Week Ending April 10, 2026 | Author Update
The Supreme Court confirms you own your AI-assisted writing, a bestselling thriller author loses his entire YouTube channel to a copyright scam but gets it back, Amazon finally ends the practice that let counterfeiters slip fakes into your book sales, and for our zeitgeist segment we’ll analyze the new movie Project Hail Mary.
Eighth Circuit Allows Iowa Schools to Enforce Book Removal Law
Jonathan: The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Monday that Iowa schools can enforce a state law removing certain books from public school libraries. A three-judge panel vacated preliminary injunctions that had blocked key provisions of the law.
Iowa legislators passed the 2023 law to regulate which books appear in K-12 school libraries and which topics teachers can cover in kindergarten through sixth grade classrooms.
The law requires schools to remove any book containing descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act. It also bars instruction related to gender identity or sexual orientation for younger students. Under the Hazelwood standard, schools can exercise editorial control over such materials when their choices tie to legitimate pedagogical concerns.
Thomas, tell me what “pedagogical” means.
Thomas: Pedagogy is the technique of teaching. There are different pedagogical approaches and philosophies. In homeschool world, there are rival schools of thought like the classical approach, the Charlotte Mason approach, or the unschooling approach. If a school has a pedagogical reason, the Supreme Court has held that it can decide a book isn’t worth the rare shelf space.
Schools have to make decisions about what will cause good education and good edification. A core element of education for 2,500 years, until about five minutes ago, was the development of character in children. Most of our ancestors saw that as the single most important element of education. It wasn’t primarily about cramming knowledge into somebody’s head, because people can learn their whole lives, but a child’s character is often formed at a young age. Cultivating character in students is a pedagogical concern for school districts, according to the courts.
How did the court address First Amendment claims?
Jonathan: The court rejected claims that the removals violate First Amendment rights to receive information.
Judge Ralph Erickson wrote the opinion. He explained that the First Amendment does not guarantee students the right to access books of their choosing at taxpayer expense. He added that removal from a school library does not prevent a student from receiving that information through other channels.
A coalition of publishers led by Penguin Random House, along with several authors, challenged the law. They argued that the removals censored their work and limited students’ access.
The appeals court disagreed on the preliminary injunction. The panel found the plaintiffs unlikely to succeed on the merits under the correct legal standard.
Is this really a “book ban”?
Thomas: But this is not a book ban.
Jonathan: A book ban means you can’t get this book anywhere. You’re not allowed to have it. If you’re caught with it, you go to prison, and they take your book. The author’s accounts get frozen, their ability to publish on KDP gets revoked, and any publishing company that publishes them is punished. That’s a book ban.
A librarian deciding they don’t have shelf space is not a book ban.
Thomas: Librarians constantly make choices about which books fill limited shelf space. The more concerning thing is how desperately some people want to put sexual content in front of children.
This is good news for authors who write for children without filling their books with sexual content. With objectional books removed, there’s going to be more shelf space for books that help develop good character.
Aristotle would not approve of encouraging children in all of their base inclinations. The cultivation of virtue is about learning to deny yourself, cultivating your higher desires, and resisting your baser ones. Your base inclinations should not define you, not if you aspire to greatness.
Who is actually fighting for these books, and why?
Jonathan: Look at the behavioral component. Who is fighting for these books? Publishers. They want to sell more books, and schools are automatic purchasers. If they have a popular YA series, they want schools to buy them with their budgets and stock their libraries.
Then you also have teachers and authors who’ve chosen progressive views of family or behavior, and they need more people on their side. If you can drown out the opposition and gaslight enough people into staying silent, no one says anything about you.
Thomas: There’s a lot of hypocrisy, because none of the “book ban” crowd cared when the Tuttle Twins got kicked out of libraries for political content. The argument isn’t really about free speech. It’s about advocating for a particular lifestyle and worldview.
We covered the Tuttle Twins case on the show. They were removed from libraries over ideological concerns.
While I like the Tuttle Twins and I’ve had Connor Boyack on the show, I made the same case in that episode that I’m making here. It’s not a book ban because you don’t have a right for the government to buy copies of your book and distribute them for free. That’s not how book bans work. A certain kind of person insists on not understanding this and acts like the government has an obligation to buy your book and put it in the library.
What role do librarians play in book selection?
Thomas: Most people in my author community have no expectation of their books ever getting into the library, because librarians overwhelmingly lean left.
I saw stats showing 95% of librarians are registered Democrats. I’ve never met a current librarian who’s a Republican. I’ve met people who were librarians 20 or 30 years ago who are Republicans now. If you’re the one-in-a-thousand Republican librarian, please reach out. I want to know who you are.
Republicans have never had an expectation that our books will get featured in libraries. The amount of effort required just to get a book into the library is enormous, while a book from the other side might have 200 copies sitting on the shelf, even though they’re not checked out. Meanwhile, 20 people are waiting for the book on our side.
The librarians are very ideological.
The phrase “freedom to read” has become a euphemism for grooming—putting sexually explicit material in front of children. This case is very narrowly defined to school libraries, libraries only accessible to K-12 children. It’s not about public libraries.
Even with public libraries, we live in a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, paid for by the people. As owners of this government, we have the right to direct how our tax dollars are spent, and we do that by electing officials.
The citizens of Iowa elected representatives who expressed the democratic view that they do not want sexually explicit books given to their children. The representatives fulfilled their constitutional role by directing the money the way voters wanted it directed.
Just because some bureaucrat thinks she knows better what content a child should receive doesn’t mean we’re a government of, for, and by bureaucrats. Authors would be wise to realize we’re not making friends with the citizens around us when we insist on shoving sexually explicit content down their children’s throats without their knowledge.
Sources:
U.S. Appeals Court Deals a Blow to the Freedom to Read
Eighth Circuit Opinion – Penguin Random House, LLC v. Robbins (No. 25-1819, April 6, 2026)
Eighth Circuit Opinion – Iowa Safe Schools v. Reynolds (No. 25-2186, April 6, 2026)
Iowa Public Radio – Appeals Court Permits Enforcement of 2023 Law
ACLU of Iowa Press Release with Opinion Links
Penguin Random House Purposefully Hides Explicit Content From Parents With Deceptive Middle Grade Covers
Jonathan: The Daily Wire reports some authors and publishers now design book covers to signal explicit themes to children while hiding those themes from parents.
Rebecca Heim wrote the middle grade novel When You’re Brave Enough. Penguin Random House released the title on April 7th for readers ages 10 to 14. She posted on Instagram about her cover instructions. She told the publisher she wanted to design the cover so queer kids and teens would notice it, but homophobic parents would see only a friendship story. The cover shows flowers growing between two characters to represent a crush. She tested the design with people on the street and praised librarians who guided kids toward these books.
Andrew Karre, executive editor at Penguin Random House’s Dutton Books for Young Readers, spoke to PEN America in November 2025. He claimed that sex forms an inextricable part of life for 13- to 19-year-olds. He argued that books give teens healthier instruction about sex than pornography does, and that publishers cannot produce young adult novels without sexual content. This is Penguin Random House, one of the major publishers.
Melissa de la Cruz published Sine on February 3rd, and Good Morning America chose the title for its Young Adult Book Club. The novel targets ninth through 12th graders and includes graphic scenes of threesomes, rape, and sexual acts. Reviewers note the complete absence of content warnings, and parents who read the book often describe the scenes as inappropriate for the intended age group.
This adds fuel to the whole conversation about book removal. What is appropriate to give children, especially when the industry producing the books will not warn you about what’s in them? Movies have to be rated. If it’s rated R, you know there’s content your kids shouldn’t see. We have ratings for visual material, but nothing like that for books. The publishers themselves will not warn or even allow any kind of signaling to let parents know something is off.
Are publishers deliberately deceiving parents?
Thomas: In fact, they’re doing the opposite of warning. They’re purposefully trying to deceive parents. This is for books categorized as young adult. It doesn’t even include the very explicit erotica books that now have young adult styled covers.
There are hundreds, if not thousands of examples of straight erotica, which is in the erotica category on Amazon or in one of the steamier romance categories, but wrapped and packaged in a middle grade or YA cover. Technically it’s in the erotica category, but if you don’t know to look for that and the shelving instructions are left off, it’s a total surprise that there is explicit content in the book.
Publishers, schools, and librarians are actively working against parents here.
This is why those parents are getting mad and electing people like the Iowa state legislature to do something about it. Should the Iowa legislature do something about Penguin Random House? No, this is a free country. If they want to publish smut, it’s their right. But it is also our right to give them social censure.
One of the most valuable things Penguin Random House has is our respect as a major publisher. I think we must strip them of that respect. If an author is published with Penguin Random House, you should treat them as somebody published by Playboy, because that’s basically the same kind of content they’re putting out, except it’s Playboy for kids, which is even worse.
How did the “all reading is good” mentality contribute to this problem?
Jonathan: There was a trend of lazy parenting in the nineties. Pizza Hut would give you a personal pan pizza if you read 10 books over the summer. Everyone has great memories of this, but what it contributed to was the idea that all books are good as long as kids are reading. The thought was that books have to be good because books develop brain activity and grow brain cells, and there was intentional ignorance over what the kid was actually reading.
It’s not enough that they’re reading.
I’m an author, and when I craft a novel, I choose my words to produce certain effects. I want the reader to feel something or think a certain way. Horror authors are very familiar with this because they know how to create a sense of dread in the reader’s mind through description and character reaction. There’s craft to creating these effects.
To just say “my kid’s reading, so it’s fine” is negligent. Now we’re reaping the whirlwind on that lazy thinking because the concrete has set. “The children are reading, what do you care?” has become the bedrock assumption, and then they’re feeding kids whatever they want. People are losing their kids to it. Mental illness is skyrocketing. Violence is skyrocketing.
Thomas: In an interview with PEN America published in November, Andrew Karre was remarkably candid about his worldview. He said that sex, “Whether actually having it or imagining having it, sex is inextricable from 13- to 19-year-olds.” He went further, saying a YA publishing industry without sexual content was essentially unimaginable.
Penguin Random House is advertising a particular sexual ethic, and part of that advertisement is saying “this is normal and standard,” but that is not true.
My first kiss was with my wife when we got engaged. That’s ethic is not as uncommon as you might expect. Not everyone is having sex in high school. In fact, the numbers are way down. Baby boomers were more likely to have sex in high school than Gen X. Millennials were less likely than Gen X. Gen Z is much less likely to have sex at all than millennials were. A lot of Gen Z are still virgins deep into their twenties.
The view that sexualized childhood is normal and good is not a view we should give our respect to. Penguin Random House is not a force for good in society. Supporting them as a publisher is not an act of good. They’re one of the plaintiffs in the opening story, trying to force libraries to put sexualized content, even from other publishers, in front of children. They are a force for sexualizing children directly and indirectly.
When they reject your novel, you can say, “Your jeers mean nothing to me. I’ve seen what you celebrate.”
Jonathan: There’s also a correlation between the people who argue most actively for this kind of content and those who end up facing charges of child pornography later.
Thomas: Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.
Sources:
Inside The Push to Get Explicit Content in Front of Kids Without Parents Knowing
PEN America Interview with Andrew Karre
1 in 10 public school students report experiencing sexual misconduct by faculty before graduation.
Authors Win Big: High Court Says Human Authors Own AI-Assisted Writing
Jonathan: The Supreme Court declined to hear Thaler v. Perlmutter on March 2nd.
Computer scientist Thaler asked the justices to recognize his AI system as the author of an image titled A Recent Entrance to Paradise. He listed the AI program called the Creativity Machine as the sole creator and stated in writing that the work lacked traditional human authorship. The Copyright Office refused his registration application, lower courts backed the office, and the Supreme Court backed them up.
The ruling confirms a core requirement in the Copyright Act. Only a human being can serve as an author. The D.C. Circuit spelled this out in its March 2025 opinion. Judges noted that the human authorship rule does not prohibit copyrighting work made by or with the assistance of artificial intelligence. The author must simply be the person who created, operated, or used the AI system. Machines cannot claim copyright as creators.
This is important from a couple of angles. First, you can copyright any book that you used AI to help you write.
Thomas: This isn’t just us speculating. Judge Patricia Millett wrote it on page 18 of the opinion:
First, the human authorship requirement does not prohibit copyrighting work that was made by or with the assistance of artificial intelligence. The rule requires only that the author of that work be a human being—the person who created, operated, or used artificial intelligence—and not the machine itself. The Copyright Office, in fact, has allowed the registration of works made by human authors who use artificial intelligence.
This is critical to underline because much misinformation is spreading in the author community, purposefully misunderstanding this case.
The Supreme Court refusing to hear it means the lower court’s decision holds. The Supreme Court could revisit this in the future, but it’s very unlikely.
Everyone who’s told you that if you use AI to help write your book you can’t get the copyright is wrong.
How does this ruling affect AI companies?
Thomas: This also makes it harder for the company that makes the AI to claim ownership of your work, because the machine can’t have ownership.
The legal doctrine for this, hinges on Naruto v. Slater, the monkey selfie case. A monkey took a selfie and PETA sued the Copyright Office so the monkey could own the copyright. The decision turned on the fact that copyright ultimately comes from the Constitution, and the Copyright and Patents Clause includes a beautiful phrase about “encouraging the arts and useful sciences.”
The whole point of copyright is to encourage human beings to think and create. Machines do not need that encouragement. I hit my machine with a hammer and say “think,” and it thinks. It doesn’t need a legal incentive.
If you used Grammarly to edit your writing and you’re nervous about losing your copyright because somebody on Facebook told you AI makes something uncopyrightable, that is just wrong.
Jonathan: Let’s go even farther. Say you use an AI image generator and completely write a description for a city, a building, or a person. You put that output in your book without changing it. It’s still yours because prompting the AI is an act of creation. You can argue with me ethically all you want, but legally speaking, you prompted it. It’s yours.
Thomas: There are a lot of authors making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, some of them tens of thousands a month, generating AI books. Most of them are very quiet about it.
Jonathan: The people who preach against AI authors on social media don’t want the competition.
Thomas: These authors often construct elaborate automations for rapidly producing fiction. That act of human creation, while not the same as typing, is still creation, legally speaking.
The more important thing is that you have to be a legal person to have standing in courts.
There are mortal humans, and there are also immortal legal “persons,” known as corporations. A corporation can own a copyright, which is why Disney the corporation owns the copyright to what Disney creates.
It’s harder for an AI company to claim copyright to your work, but not necessarily impossible, because that company is a legal person in the eyes of the law. More exploration and clarification will come through other court cases we’re following.
In the mean time, if you’re nervous about AI stealing or invalidating your copyright, you don’t have to be.
Does copyright protection actually work in practice?
Thomas: Is copyright protection real? I still can’t name a single human author who’s actually won a copyright court case, because it’s a law written for and by Disney. But you can put your name on the book with confidence that you are doing a legal thing.
There was some question at AuthorMedia.social about book cover images created with a book cover designer in the Patron Toolbox and whether people were allowed to use those. I built that tool with the intention of it creating placeholder covers for reader magnets.
Are people using it to create effective book covers? Yes. You’re an adult in a free country. I’ve put language on that page saying we don’t take any claim to the copyright of that image. I can’t even see the images you create. I have the privacy settings so high that the only time I see the designs people make is if they share them with me.
Is AI-generated content really “art”?
Jonathan: Let’s make an argument for art here. You’ve seen the videos of graduate students wearing avant-garde clothes who slop paint onto the floor and throw a banana peel at it and call it art. I’m not sure what part of that took any artistic skill or expression.
Generating your whole book with AI is similar. Technically it’s art because there was a creative process, but it was 10 minutes of creative process as opposed to the months that go into sculpting a book with a tiny hammer and tiny chisel.
Thomas: Is Penguin Random House’ smut for kids a kind of art? No.
s it legal? Yes.
Just because it’s legal and just because the Copyright Office says you can own a copyright on something is in no way an indication of the quality or virtue of that thing.
Let’s be clear. I’m not advocating that you all start creating automations and generate a book a day. But if you do, it looks like from our reading of the Supreme Court case that you can get a copyright. That’s all we’re saying.
Sources:
Supreme Court Denies Certiorari in Thaler v. Perlmutter: AI Cannot Be an Author Under the Copyright Act
Supreme Court Denies Cert in AI Authorship Case
Supreme Court Denies Certiorari in Thaler v. Perlmutter: “Human-Only Rule” for AI Works Stands
Thaler v. Perlmutter Docket – Supreme Court of the United States
U.S. Copyright Office: Copyright and Artificial Intelligence – Part 2: Copyrightability Report (January 2025)
YouTube Wipes Out Author’s Channel After He Posts Clips From Own Audiobooks
Jonathan: Bestselling thriller author J.A. Konrath lost his YouTube channel this week.
He had uploaded one-hour audio excerpts from four of his self-published audiobooks. YouTube removed the videos and banned him after copyright strikes arrived from an Indian enforcement firm called Mark Scan.
Konrath has sold millions of thrillers. He publishes the ebooks on Amazon, produces the audiobooks through ACX, and holds sole rights to every title. The voice actors signed work-for-hire contracts and receive no royalties or ownership shares. The four struck videos featured samples from Rum Runner, Dead on the Feet, Watch Too Long, and Webcam.
Mark Scan operates from Noida, India. The company offers digital asset protection and anti-piracy services to clients that include Sony, Netflix, and Amazon.
Konrath emailed them multiple times, but they never replied. He has no contract with them. He never authorized them to act on his behalf, but they reported him to YouTube, and YouTube shut down his channel.
Four days after the first notice reached his inbox, he missed the email and had no chance to respond before the termination happened. Other creators on Reddit and YouTube have reported similar problems with Mark Scan, including false claims, ignored appeals, and demands for payment to lift strikes.
There’s an extortion mechanic at work here.
Konrath prepared a formal DMCA counter-notification. He swore under penalty of perjury that he owns the content and that Mark Scan misidentified it. YouTube must legally review a counter-notice within 10 business days and may restore the channel if the claimant does not file a lawsuit.
That’s exactly what happened. He filed the notification, YouTube sent him a “we are unable to assist in this matter” email saying his channel was gone, and then about an hour later they sent another email reversing the decision after a human reviewed it and realized they were in legal trouble.
Thomas: The author posted about it on X and his post went viral. That’s the unfortunate reality.
These big copyright troll agencies mass-report and mass-claim content. The other strategy is they’ll claim all the revenue from your video. We shared a clip in one of our Author Update videos of a Brandon Sanderson AI-generated fan-made video that had a tiny bit of music on it. A company like Mark Scan claimed they owned the copyright for that music and claimed the revenue from the entire video.
This is an abuse of the DMCA system where human authors, at great effort to themselves, have to fight automated machines. Humans can only appeal to the automated machine on YouTube, unless they’re famous enough or go viral enough on X for the humans at YouTube to pay attention. It’s like a battlefield where one side has drones and the other side has humans. It’s not a fair fight.
Jonathan: As one of our viewers pointed out, video game music mixers on YouTube had this happening to them a few months ago. YouTubers have been dealing with copyrighted music claims on their videos for a while now.
Thomas: Some video games now have a copyright-free music mode in their settings that you toggle on so streamers can still make money.
Sources:
J.A. Konrath’s X Post Detailing the YouTube Termination
MarkScan Official Website – Digital IP Protection Services
Trustpilot Reviews of MarkScan – Multiple Complaints of False Strikes
Reddit Thread on MarkScan Enforcement Copyright Strikes
2027 Novel Marketing Tickets for Sale
Jonathan: Tickets for the 2027 Novel Marketing Conference are on sale now.
- What: Novel Marketing Conference (Red Year)
- When: January 22-23, 2027
- Where: Austin, Texas
Only three Super Tickets remain. Last year, the most expensive tickets sold out first, standard tickets next, and gallery tickets (cheapest) last.
Seth Ring, who joined me on this week’s zeitgeist episode of Novel Marketing, is confirmed as a speaker. I’ll be adding more speakers and information soon.
Get your tickets now, especially if you want a super ticket.
Pre-Conference Workshop (with Super Ticket)
The Super Ticket extends the two-day conference to three days with a smaller, more intimate pre-conference workshop focused on advertising.
Content Rotation (Red/Blue Years)
The conference alternates between two tracks each year, a red year and a blue year, with entirely different topics. In the blue year, the pre-conference workshop covers building or upgrading your website. In the red year (2027) it’s advertising.
For the 2027 advertising workshop, you really need a book on Amazon to get the most out of it. If you have a book, you’ll be creating ads for it with our help. If you’re already advertising, you can pull up your dashboard and get tips, critiques, and encouragement to make your ads more effective.
The final session every year is a productivity session, always taught by someone different, always completely new material. The conference doubles as a plan-your-next-year getaway.
I recommend booking an extra day at the hotel after the conference to be alone with your laptop, do some writing and planning, and digest everything.
Focused on Book Marketing and Promotion
Thomas: I think it’s the only conference focused solely on promotion. There are no agents, no acquisitions editors. It’s entirely about selling more copies of your books.
The 2027 conference is probably friendlier to unpublished authors because we’re talking more about launching a book. We’ll have a session on Kickstarter and several sessions on book launching.
Novel Marketing Book Launch Method Revealed
Right now, this is the only place to learn the Novel Marketing launch team method. I don’t offer the course anymore and I don’t give it away on the podcast. It’s the one thing I keep close to the chest.
The Novel Marketing Book Launch Method is effective and different from other methods. Part of the method is not letting other authors on your launch team, for several good reasons. One side effect of that guideline is that it has kept the method secret, because you can’t learn it by joining another author’s launch team.
Come to the conference to learn the Novel Marketing Book Launch method.
Small Writers Groups Based on Genre
We also put everyone into writers groups of about eight people, clustered by similarity, and that’s your group for the whole conference. People love this. We consistently get great feedback on the writers groups.
Small, Intimate Conference Setting
We limit the conference to about 120 people, including coaches, but your writers group keeps it feeling small. Some of the groups continue to meet after the conference. People stay in touch and keep meeting.
Learn more about the 2027 Novel Marketing Conference.
Amazon Fights Book Counterfeiting & Ends Commingled Book Inventory
Thomas: Amazon has made a really good change to the platform by ending co-mingled book inventory.
Jonathan: The old system allowed scammers to make millions selling counterfeit books. Amazon would mix identical books from multiple sellers into shared warehouse bins.
Every time somebody ordered a book, they would just grab one out of the bin and mail it. That created serious quality issues because the book might not have come from an Amazon printer. It might have come from a reseller or counterfeiter who slapped a cover on a fake copy. That can poison an author’s career if your name is on the book and it’s nothing like the actual product.
Thomas: It also made it nearly impossible to find the counterfeiters because all the inventory was mixed together. You didn’t know who put which book into the pool.
Now, each seller’s books will be kept in their own separate inventory. If a reader complains about a counterfeit from a specific seller, Amazon can trace it directly and remove that seller from the platform.
This is great news for authors. Print-on-demand authors have been especially vulnerable because anybody with a print-on-demand machine can make copies of your book that look identical to the copies sold on Amazon.
Amazon tried to combat this earlier with a special tracking code. If you have a book printed on Amazon, you’ll notice a unique identifier just above the barcode and a little blue “T” next to it. The idea was to fight counterfeiting, but it didn’t do much. The only thing it’s really useful for now is that a reader who knows about it can scan that code with an app on their phone and leave a review. I’ve never in my life met a reader who knows they can do that.
Thomas: I have a few free tools in the Patron Toolbox worth mentioning. I built a barcode generator, an ISBN generator, and a “leave a review” QR code generator. All of them are free. You do have to become a patron, but you can become a free patron with unlimited, unmetered access. If you have 20 books or 100 books, you can run them all through the barcode generator.
I recommend using my barcode generator rather than the free one that came with KDP or any other app, because those are all terrible. In fact, a bad barcode is one way I can identify a self-published book, and readers often subconsciously notice it too.
A true industry-standard barcode has the main barcode and then a smaller barcode to the side that either shows the price for the scanner or includes a 90000 code, indicating no pricing information. Some scanners can’t read barcodes without the pricing component. My generator supports both options.
My generator also supports shelving instructions, which is the other thing that gives away an indie-published book. Many indie authors signal that they put no thought into selling in physical bookstores because their books lack shelving instructions.
Traditionally published books always where to shelve the book right above the barcode, something like “Nonfiction/Business” or “Fiction/Romance.” Often there’s a broad category and a narrow category, because some bookshops only have fiction and nonfiction shelves while larger stores have more specific sections.
Including shelving instructions costs nothing and makes you look more professional.
With any barcode generator, I recommend testing the output yourself. Get a barcode-reading app on your phone, scan it, and make sure the number it returns matches your ISBN. That only takes a moment and saves you from printing a thousand copies where one line is slightly too thick and the whole barcode reads the wrong number.
Sources:
Commingling practices will end effective March 31, 2026
Amazon Commingled Inventory Ending March 2026
Amazon to end commingling program after years of complaints from brands and sellers
Bookvault Raises Shipping Prices
Jonathan: Bookvault pushed out a notification that due to the conflict in the Middle East, they will be raising shipping prices. I did a test checkout for printing a copy of In Darkness Cast, and on top of the £7.63 to print it, shipping would be another £5.73. My personal opinion on the Iran conflict is that this is wrapping up soon.
Thomas: Shipping prices go up every year, but keep an eye out for these emails because companies often say the price will go up at the first of the next month. A pro strategy is to place your order as soon as you get that email so you lock in the old shipping rate.
Companies like Bookvault are pretty good about giving you a heads up so you can adjust your system.
Vellum Releases New Update
Jonathan: Vellum has released a new update. You can now see word count per chapter displayed in a graph. This helps you see how your chapters compare to the average for your book. If you have a 2,000-word chapter followed by a 9,000-word chapter followed by a 750-word chapter, you can see that pacing at a glance. It also shows the midpoint of your book, which is a huge pacing tool. Has everything that needs to happen by the midpoint actually happened?
When I first saw it, I thought, Vellum is formatting software, why would I need this there? But the final stage of my editing takes place in the formatting software because I’m double-checking everything, making sure nothing got messed up through auto formatting. Being able to see these stats at that stage means I can rearrange and adjust how the book is going to come out.
Thomas: I’m not a lawyer, but my understanding is that fonts and letterforms are not copyrightable. You can’t own the letter A. Fonts are potentially protectable under trademark, so the Oakland A’s can protect their stylized A under trademark law, but I don’t think they can copyright it.
Shopify Notifies Users That Customers Can Use ChatGPT to Purchase Their Products
Jonathan: Shopify has notified users that customers can use ChatGPT to purchase their products. I tested it out. ChatGPT recommended my book and gave me a link to purchase it, but it didn’t open the agentic commerce window for a direct checkout. When I asked why, it said Shopify is rolling out the feature slowly.
I checked my Shopify settings, and I do have agentic commerce enabled with ChatGPT listed, so OpenAI can scan my catalog and find my product. The hangup is in the actual checkout process. Until Shopify unlocks that for my store, people will have to follow the link and buy directly from the Shopify store. It’s not live yet.
Thomas: They keep announcing this and it keeps not being true. This is like the smart fridge that will order new milk for you. Computer companies have been promising that since about 1999, and it still doesn’t exist. It’s always a year away. I’m sure they’ll figure out agentic commerce before they figure out the fridge.
Google Releases Gemma 4 an LLM That Can Run Locally on Your Laptop
Thomas: Google just released Gemma 4, an open-source LLM that can run locally on your laptop. It’s arguably the best local LLM available.
Some benefits of running an LLM on your computer: peak privacy because your data never leaves your device, reduced costs because you’re not paying for tokens or subscription fees, and the ability to work offline. Cloud services will always outperform local setups, and it’s not really saving you money if you have to buy a new Mac Mini to run it. Cloud services are also easier to use. But it’s encouraging to see local models getting better.
There are also Chinese models you can run locally, but I think Google is going to win the local model race in the short and medium term because they’re doing innovative things with memory compression.
Jonathan: The Chinese models are not renowned for their privacy.
Thomas: They’re actually perfectly private if you’re running them locally, because there’s nothing to call back to. It’s all contained on your machine.
Sources:
Gemma 4: Our most capable open models to date
Gemma 4 model overview | Google AI for Developers
Gemma 4 — Google DeepMind
Gemma releases | Google AI for Developers
Don’t Buy the Hype on the Claude Mythos Danger
Thomas: If you’re following AI news, Anthropic has pulled off the best kind of misdirection. Everyone was talking about their code leak last week. Now they’ve convinced everyone that their latest model is going to break the internet, that it’s too dangerous for general release, and that only 10 companies can access it because it found all these security vulnerabilities.
My eyes are rolling because they do this with every release. They change what the risk is each time so it seems new, but the playbook is the same. “This model is so dangerous we can’t release it.” Then they release it. Everyone says, “It’s the dangerous model, I have to have it.”
Letting the big, expensive companies get access first is the same thing Steve Jobs did when he gave Madonna an iPhone before launch. Nobody had seen one other than Steve Jobs on stage, and then Madonna has one and it’s a whole news cycle.
Jonathan: It’s like a guy trying to impress a girl by saying his temper is so bad that if he loses control, he’ll be dangerous, so he can’t be around anybody. And she says, “I need to help him.” It’s the same selling process.
Thomas: From my time on a grand jury handling drug cases for three months, I learned that drug dealers hype how dangerous their product is to signal quality. “Three guys overdosed on this and were hospitalized last week. This is the good stuff.”
That’s the exact same playbook Anthropic is using. “It hacked so many companies. It broke all of these things. OpenBSD has been unhacked for 15 years and this hacked it.”
If you dig behind the surface, you’ll discover that it found one vulnerability and basically repeated the same finding across a hundred different applications. It’s not nearly as impressive as the headlines suggest.
Don’t let them scare you, and don’t let them convince you the model is the greatest thing in the world. The Claude models are very impressive. I’m using Claude for a lot of reasoning tasks right now. It is the most politically biased of the major models, though, and it’s really difficult to use for anything writing-related because it pushes your writing to the political center.
Sources:
Project Glasswing: Securing critical software for the AI era
Anthropic Unveils ‘Claude Mythos’ – A Cybersecurity Breakthrough That Could Also Supercharge Attacks
What Is Claude Mythos—And Why Anthropic Won’t Let Anyone Use It?
Claude Mythos: Anthropic says this model is too dangerous to release
Zeitgeist
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Project Hail Mary Rockets Past Two Hundred Twenty Six Million Dollars at the Domestic Box Office
Jonathan: Project Hail Mary has passed $226 million at the domestic box office, not including global numbers. It opened to $80.5 million on March 20th and followed with $54.5 million in its second weekend, only a 32% drop. As of early April, the title has earned $226 million in North America and $430 million more worldwide. Amazon MGM Studios is calling it the company’s highest-grossing release ever. From what I’m seeing on social media, it’s driven by rewatches and word of mouth from people having such a good time that they’re pulling others into theaters.
What psychological need is this film meeting?
Thomas: We’ve talked about understanding the psychological reason your reader picks up your genre and how there is no universal motivation for reading a book or watching a movie. I watched Project Hail Mary with my wife, and one of my first comments afterward was that this movie is all about the male loneliness epidemic. She had no idea it scratched that itch. A movie can scratch more than one itch, but this one hits a big one.
Starting with television and several societal changes in the 1970s, people’s social circles have contracted. People went from five best friends in the eighties to four in the nineties to three in the 2000s to zero for a lot of people today, particularly younger people. They’re not making friends. Face-to-face time has gone way down and screen time has gone way up. Some trends that look positive on the surface, like young people drinking less, are actually symptoms of isolation. Loneliness will kill you faster than alcoholism.
It’s getting to the point where some people’s view of friendship has become so distorted that they feel the only kind of relationship can be a sexual one, the kind of view advocated by people at Penguin Random House who are trying to sexualize childhood friendships unnecessarily.
In Greek, there are many words for love. English just has one. The Greeks had the word eros for romantic and sexual attraction, phileo for brotherly love, the love of comrades in arms, and storge for maternal love or the warmth of puppies snuggled together. C.S. Lewis breaks down four of these words in The Four Loves. Phileo love is the rarest love in American culture right now, and I think it’s why this movie is doing so well in America, better than it’s doing globally.
The relationship between the protagonists can’t be sexual because they can’t even touch each other. They are so alien to each other that they can’t breathe each other’s air. Learning to communicate is this huge challenge, and it’s a journey of growing a friendship from first principles. It’s deeply satisfying. The movie knows which itch it’s scratching. Should your book scratch that same itch? Not necessarily. There are a lot of psychological needs out there. But this is a big one, a broad one, and one that very few stories are addressing, which is why this particular story is doing so well.
Jonathan: I’m a big follower of the Predator franchise. I liked Predator one and two, loved AVP, thought everything after that was awful, and then really liked Prey. When they released Predator: Badlands, there was bad press because the predator looked like a Gen Z kid, young, without the full crest of dreadlocks, wearing them in a little ponytail. People made fun of it. I watched it a couple weeks ago and immediately watched it again.
It was so enjoyable because it hits this male loneliness theme. The predator in that movie is a younger brother whose older brother stood up for him to their father. The father killed the older brother for trying to protect the younger one. The younger brother escapes to a death planet where he has to hunt and kill something no predator has ever killed before, but he builds a family while doing it. He adopts a different model of what it means to be a hunter, a protector, a dominant force. Someone tells him about the wolf, how the alpha male in the wolf pack is the one who protects all the others. That creates a new framework for this young predator. He becomes pretty cool. It’s a good movie that hits all my buttons, built around the question of what it means to be male, to be masculine, to be a protector.
Thomas: One thing to realize when you’re targeting men with a story is that it doesn’t turn away women the way that targeting women with a story turns away men.
Jonathan: My wife and my sister-in-law are Jane Austen fans. I made them watch Predator: Badlands with me the second time because I said they were going to like it. They were skeptical because it’s a Predator movie. They enjoyed it because they connected with this kid becoming a man and deciding what kind of man he’s going to be.
Why do audiences crave ruthless characters right now?
Thomas: We’ve talked about how readers are craving ruthless characters. I warned two weeks ago I was going to spoil Project Hail Mary, so here we go. The Ryan Gosling character did not choose to get on the ship for this death mission. The female lead scientist drugged him and had him beaten and put onto the ship because it was required to save the planet. She sits him down and says, “You are going to go.” He says he’s too afraid. She tells him he can go the easy way or the hard way. He tries to run. He gets beaten. He goes anyway.
Very ruthless, but very much a story for dark times. We need ruthless heroes who do the difficult and dirty thing in order to save everyone. This is very much a fourth-turning film where the world is broken. There’s a catastrophe threatening all life, but it’s not a climate change catastrophe. The problem is an alien eating the sun, which really helped this movie. They could have so easily made it a preachy climate change story and chose not to. That was intentional, and it reoriented the story away from politics and toward friendship, character, and nobility, eternal principles that will cause this movie to resonate for years after the current political conversation moves on.
What can authors learn about glory and dénouement?
Thomas: Another thing we talked about on the show was glory and how audiences are longing for it. The filmmakers really take the time to let you feel the glory of success. They don’t just roll the credits. There’s a five-minute montage of celebration. Marvel never gave you that moment of glory. We’re just beginning the hunger for it.
This is something a lot of authors weren’t thinking about five years ago, but five years from now it’ll be expected. In craft books you learn about the dénouement, that moment after the climax where everything settles. The dénouement doesn’t always have to be about glory, but now that we’re in a fourth turning, a glory dénouement is a really safe bet. Maybe add one more chapter to the end of your story. Don’t end it so quickly. In the third turning and its grim-dark sensibility, you cut it off fast and let the reader sit in the sadness and hopelessness. But now, let the glory breathe. Your readers will finish with a much more powerful emotional experience, which will boost your reviews and recommendations.
Jonathan: Right in that same line, the Star Wars prequels have this problem. The end of Episode III was hopeless, and there wasn’t enough of the birth of Luke and Leia to bring the tone back up to where Star Wars is supposed to be, which is hopeful resistance against an oppressor. You can’t just say, “Well, that’s what Episodes IV, V, and VI are for.” Those were 30 years old by the time Episode III came out. You need that hopeful experience within the film itself to keep people locked into what you’re trying to do.
Thomas: By the time they made Episode III, we were very much in the third turning culturally, so there was pressure to match the zeitgeist. If you’re writing a true classic, you don’t have to follow the zeitgeist as carefully, because a classic can appeal across all the turnings. That’s what George Lucas was attempting with Star Wars. I don’t think he pulled it off. I watched it with my kids and they find it boring. Luke’s disrespectfulness is a real turnoff for them.
Jonathan: Nobody likes Luke Skywalker as a character. He whines, he doesn’t get the girl, he’s not funny. He has this spiritual journey, but everything about him is just annoying.
Are extended epilogues back?
Thomas: A viewer asks whether we’re back to extended epilogues. I think the blanket rule that epilogues are always bad is no longer a good rule. It’s easy to write a boring epilogue if you’re not careful, but if you know what emotional experience you’re creating for the reader, an epilogue is really beneficial.
My wife was working through a mystery she was struggling with, too many characters, a lot of issues. But the very best part was the dénouement. When the puzzle was finally solved and order was restored, the book let the epilogue linger. It wasn’t just “here’s who did it” and roll the credits. That basically saved the book for her. It was the only redeeming thing she had to say about it.
Thomas: Another thing about Project Hail Mary is that there are no sermons. Nobody gets up and preaches about climate change or politics. There are people who are angry about this, saying it was a missed opportunity to use the platform. There’s an effort in Hollywood to be upset that conservatives like the film, as though the filmmakers should have done more to make it distasteful to them. I keep thinking, do you not like money? I’m starting to believe that for certain people, they really don’t care about the money. For them it’s a religious crusade, and doing the right thing in their eyes is more important than profit.
What makes the character growth in this film work?
Thomas: One of the themes I really appreciated was the Ryan Gosling character learning how to sacrifice. His growth is a growth of character, learning to become a more virtuous person. The story is told non-linearly, which is risky because it’s almost always easier to write a linear story. But it works here because you wouldn’t have liked the character at the beginning. He’s cowardly and lazy. He’s learning heroism, virtue, wisdom. He was always smart, but he gets wiser.
This is where girl-boss fatigue comes from. If a character emerges on page one practically perfect in every way, there’s no room for growth or a meaningful journey. Here we see genuine character development. Half the scenes are Ryan Gosling alone on a spaceship, and it somehow holds your attention. There’s no CGI. It’s a space movie with no green screen. The alien character is run by five puppeteers in a giant robotic rig, so all the movements Ryan Gosling sees are real. They can act off each other, and it’s so much better.
Hollywood went overboard on CGI, and this is a warning for authors. CGI for Hollywood is what AI is for authors. “We’ll fix it with AI, we’ll fix it in post.” There’s something to be said for struggling through the blocking instead of kicking everything to the machine.
I also appreciated that the film had natural diversity rather than gratuitous diversity. There’s a council with people from around the world, but it’s not artificial. The whole world is going to die because the sun is dying, so all the nations are coming together. It was refreshing to see diversity that was natural to the plot rather than random race-swapping. If you want diversity in your story, write a diverse story. Don’t sprinkle it on at the end.
The other thing I liked is that heroism is what grows, not power. The Ryan Gosling character is no more powerful at the end than at the beginning. He doesn’t get smarter. He gets wiser and more virtuous. That’s refreshing. The early Marvel movies did this well. Iron Man went through real character growth. But it’s been rare since.
How does color and emotional range apply to authors?
Thomas: The third turning in film was marked by muted colors. Two films kicked it off. O Brother, Where Art Thou? took one of the most beautiful, lush parts of America and put a faded yellow sheen over everything because the world was ugly and the characters were criminals. The Matrix came out around the same time with a green sheen over everything because none of it was real. Every film since has had some kind of color muting. When Barbie came out with saturated colors, people were stunned. Movies can be beautiful. There’s a longing for saturated color.
How does this apply to authors? It doesn’t necessarily mean your cover should have saturated colors, but emotionally you can explore the full range now. In this noble-dark era, your book can be more colorful emotionally than what you could have gotten away with 10 years ago.
What’s the takeaway for the current storytelling moment?
Jonathan: I haven’t seen Project Hail Mary yet, so I don’t have anything to offer on it specifically. But I do see a turning in filmmaking toward exploring how to be a young man again, how to be a young woman again, how to be a good person.
We got a snapshot of that when Top Gun: Maverick came out and everyone was shocked that there was no political agenda. It was just a good story about a good hero who got to do his thing again and raised another generation to follow him. It was very hopeful, and I think people took notice. Now we’re getting the harvest of movies that followed Top Gun: Maverick.
Thomas: The turning affects the whole political spectrum. You’re hearing it from us and we lean right, but all stories are going to become noble-dark over the next 10 to 20 years because that’s what audiences and readers are demanding.
Jonathan: Supernatural is trending on Amazon again. It’s consistently one of the highest-performing streaming shows wherever it lands, Netflix or Amazon Prime. It’s noble-dark and it goes through its own turnings across the series. It’s about two young men who love each other as brothers and will do anything for their family. That’s a universal concept.
Thomas: The longing for stories that show phileo love is enormous. Cozy stories show storge love. I encourage every author to read The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis. The whole cozy genre is defined by storge love. Phileo love is where the easiest money is to be made because demand is high and supply is low. This is green pasture. You’re the first one skiing down fresh powder, and there’s going to be a whole horde of people following you. It’s why The Lord of the Rings is still so resonant. Those films do phileo love extraordinarily well.
Sources:
Project Hail Mary (2026) – Box Office Mojo
Project Hail Mary Box Office: Ryan Gosling Film Scores Biggest Debut of Year – Variety
‘Project Hail Mary’ Contains Not a Single Green Screen Shot, Director Says – The Hollywood Reporter
Project Hail Mary Is Actually About Male Loneliness – Esquire
How ‘Project Hail Mary’ Answers the Call for Positive Masculinity – Aaron Renn
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