Welcome to Author Update, your go-to source for the latest publishing industry news, marketing strategies, and author advice! In this episode, we dive into crucial developments affecting authors and their publishing journeys.
Episode Highlights:
- 🔍 Social media AI bots are proving more persuasive than humans – what this means for your author platform
- 📚 Libraries removing conservative books – the double standard in book banning debates
- ⚖️ Apple losing its App Store court case – huge implications for indie authors selling directly to readers
- 🎓 Writer MBA conference shutting down – lessons for author businesses
- 🤖 AI selecting author panelists at conferences – how to optimize your presence for AI recommendations
- ⚠️ Copyright trolls targeting authors and bloggers – how to protect yourself with DMCA registration
- 🌍 EU regulations classifying authors as “manufacturers” – what this means for global distribution
- 📈 How tariffs might actually help authors with advertising costs
Transcript:
Thomas: In this episode, we are going to talk about libraries canceling conservative books, Apple losing a court case that is news for indie authors, Writer MBA closing down, AI picking author panelists at world con, and more. But first, Jonathan, congratulations on the new baby.
Jonathan: Thank you, Thomas. I worked very hard on this baby, and unfortunately I was going to show her on the live stream because she is super adorable and tiny and cute, but she is also sleeping and in a house with four other children, she needs to have the time where she can sleep.
Social Media Bots Are More Persuasive Than Humans According to Science
Jonathan: Our top news story today is it would appear social media AI bots are more persuasive to humans according to science. According to Mario Nawfal, the University of Zurich has secretly been deploying AI bots to manipulate Reddit users’ opinions, which should make you fairly concerned if you value actual human discourse. These were not passive bots. They weren’t scraping data. They were actually contributing to discussions that people were having and turning them to try to achieve certain goals. They were doing that with freely available online information regarding the user based on Reddit interactions and anything else that might be available open source. People are saying this experiment has crossed critical ethical lines because these bots achieved a persuasion rate six times higher than has been seen with normal human interactions.
Thomas: Let me point out they’re not competing with like “The Case for Christ” or Dawkins’ book on “The God Delusion.” These bots are competing with people typing with their thumbs in the bathroom, trying to convince each other about politics, and the bots are six times more effective than the humans.
One thing I’ve enjoyed about this story is everyone pretending to be shocked that there’s bots on Reddit. This has been a problem on social media for years, even longer than GPT came out. ChatGPT came out a couple years ago and was the first kind of commercially available AI tool that normal people could use without being a researcher or being technically sophisticated. But there have been tools like this for years before that, and armies of bots commenting and creating content and trying to influence elections and get you to make certain purchases.
Most of the social web, most of social media is bots. In fact, it’s such a problem I had a mug made “bots don’t buy books” years ago. This is part of the reason why I don’t recommend social media.
What’s interesting is that this is one of the first times an organization has admitted to doing what we all know is happening, which is bots interacting with users. They typically don’t create content – you don’t see bots posting content on X necessarily – but where the bots are really active is in the comments. When you post to Facebook and you’re getting lots of comments, those comments are often not from humans. The same is true on blogging.
I’ve noticed the quality of the bot comments on my blog has gone way up as the AI models have improved, particularly DeepSeek. I think criminal enterprises really like DeepSeek because it’s easy to jailbreak, it’s open source, and you can manipulate it pretty easily.
For authors, this means a lot of the time you’re spending on social media building engagement will not result in book sales because those bots don’t buy books. They have no money, and even the ones that have access to credit cards don’t have authorization to buy your book. You find out how few humans are on the internet when you put up a paywall of any amount of money – suddenly there’s hardly anyone there because it was mostly bots.
That authors group you have? Going to be a lot of bots, and they’re not just there to create content, they’re also there to harvest content. AI models need lots of content to train, and content from behind paywalls and login walls is more valuable than publicly available content.
Jonathan: Well just keep in mind that if you are arguing on Reddit or Facebook or whatever and you’re looking at somebody going, “Huh, this guy has a point,” it’s probably a bot.
Seattle Worldcon Uses ChatGPT To Select Authors for Panels
Thomas: So this connects to a news story we were going to cover later, about how conferences are now using AI to determine which authors to bring on as panelists. It’s about getting the AI to promote you.
Jonathan: Seattle World Con put out something on their blog which says they used ChatGPT, the LLM feature, not the generative AI, to help sort what panelists to use for the world con. They had 1,300 applications to be panelists, and they usually use volunteers to go through and figure out who would be the best speakers. This time they decided to put it through ChatGPT, and they were very specific to say “we didn’t say no to anybody because of ChatGPT.”
Look at the comment section on that blog, and everyone’s saying, “But why did you say yes?” Everyone is very angry. The majority of the comments revolve around “why are you using a plagiarism service that is also destroying the planet through its use of electricity and water?” It’s blowing up big time amongst these authors who are very anti-AI.
Thomas: I laugh at the electricity argument because they never use that against Facebook or Amazon. Amazon is a massive user of electricity to run all of those servers – more than many nations. X, Blue Sky, all of these social networks use just as much electricity as an AI service. In fact, they use more because they’ve all run their own AIs for a long time. Facebook started using AI on its users back in 2014 – that’s what EdgeRank was. Anytime you hear the word “algorithm,” that means AI.
Every big tech company with an algorithm has been using AI on you for a long time. The difference now is that the muskets are also in the hands of the people and not just the hands of the powerful corporations. I feel like that particular line of argumentation is very disingenuous.
Jonathan: So what’s the benefit here then? Because if you’re a panelist and you want to speak, now you have to consider that AI needs to suggest you, right?
Thomas: Very soon, authors are going to completely reorient the way they see AI. Right now, authors, particularly left-leaning authors, are very threatened by AI and see it as a negative. The big debate is over whether you can write a book with AI.
Where the conversation is moving: pretty soon you’re going to be hearing authors talking about AIO a lot. We had SEO (search engine optimization). Well, the marketing technique of the 2030s is going to be AIO – AI optimization. Being able to prompt and influence the material that’s part of the large language model, so that you are the author that it recommends and your book is the book that it recommends.
Right now, authors are afraid that AI might read their book. In a few years, they’re going to be paying money to ensure that AI reads their book. It’s a completely different orientation. Rufus is going to start making recommendations of books. ChatGPT is already making recommendations of books. Grok is making recommendations of books.
[Thomas demonstrates by asking Grok for book recommendations in a specific genre]
This is where things are going – people are going to be asking AI for book recommendations. With the digital assistants of a couple years ago like Alexa and Siri, those would only give one answer. It was either number one or nothing. In this new era of AI, it’s not about being number one or nothing because they will give you more options.
It’s no longer number one or nothing, but still getting the AI to recommend your book is really important. People are terrified that AI will steal your book, but it’s actually kind of hard to get content into an LLM. Being like “please take this” is actually non-trivial.
One interesting thing about these recommendation lists is that they’re not necessarily listing recent books, which is actually putting new authors at a disadvantage. Typically you’re only competing against the books that have just come out and a handful of classics. But now AI is recommending those classics to people, which may help boost some of those evergreen backlist books.
AIO – mark it down. We’ll be covering it as tips emerge on how to optimize your book to be recommended by the AIs. It’s important.
For more on this story see Fandom Pulse.
Book Bans: Tuttle Twins Books Removed from NY Libraries
Jonathan: Speaking of recommendations, let’s talk about the opposite of recommendations. In the news this past week, the Tuttle Twins books were removed from New York libraries. The Tuttle twins are libertarian, definitely right-wing leaning books, talking about the dangers of socialism. They’re illustrated kids’ books talking about the dangers of socialism, the positive elements of the First Amendment and the Constitution. Well, New York libraries decided to get rid of the Tuttle twins because they said they were problematic or that they excluded other viewpoints. That was my favorite part of their verbiage: “we accept all viewpoints and these books exclude viewpoints. So we’re banning these books.”
Thomas: That doesn’t make sense on its face obviously, because in order to present a viewpoint, you have to present the viewpoint. The reality is that librarians are left-leaning – something like 95% of librarians vote Democrat. So there’s not a lot of intellectual diversity amongst librarians.
It’s very interesting how this story has been treated. When it’s going the other way, when it’s adult content in general – there’s certain books that would be deemed adult content and certain libraries that cater to children that say “we don’t want to have this adult content that’s inappropriate for children” – it’s big court cases and big drama. People are talking about “Florida is banning books” when in reality they’re just not placing those books in libraries for free for children.
But when it goes the other way, and it’s a libertarian book about using the non-aggression principle and having limited government, and those books are banned, nobody’s covering the story. Often when people talk about this sort of thing, they are not doing it in good faith. They’re not really against book bans – they’re just against book bans for their side.
What broke the story was an internal email that was leaked. The email said the books are in poor condition, which is an indication they’ve been checked out a lot and have been very well loved by readers. That isn’t a reason not to have a book – it’s a reason to order another copy. Another reason was that it wasn’t reviewed by Kirkus, which isn’t a real reason because the book was already on the shelf. The third reason they gave was essentially political, using the euphemism “excluded viewpoints,” which every book does except maybe the encyclopedia.
The left will do this very often to authors: “Your book is not a good fit for us” or “You don’t have a big enough platform” when in reality it’s “Politically we don’t agree with you, but we can’t say that” or “You’re not intersectional enough, but we can’t say that either.” You have to know when you’re being discriminated against and then take action, which typically means doing things yourself.
Fortunately for Connor Boyack, he’s not particularly harmed by this because he has a direct connection to his readers. In fact, he’s probably making more money in sales over the drama.
Jonathan: I was going to talk about this. His advertising is so much more aggressive now. I went to the landing page for his ad. It was like “Attacked by CNN” and then it shows pictures of parents saying “We’re so happy our children read these and learned about what they need to learn about America” and “We’ve been banned from libraries by the left.” It’s about taking straw and spinning it into gold.
Thomas: But if you’re dependent on a publisher, if you’re dependent on gatekeepers and they actually can close the gate on you, then you’re very much at risk. This is one of the reasons why I’ve become more of an advocate for indie publishing – I’ve seen how biased and discriminatory traditional publishing has been. They’ll blame it on the discrimination of another organization: “Oh, it hasn’t been reviewed by the Library Journal.” Well, Library Journal’s not going to review it because it’s libertarian. They’re outsourcing their discrimination to a third party, but it’s still discrimination.
Apple Loses App Store Court Case
Jonathan: Our next news story is Apple has lost the App Store Court case. Apple’s been in a legal battle with Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, over App store policies. The conflict escalated when Epic tried to bypass Apple’s payment system in 2020, which led to their account being pulled. The 2021 court order required Apple to allow more competition, but it’s looking like Apple has not been complying. The judge has referred Apple and an executive to federal prosecutors for criminal contempt, emphasizing that they’re interfering with competition. I’m going to ask Thomas some questions because I personally have no idea how this relates to authors.
Thomas: This is a huge story, and part of the reason why it’s huge is the fact that we don’t think this applies to authors – that’s an indication of how broken the system was that this court has now thrown out.
Previously, Apple would take a 30% cut of all sales done through an app. If Book Funnel wanted to allow you to buy and sell books directly to readers, Apple would take a 30% cut. Then the 70% remaining Book Funnel would have to split with you. The result was that for an ebook, you’d actually be making less money selling it directly to a reader than you would just letting that reader buy it from Amazon, which would take its 30% cut.
There was this big court case – Epic Games went to the mat fighting this monopolistic behavior. One of the principles of the law is that a monopoly in one market shouldn’t allow you to bully your way into other markets. If you win and become the best through your own merit, that’s fine. But you can’t use that merit to crush others.
Typically the fee is like 2-3% for a credit card fee if you’re selling direct. There’s a big gap between 2-3% to Stripe and 30% to Apple. Apple lost a court case a few years ago, but they did not comply with the spirit of the ruling – they still effectively made it impossible to use your own checkout.
That’s why if you try to buy a Kindle book on the Kindle app for iPad, you probably couldn’t see it. For years you couldn’t buy an Audible book in the Audible app. Apple complied with the ruling in the most malicious way possible, and the court got so angry it threw the book at them. Criminal contempt means some Apple executives could potentially go to jail.
Apple is in really hot water. What’s very likely to happen is that their malicious compliance with the ruling is going to go away quickly. This will open up an entirely new avenue for authors, particularly indie authors but also savvy publishers, to sell directly to readers through the iOS ecosystem, which was previously priced out of the market.
Now if Apple’s only taking 5%, or you can use Stripe and they take their 3%, an app developer could create a whole new ecosystem for buying and selling ebooks where they take 10%, Stripe takes 3%, and the author takes 87%. That would be really appealing for indie authors – 87% is way better than 70%. I’m really excited about this ruling. It’s good for publishers, it’s good for readers, and it’s good for authors. The only entity it’s not good for is Apple stockholders.
Jonathan: So just breaking it down Barney style, what you’re talking about is like Book Funnel now would have the capacity to add to their iOS app the ability to purchase a book directly through this instead of having to do the code thing?
Thomas: All of that code friction has been because of Apple’s iOS policy and insisting on taking 30%. Imagine Book Funnel saying “It’s a 3% fee for the credit card and we’re taking 5% for our commission, and you can sell direct and you get 92% of the money.” Authors will flock to that. If Book Funnel doesn’t do it, somebody else will. There’s now so much money on the table that was going to Apple for them doing nothing.
Previously, small indie developers trying to sell something directly had to give 30% every time and pay a hundred dollars a year fee. Meanwhile, Bank of America or Chase, which has an update every two weeks that Apple has to review, only has to pay their hundred dollars fee. Small indie developers were subsidizing these big corporations.
This court case is helping fix an unfair system. Google has also lost a very similar court case over the Google Play store. We’re going to get more options. Effectively what’s been happening is Apple and Google have been operating like governments that are more powerful than the government and charging taxes. This 30% is referred to in the industry as an “Apple tax.” Companies should sell products and services – they shouldn’t collect taxes.
Jonathan: So old-fashioned.
Thomas: I believe in representative government, and if somebody should be able to tax me, I should be able to vote for them.
Writer MBA Closes Down
Jonathan: Our next news story is another conference is shutting down. The Writer MBA conference has been losing money, and they’re closing down their services and just focusing on fiction. I read through the announcement as to why they were closing down – they can’t make money, there’s so much work, they can’t afford to pay somebody to do it for them, they don’t have the time to focus on their fiction businesses. They are saying they feel like they accomplished the impact they wanted to accomplish. They did do a lot of work for direct sales, getting authors into direct sales, and a lot of work into crowdfunding. They’re stating that they’re taking it as a win, that they’ve done what they wanted to do, and now they’re moving on to focus on their fiction markets.
Thomas: This is something I think a lot about as somebody who supports my family by making services and training and conferences for authors. This is a really difficult industry – authors don’t have a lot of money. It’s not like serving plumbers or dentists. Almost every other sector has more money. If I were taking my marketing services, I could make more money doing marketing for almost any other group. Even churches would pay better than what authors pay.
Doing a conference for authors is very risky. You have a lot of fixed upfront costs and variable revenue. What you pay for the venue is fixed, what you pay for the speakers is fixed, and all those flights and hotels are fixed costs. If you don’t sell a sufficient number of tickets, often what happens in the conference world is that the last conference that loses money wipes out all of the profits from all of the previous conferences.
People don’t return to conferences – there’s not a lot of incentive to come back over and over again. An easy mistake to make when running a conference is to underestimate the cost of customer acquisition. You have to go out and find new people every year.
One of the things I’ve done to help with this is I have basically two conferences – the Blue conference and the Red conference. So every year of Novel Marketing Conference is 100% different than the next year, but the third year will rhyme with the first year. My hope is that I can increase the number of people who come back a second time, but I still know it’s mostly about grabbing new people to come to the conference.
Writer MBA was very generous – they gave, and they really helped a lot of folks. They could have kept these secrets to themselves. There’s a sense, especially with advertising and marketing, that the more you share, the more competition you create for yourself.
Few people create services for writers because that’s what they wanted to do. Often what happens is somebody’s writing novels – they’ve always wanted to write novels their whole life. They’ve experienced a little bit of success with their novels, but not enough to pay the bills. So they still need a day job, and they can sell their writing and marketing skills as knowledge or coaching to other authors.
So they start doing that and they have basically two businesses that they run simultaneously – their fiction business and their training for authors business. Sometimes what happens is the fiction takes off, and after a while they’re like “I’m making a lot of money being a successful novelist. Why am I teaching other authors how to do this for comparatively less money?” Or “I’m having way more fun writing novels because that’s what I always wanted to do.”
I think fiction was the first love of the folks behind Writer MBA, not Writer MBA itself. I’m not a novelist – I actually enjoy serving authors. That’s part of the reason why the Novel Marketing podcast is the longest running book marketing podcast, because I’ve seen a lot of really successful things like Writer MBA come and go over the years.
I think they’re right that they’ve really helped the conversation. Selling direct was going to happen. Kickstarter was going to happen whether or not they pushed it. I’ve been pushing Kickstarter for a long time, but what made Kickstarter take off was Brandon Sanderson. The genres closer to Sanderson are the ones doing the best on Kickstarter. It was really Sanderson bringing his audience and proving it – if Brandon Sanderson can make $50 million, maybe I could make 1 million. And you go on and you only make $10,000, but $10,000 is still a lot of money.
Jonathan: We’ll see how that arc terminates, because now a bunch of companies have seen Brandon Sanderson’s success and they’re trying to jump in on the Kickstarter thing too. We’ll see what happens when Kickstarter becomes more corporate rather than artist-focused.
Thomas: My course on Kickstarter was the first ever course on Kickstarter to successfully fund on Kickstarter, although we actually did it on Indiegogo – we switched at the last minute because in the early days, Kickstarter was pretty hostile to nonfiction content. They’re not that way anymore.
New Beta Readers: JaneBot and TwainBot
Jonathan: Moving on to another tool from Thomas and AI, we got Jane Bot and Twain Bot. What do you want to tell me about those, Thomas?
Thomas: This is an idea that I’ve had on and off for a long time, and the technology is finally caught up where I can create it. These are beta readers trained on Jane Austen and Mark Twain. There’s two different ones, and you can feed them scenes from your book to get feedback, and you can also ask them questions.
For Mark Twain, the training data is pretty comprehensive – all of Mark Twain’s novels, all of his nonfiction, his memoir, all of the public domain biographies of Mark Twain, and crucially, all of Mark Twain’s correspondence. There are five volumes of correspondence from Mark Twain that historians have captured over the years that’s public domain. So I was able to train this bot on all of it. When you talk to Mark Twain, it even matches his writing style a little bit as he’s giving you feedback.
I did the same thing with Jane Austen. We don’t have as much from Jane Austen – we have her novels of course, and there’s one volume of Jane Austen’s correspondence, but Jane Austen didn’t go on a worldwide speaking tour. There’s not as much material to train the bot, but Jane Austen bot’s also helpful.
I was a little nervous creating these because I’m like, is this necromancy? It did feel a little bit like talking to Mark Twain, and I’m still a little unsure what to think of these things I’ve created. I don’t know if I made a monster or if I end up being Dr. Frankenstein.
I made it really obvious – there’s pictures of them with a robot for half of their face. I’m trying to make it really obvious that this is a machine. If you’re a patron, you’re welcome to play with it here. The Mark Twain bot quotes himself a lot because Mark Twain has like a million famous quotes. Also, Mark Twain wrote a lot about writing, so we have material on him talking about writing and not just his writing.
Jonathan: Well, I don’t think anyone ever saw AI taking over the world because a podcaster created bots.
Thomas: Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, Jonathan. Nobody expects the Mongol invasion.
Copyright Trolls Target Authors & Bloggers
Jonathan: Let’s talk about something that’s happened to you lately. Copyright trolls are targeting authors and bloggers. You said you got hit for the fourth time recently.
Thomas: I’ve now been hit four times by copyright trolls. This is a new grift that’s been enabled by a law passed in Germany. Germany now has very draconian copyright laws, and there is one particular law firm in Germany doing nothing but harassing American website owners, which applies to American authors.
The worst thing you can do with a copyright troll is ignore it. Here’s how the attack works: You get an email from somebody claiming they have the copyright on an image that you used on your website. If you ignore it, they can go to court against you and get a summary judgment against you, and now you have a court going after you. That’s the worst possible scenario, especially because almost everything they’re doing is shady. If you push back in any way, you’ll win, but you don’t want to hire an attorney for hundreds of dollars if you can avoid it.
Often the email will say, “You’ve got this photo on your website. It’s a violation of our copyright. We have evidence. We’re going to come after you for $20,000, or you can pay us $900 or $1,500 right now, and we’ll make it all go away.” It’s very much an organized crime style attack.
In order for them to actually get a judgment against you, for statutory damages, they have to have registered the copyright within three months of the content’s creation. Very few stock photos actually have registered copyrights – it’s more likely if it’s with the Associated Press or Reuters, but most stock photos aren’t registered copyrights. This means they can’t come after you for statutory damages – they can only come after you for actual damages, which is very difficult to prove in court.
The threat in the email is hollow unless you ignore the email, then they can get a summary judgment against you.
One defense I used the first time was talking to an attorney who sent a letter. He kept asking in different ways, “We want to know that you’re representing the registered copyright holder,” which was a way of saying, “Is this copyright registered? Do you have a leg to stand on?” They finally went away because the stock photo wasn’t a registered copyright.
Through this, I learned about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The proper process is they ask you to take the offending material off your website, then you can challenge and say “No, I think this is fair use.” You go back and forth without involving courts or big sums of money.
If you register as a DMCA agent, they can’t come after you for statutory damages until they’ve exhausted that back-and-forth process. It costs just $6 a year to become a DMCA registered agent. Another way to defend yourself is to put a DMCA clause in the terms of service at the bottom of your website. AI can write this for you.
I also handled one case by getting the license from the stock photo that I had legally purchased and sending it to them. But after getting hit multiple times, I didn’t want to keep proving to some random law firm in Germany that I purchased these images legally.
When I started using the DMCA defense, that particular company never contacted me again. They basically flagged my website in their system as a DMCA-protected website.
One other protection I forgot to mention is just don’t use stock photos and don’t use photos from newspapers – only use AI-generated images. This is where copyright law is really hurting artists. If you’re an artist with a copyright, now that there are these copyright trolls using your copyright to harass people who may have legally purchased your art, they have a huge incentive to instead have an AI image made in your style. There’s no trolls going after people generating stuff with AI.
Jonathan: Well, predators don’t want to work. They don’t want to run, they don’t want to zig, they don’t want to zag. They want easy prey.
Thomas: That’s exactly how it is, because the process is entirely automated. You’re not interacting with their lawyers, you’re going to a shopping cart where you buy protection from this company. But if you buy protection one time, you’ll never be rid of these people.
Regulations for Authors in EU
Jonathan: Publish Drive put out a story about regulations for authors in the EU. The EU has now designated authors and publishers as manufacturers, and if you distribute books, ebooks, or audiobooks to EU readers, you’re now required to conduct a basic internal risk assessment, maintain technical documentation, include a product identifier such as an ISBN. There’s just a ton of things you have to do now to deliver to the EU. Thomas, what are your thoughts on that?
Thomas: You don’t have to follow European laws if you’re not a European. It’s that simple. European laws don’t apply to you if you’re an American.
The thing you have to understand about regulations is that this kind of regulation is about crushing the little guys. When I worked in the government as a legislative aide, I learned that the people advocating for regulations are the industries themselves. The industry will come to the government and say, “We are really dangerous and you need to regulate us. In fact, we even have a draft proposal of regulations.” Those regulations just happen to be the corporate practices of the very biggest players.
They pay their lobbyists to get this regulation passed. The language is all about keeping people safe, but it’s disingenuous. What they care about is competition. Once they get that regulation passed, they use it to push out their competitors or acquire them. A smaller competitor can’t keep up with these regulations that force them to act like a big company.
There’s a term for it called corporate capture, and these regulations are really toxic. We have the same kind of regulations in the United States. When they say it’s for safety, you have to realize that’s not true – it’s to protect the big companies against the little companies.
How Tariffs Might Help Authors Who Advertise
Jonathan: Our last story we’re going to cover today – how tariffs might actually help authors who are advertising. There is huge tariff fallout happening right now as Chinese companies are pulling their listings because with a 145% tariff onto their cost, they can’t sustain their business model. They’re slashing their Amazon advertising in the US, which is good news because now there’s less competition for these keywords. Thomas, what do you think?
Thomas: Authors are coming out smelling like roses right now with the current tariff situation. Our inputs are not tariffed – books are not tariffed coming in from China. The biggest thing is our competition for advertising – a lot of advertisers on Amazon and Facebook are selling cheap Temu stuff, which are really big advertisers because the margins are high.
There’s a whole world of drop shippers where people buy things really cheap on AliExpress or Alibaba and then resell them on Amazon for much more. That business model is getting really squeezed by these Chinese tariffs, and what will get squeezed with the margins is their advertising budgets.
There’s a misnomer that tariffs are paid by the consumer – that’s not true nearly as much as you would think. The first round of Trump tariffs didn’t actually increase consumer prices in any measurable way because it tends to hit the profit margins of all the companies first.
As their profits get squeezed, the temptation will be to reduce their advertising. Because advertising is an auction system where you’re bidding against Temu sellers and others when you’re buying ads on Meta, fewer people bidding means your ads will be cheaper and more profitable. Authors right now are winners in this setup.
If there is a recession, we will not be winners because books are a discretionary purchase. But the current economic situation is really good – the stock market has totally recovered. If you had been not paying attention to the news at all, the entire tariff story would’ve had no impact on your stocks.
Right now the tariffs are really good for authors. You can often tell the political leaning of a news source by how they’re reporting on the tariffs, because a lot of them are trying to find reasons why it would be bad for authors. The best argument you can make for harm to authors is paper prices going up, but the paper prices are going up universally, which means it doesn’t put you at a disadvantage from any other authors.
There’s a bunch of companies in that supply chain – the pulp makers, the paper makers, the printers, the delivery companies – all of them are going to have their profit squeezed before it gets to the end consumer because they are competing against American sources of paper that aren’t being squeezed.
Jonathan: And weirdly, paper grows on trees.
Thomas: Well, paper inputs grow on trees. Canada is probably the number one country in the world for timber supply. It’s either Canada or Brazil. But we also have a lot of trees in the United States, and United States now has a fully renewable pulp supply. Timber is actually a renewable resource – you can cut down trees, plant new trees, and cut them down again 20-30 years later.
We’ve been managing our forests responsibly to the point that we actually have more forests now in the United States than we did a hundred years ago while still supplying all of the wood for building.
Amazon has been making changes too – I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Jonathan, with stuff from Amazon, but they’re moving away from cardboard.
Jonathan: They are. I’m getting more packages in the little cheap plastic bags.
Also MSNBC reports, Chinese advertisers like Temu are slashes U.S. ad spending, plummets in App Store rankings after Trump China tariffs.
