was given, and hand it to God at the end of the day.

For those of you who are Christians, that can help keep you normal. Having a family also helps keep you normal, because your kids do not care how famous you are, and their dirty diapers really do not care how famous you are.

Jonathan: My kids would say, "What? You're famous, Dad? But you're not even cool!"

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

Authors Lost 40-70% of KENP Overnight

Publishing News

Authors See 40-70% KENP Drops After Kindle+ Reporting Migration

Commentary

Novel Marketing Conference

Commentary

Beventi and Bookvault Stock-Free Fulfillment

Commentary

Novel November: Write a Novel This Month With Authors Who Check the Count

Commentary

Voices by INaudio Auto-Sends Existing AI-Narrated Titles to Chirp and Hoopla

Commentary

The Real Payoff on Your Ads Starts in Month Three

Commentary

Technology

Discord Puts Public Server Messages on Google by Default in December

Commentary

Spotify Free Redemption Codes

Commentary

Instagram Tests 90-Minute Videos After Years of Fighting Long-Form

Commentary

Download Your Old ACX Statements Before the Temporary Link Disappears

Commentary

OpenAI Opens Holiday ChatGPT Ads to $25-a-Day Spenders

Commentary

Is the AI Bubble Bursting?

What a Pop Actually Looks Like

Amazon: Record Profit, Record Burn

Buyouts and Pink Slips

Where Your Ad Dollars Went

Google's Worst Day Ever

Chinese Models vs. Jevons Paradox

The Redwood Problem

The Guppies

Why Authors Care

Commentary

Kimi K3.1 Pro Scores 81.5 on Fiction Bench, Open Weights Due November 4

Commentary

Story Hacker OS Adds Genre Templates and AI-ism Cleanup

Commentary

Zeitgeist Report

BC Conservatives Win First Majority in 98 Years in British Columbia

A Statement on the Use of the Word Retarded

Commentary

Why It Matters for Authors

Leave a ReplyCancel reply

7 Secrets of Amazing Author Websites

You have Successfully Subscribed!

Recent Episodes

Categories

Tags

Want more help?

You have Successfully Subscribed!