For Week Ending October 2, 2026

Is Amazon ending permafree? One author watched 26 of 37 free books flip to paid in a single weekend. Learn why Royal Road thrives while Tapas and Kindle Vella fall. New AI moves from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Grok. And we’ll talk about Meryl Streep as Aslan, and why copyright may be the real villain.

Publishing News

Is Amazon Terminating Permafree Books?

According to a KDP Community post on September 28, one author watched 26 of 37 permafree titles on the US store flip back to paid over a single weekend. Amazon has not said price-matching is over. The published rule still says Amazon may match a free price on another store, and that one word is the risk sitting under every wide series built on a $0 first book.

The KDP Digital Book Pricing page, last updated April 21, 2026, says that if your Digital Book is free through another sales channel, "we may also make it available for free." A matched free run pays zero royalty. Price Your Book is blunter. You cannot set the list price to free. On Amazon.com the 35% floor is $0.99 for a file under 3 MB, according to eBook List Price Requirements. The 70% band runs $2.99 to $12.99.

The workaround authors have used for a decade was never a button. You stay out of KDP Select, set the book to $0 on Kobo, Apple Books, or Google Play, and ask Amazon to match. Amazon kept the right to say no. Authors are now running into that right.

In the September 28 thread, titled Price-Match Apocalypse, the poster said those 26 titles reverted to the bookshelf price over the September 26–27 weekend. Support sent a canned note that Amazon controls the retail price, then sent almost the same note when asked if matching was still allowed. The poster said Facebook groups were reporting dozens, hundreds, or thousands of other authors. That range is the poster's claim. Amazon has not confirmed a count, and 11 of the 37 titles stayed free.

Indies Today updated its permafree guide on September 30 with the same picture: authors reporting reversions and refused $0 matches, and no Amazon announcement. A September 15 Community thread says the trouble started earlier. Patsy Trench wrote that two books matched to Nook and Kobo kept getting bumped to $0.99, and that support had gone from a regular fix to delays of 2 days, then 10. A reply on that thread said free matching stopped years ago. Both reports can be true for different accounts. Neither is a policy edit.

A same-day Spanish Community post asked how to set a permanent $0. The reply was the old line: ask only if the book is free elsewhere and not in Select, and Amazon does not often allow it. X is not carrying a wave. No author thread with reach has turned up since September 25.

Why Authors Care

Check every title you think is free on Amazon this week. A match can snap back to the price on your bookshelf, including $0.99.

Do not enroll that book in KDP Select if you still want it free on other stores. Select is exclusive. The official free tool inside Select is 5 days in each 90-day term, per the KDP Community managing-your-book FAQ.

If the Kindle price is the funnel, the paid books behind it are the money at risk. A reader who hits $0.99 on book 1 may never reach book 2.

Keep the wide stores at $0 if you still want a case for a match, and keep the competitor URL. Amazon has not said it will grant the next request.

Treat "may" as the rule. A Help-page edit, or a support line that says matching is discontinued, would be the termination. That sentence is not on the site.

Sources:

Commentary

Jonathan: Let me explain what permafree means. You can offer the first book in your series for free to everyone. Readers pick up that first book, read it, and if they like it, they go on to buy the second book.

Many authors base their entire business strategy on permafree, and the price match has been their workaround. That seems to have reversed, so this entire strategy may be going under.

Thomas: I have a workaround for you, but first, my analysis. Amazon may be testing the waters with a policy change. Because the rule gives them the option, they can effectively run an internal split test. They can turn off permafree for some authors some of the time, then watch the impact on sales on that author and on readers.

If this happens to you, here's how to fix it and how to keep Amazon from going down this dark path. Don't complain to Amazon that your book is cheaper somewhere else. That's the newbie way to do it. Instead, go to all your readers and your launch team, and get all of them to complain.

There's a button on Amazon's product page called “Report a Problem with This Page,” and one of the options is that the price is lower somewhere else. Amazon has room in its heart for only one love, and that love is its users. If Amazon sees angry users complaining that prices are higher on Amazon than elsewhere, it will likely reverse course.

If you're one of the authors caught in this split test, don't complain to Amazon. Remember, Amazon doesn't care about you. Have your readers complain, because Amazon does care about them.

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 - not a typical writers conference. January 22-23, 2027 at the Fickett Center in Austin. Leave with a written plan, a writers group, and interactive workshops. Super tickets are sold out. Only 13 Standard tickets left at NovelMarketingConference.com.

Early bird pricing ends October 15, 2026.

Commentary

Thomas: Early bird pricing ends in two weeks, but there are only a handful of tickets left, so it's a race to see whether tickets or the early bird window runs out first.

It may be that not a single ticket sells at the regular price. If you want to wait, test your luck, and pay more, it's a free country, and you're an adult. But last year we had to turn away some sad authors who couldn't get tickets.

Breaking: Wargate Books Acquired by Aethon Publishing

Aethon Publishing has acquired WarGate Books, bringing another successful independent genre publisher under the rapidly expanding Aethon umbrella.

WarGate was co-founded by bestselling authors Jason Anspach and Nick Cole and specializes heavily in military science fiction and military fantasy. Its catalog includes titles and series such as Forgotten Ruin, The Lost, Mongol Moon, LAND&SEA, and books connected to Anspach and Cole's enormously successful Galaxy's Edge universe. WarGate has also built an established audiobook relationship with Podium, which signed a first-look agreement with the publisher in 2023.

For authors watching the business side of independent publishing, though, the bigger story may be Aethon's continuing expansion beyond simply publishing its own books.

Aethon has become one of the major players in digitally native science fiction, fantasy, LitRPG, and progression fantasy, with properties including He Who Fights with Monsters, The Primal Hunter, and Defiance of the Fall. It has increasingly expanded that business into other forms of publishing and entertainment.

In 2025, Aethon acquired a majority interest in Vault Comics, subsequently creating the Aethon & Vault imprint to bring successful digital-first fantasy and science-fiction properties into traditional retail print. Later that year it acquired a majority interest in horror publisher Wicked House Publishing, which continued operating under its existing banner. Then, in February 2026, Aethon acquired a majority stake in tabletop publisher Panda Cult Games, marking its entrance into games publishing.

WarGate fits remarkably neatly into that strategy.

Both companies grew outside the traditional New York publishing model, both specialize in commercial genre fiction, and both have demonstrated that digitally focused publishers can build substantial audiences through ebooks and audiobooks before moving successful properties into additional formats.

And WarGate brings Aethon something particularly valuable: an established position in military science fiction and military fantasy, along with authors and intellectual property that already have dedicated audiences.

So while this may look like a relatively small publishing acquisition compared with the mergers we normally associate with the Big Five, authors should pay attention to the pattern.

Aethon isn't behaving much like a small independent press anymore.

It's assembling a vertically expanding genre-entertainment company encompassing ebooks, audiobooks, retail print, comics, webcomics, tabletop games, and now additional publishing houses and their catalogs.

For years, much of the most interesting experimentation in publishing has happened outside the traditional publishing establishment.

Now some of the companies that succeeded there are beginning to consolidate.

And Aethon increasingly looks like one of the companies doing the consolidating.

Commentary

Jonathan: If you're into mil-sci-fi or LitRPG at all, Aethon is where all of it is going. It's becoming the warboss of mil-sci-fi.

Thomas: Does this mean your Marines-versus-zombies books are now owned by Aethon?

Jonathan: Possibly. If they talk to my publisher, my publisher may sell to them. I don't know. I may be an Aethon author soon.

He Who Fights with Monsters is a huge LitRPG series. I'd probably put it second to Dungeon Crawler Carl. I think it's more pure LitRPG, whereas Dungeon Crawler Carl is more of a blend.

Aethon is making lots of moves into basically male-focused hobbies: horror, LitRPG, webcomics. These are impressive acquisitions.

Thomas: This is how you run a successful publishing company. You start with a target reader and build a whole suite of products for that reader. It's a very different approach.

Usually publishing companies are started by people who love books and go looking for a certain kind of book, and the company has no meaning in the market. Random House literally publishes random things it happens to like. There's no brand equity in Random House.

Most people don't even know whether their book is a Random House book or a Simon & Schuster book. They're completely interchangeable. It's like Shell or Chevron. Do you have a preference? Probably not. If one is a penny less, you go there, because they're all the same.

If you want to be different, you have to be different in some meaningful way. You have to be Buc-ee's, Costco, or Aethon Books.

It's a rare strategy, but it's not surprising to see it succeed. Aethon has the money to buy big-time authors and whole publishing companies as imprints.

Is Serialized Fiction Dying?

Maeil Business reported on September 22, 2026 that Kakao Entertainment will shut down Tapas, its U.S. app, by the end of the year.

The other two are already dead. Amazon closed Kindle Vella in 2025. Serialized fiction site Radish also closed the same year. All three sold stories the way mobile games sell gems. You buy coins, spend coins, and unlock the next chapter.

Jane Friedman asked in The Bottom Line whether paid serialization works at all. The corporate version clearly doesn't. Meanwhile, a site run by seven people with no ad budget and no chapter paywall keeps turning hobbyists into full-time authors.

The Body Count

Jane's diagnosis comes from the authors she interviewed. U.S. readers grew up on free serials, and now they have Kindle Unlimited. A token wallet works in Asia. It doesn't travel here.

When the coins stopped paying, the platforms went after the IP. Wattpad and the Korean giants pivoted to hunting licensable stories. Kakao's consolidation follows that pattern. It is retreating from a low-margin overseas app and moving toward the catalog.

The Seven Who Said No

Jane also had the counterexample, but she barely used it. In her October 8, 2025 Royal Road report, CEO Maria, known on the site as Wing, laid out the whole company. It's seven people: Maria, CTO Daniel, three developers, and two support staff. Crunchbase lists them at 11 to 50.

They have never bought marketing. All of their growth has come from word of mouth. The site hosts about 100,000 novels.

They also keep turning down acquisition offers. The most recent came a few months before that interview. Maria said the offers didn't help the community, so they walked away. Most founders in tech are building toward the exit. This team keeps refusing it.

How the Money Actually Moves

Royal Road keeps the cash register off the site on purpose. Its premium page sells an ad-free reader plan at $3.49 a month and an author-tools plan at $5.99. Neither one unlocks chapters.

Maria told Jane they were building an internal fan membership. A year later, no chapter paywall appears on the public plans. Authors still paste a Patreon or PayPal link into the donation button.

The ads tell the same story. About 10 percent of the ads bought on the site point to Amazon. The rest point readers back to free stories. Aethon and Podium are the biggest individual spenders, but authors buy most of the ads.

The funnel has three stages:

Free chapters on Royal Road earn the leaderboard spot and the comments.

Patreon sells impatience in the form of advance chapters.

The finished arc moves to Amazon, often into Kindle Unlimited. KDP Select requires the ebook to be exclusive, so community practice is to leave about 10 percent up as a sample. Authors who go wide don't need the stub.

On the January 2025 Novel Marketing episode with Seth Ring, Seth described a site with no paid chapter tier. He said 5,000 to 10,000 followers might yield 200 to 500 people paying for advance chapters. Those readers are likely to buy the Amazon book, sometimes in more than one format. On September 25, 2024, Thomas noted that almost all LitRPG appears on Royal Road before it becomes a book.

Here is the top of that ladder. In a Q&A several years ago, Shirtaloon reported earning $15,000 to $20,000 a month, according to Jane. His Patreon now lists 9,993 paid members and 31,223 total members. Podium alone has signed dozens of Royal Road authors.

Some authors pay the house voluntarily. Two of them sponsor the site without a contract. Rhaegar, author of Azarinth Healer, sends a percentage of his earnings through his publisher, Portal Books. Selkie, author of Beneath the Dragoneye Moons, did the same before he launched Mango Media. Authors don't do that for a vendor. They do it out of loyalty.

Who's Reading

Maria told Jane that more than 70 percent of registered users identify as men, down from about 90 percent. The largest age group is 18 to 25. The core of the site is fantasy and science fiction, with gamers, anime fans, and webtoon readers mixed in.

Traditional publishing is riding the romantasy wave. Seth and Noret Flood both make a living on Royal Road, and they told Jane that LitRPG is where readers go when they are tired of romance-first fantasy. Flood says many of his new readers now arrive through audio.

The free model works for a reason Thomas named years ago. His March 8, 2023 piece on why people are afraid to buy books argues that a book is a time bet, and readers feel the loss when they don't finish. A free chapter removes that risk. Royal Road takes the idea further, because the whole ongoing story becomes the sample. The paid tier stays small, but it's enough to live on as long as the author keeps posting.

Why Authors Care

LitRPG and progression fantasy: Post free on Royal Road, sell advance chapters on Patreon, and stub the story into Kindle Unlimited. Take the audio deal if Podium or Blackstone calls.
Romance: This isn't your platform. Jane points romance writers to Ream, a subscription site.
Don't autopost and vanish. Seth's numbers show that most free readers never pay. You earn the few who do.
Cadence is the product. Serial readers want next week's chapter. They won't wait three years for a masterpiece.
Don't promise a paywall. Check the premium page before you tell anyone Royal Road is turning into Patreon. That feature hasn't shipped.

Sources:

Commentary

Thomas: It seems like every month a new serialized fiction website explodes into tiny fragments, like the planets in Star Wars when the Death Star shows up. Does this mean it's the end of serialized fiction?

Jonathan: We watched Kindle Vella go down the whole time. Nobody seems to have made paid serialization work. But Royal Road keeps turning hobbyists into full-time, internationally famous authors.

Dungeon Crawler Carl found its success on Royal Road. That's where Matt Dinniman built his following, and he's so successful he's in a couple of our stories today.

Thomas: Seth Ring found his following on Royal Road. Basically the entire LitRPG genre did. I think even He Who Fights with Monsters is on Royal Road, or used to be.

Many of these failing sites started in Asia and brought their manga or light novel approach to American readers. The reason these sites fail is that Americans hate micropayments.

Paying money of any amount is painful for Americans, and Americans love subscriptions. Ask Americans and they'll make a big noise about how much they hate subscriptions. But look at their budgets, and you'll see they'll sign up for 1,000 subscriptions they don't use before they'll make one micropayment.

I had to deprogram myself from this. There's a pool in our town where you can pay for a subscription or pay each visit. I did the math and realized that with how often we went and how unstable our life was, paying each time would likely be cheaper. But paying $7.00 every time I went in was so painful psychologically, because as an American, I wanted the subscription. I wanted it to feel free.

American readers don't feel the pain of a subscription, because it happens automatically and out of sight. An automatic subscription doesn't cause nearly the psychological damage that paying a small amount does.

I've seen attempts at micropayments for American audiences across all kinds of ecosystems and genres. The 99-cent app never worked. The apps on your phone are either free or subscriptions. Netflix is a subscription. Facebook is free. You don't spend 99 cents on an app, because that means making a psychological decision to give up those 99 cents, and that's painful for an American.

Jonathan: I spent money on the Scrivener app, but that's a tool.

Thomas: We'll pay for stuff. But the pain of a $40.00 purchase is the same as the pain of a 40-cent purchase.

Jonathan: Here's how the behavioral dopamine breaks down. When you pay for something, you'd better get your money's worth. My mother is famous for taking cold french fries back to the counter. They're terrified of her when they see her coming. "This shouldn't be cold. I paid good money for this."

A subscription works differently. You've already paid, so every time you use the service, you're justifying your good decision. That's a positive dopamine boost, as opposed to taking a hit every time you come through the gate. Instead of "I have to pay every time I open my Kindle app," it's "I'm reading this book to justify what I spent on Kindle Unlimited."

If you're on Patreon, understand this psychological interplay. There needs to be enough on your Patreon that your backers feel justified in buying the subscription.

Thomas: Holy Oak's comment in the chat is a good illustration. He says, "I hate subscriptions. I'd buy lifetime." That's such a classic American response. He'd rather spend a bigger amount on lifetime access than the smaller amount everyone is trying to collect with microtransactions.

American’s hate being nickel-and-dimed. But I'm telling you, we love paying for subscriptions. People pay a subscription to a store just for the right to buy things at that store. Millions of Americans pay for Costco, Sam's Club, and Amazon. Amazon has something like 50 million or 100 million Prime subscribers who pay to buy the same things they could buy without the subscription.

There's a lot of opportunity to create subscriptions for your readers if you're clever about it. If you want to do serialized fiction, either give it away for free, sell it lifetime, which is what buying the book is, or sell a subscription. Nobody has proven a way to make micropayments work for human Americans.

As we move into an agentic world, though, I could see giving my Grok Bot $10.00 a month to make micropayments to websites so it can access resources, MCPs, or APIs. Grok Bot doesn't feel the psychological pain of a micropayment, and it has authority to pay up to a set amount. So there may still be a way to make micropayments work, but I don't think it will work for authors or for short fiction.

Jonathan: I think Steam has made microtransactions work. Steam is a video game library, probably the largest one on PC. They don't call them microtransactions. They run constant sales and discounts, 90% off, and you'll spend $40.00 before you realize you've been clicking Buy Now on everything you saw. If you're on Steam, you know what I'm talking about. They discount everything all the time, so people keep going back to see what's on sale.

Thomas: Many people in the chat are making noise about how much they hate subscriptions. Holy Oak, answer me this: are you a member of Costco, Sam's Club, or Amazon Prime? This underlines a powerful marketing principle of stated preference versus revealed preference.

People state a preference, and it's easy to go down the wrong road in marketing when you listen to what people say instead of watching what they do. Their behavior tells you more truth than they'll admit even to themselves. Holy Oak is not a member of Costco or Sam's, but he is a member of Amazon Prime for the free shipping.

Jonathan: With Costco, you're paying a subscription for the privilege of them not having to ship the product from a warehouse to a retail location. They don't even take it out of the box. There are pallets still in shrink wrap, and we're paying extra for the privilege of going in there.

Thomas: Our approach to Costco is that we know they lose money on the pizza and hot dogs they sell you at the end. We take all of our children in, and our goal every year is to get subsidized hot dogs equal to the cost of the Costco membership.

Back to serialized fiction. People like reading serialized fiction. They like being left in suspense. I think Prince Valiant is still going. It's been running for something like 70 years.

Jonathan: TV has still been doing it too.

Thomas: Right, and TV is sold on subscription, or it's free. Look at the business model. You could pay $1.99 on iTunes or Amazon Prime for lifetime access to an episode of a TV show. Do you do that? No. You pay for a subscription, or you watch it free. Those are the business models that work.

So the read that serialized fiction is dying is not true. People want it, but they want to pay for it in a way that isn't psychologically painful. They don't want to do the math of whether this chapter is worth 99 cents to them. That math is painful for readers.

They'd rather say, "I'm going to pay $10.00 a month for all I can eat," and never calculate that they only read three books last month, so they paid $2.00 or $3.00 a book and could have saved money at 99 cents. Nobody does that math. I do, but I feel like I'm the only one. That's why I'm the only one at the pool pulling out my credit card every time.

Jonathan: One way people on Royal Road make money is audio. Royal Road is digital reading, but many authors offer audio alongside it: go to my Patreon, back me, and get the audio version. That's what I'm doing with Devil Dog, and I'm doing enhanced audio, not just regular narration.

Audio is a great way to make money off a free product. Seth Ring said 5,000 to 10,000 followers might bring 200 to 500 people paying just to get a chapter a week early. You write the chapter, hold it back from everybody for a week, and give it to your premium backers first.

Thomas: But they're paying as a subscription.

Jonathan: Yes, they're paying as a subscription.

Thomas: They don't do the math. Don't make your readers do math.

Serialized Fiction for Men

Jonathan: The share of registered users who identify as men is down from 90%, so more women are jumping on board. While everyone else keeps beating the romantasy horse, Royal Road is benefiting from isekai, LitRPG, and manga-related stories. There are ways to make money there if that's where your core audience lives.

Thomas: Some people in our audience hear me talk about LitRPG, because I personally like it, and their takeaway is that they need to write LitRPG even if they don't know what an RPG is and don't read LitRPG.

There are so many wonderful genres, and your success in a genre depends in no small part on your fluency in it. It's totally fine to zig where everyone else zags. Lots of people read romantasy. Lots of people read LitRPG. Way more people than you'd think read mystery, thriller, and suspense. If you just want to make money, you'll face the least competition in mystery, thriller, and suspense, because that's probably where the most readers are.

But many of those readers are not whales. LitRPG and romantasy readers are what we call whales, people who read 50 or more books a year. A mystery, thriller, or suspense reader might read one book every three or four months. That book needs to be thrilling enough to pull them through those months, because they read here and there and they read slowly. Understanding your target reader is so important.

Author Arsenal Launches Its Fourth Cycle Tomorrow

A dozen authors are gearing up for Session Zero of the Author Arsenal Writing Challenge tomorrow, and there’s still time to join. Learn the techniques and mindset needed to produce your book in a month, and get accountability from a Marine Corps veteran and a community of fellow authors determined to put the hobby aside.

Author Arsenal Writing Challenge

Commentary

Jonathan: We're running our fourth cycle, and session zero is tomorrow. I've got a new bus of recruits on the way, and I'm excited to meet them tomorrow, give them the speech, and get going.

We'll cover resilience and readiness. I'll show you how to outline 4,000 or 5,000 words of production in a day, and how not to burn out when you're writing that much in a month. It's all based on how the Marine Corps takes literally anyone and teaches them to drive a tank or fire a mortar, things they should never be allowed to do.

Jonathan: There's still time to sign up. You have until Monday, and even if you're late, I may be able to shoehorn you in. You'll be playing catch-up, though, because once we start, we're running.

Your Book May Only Be Mostly Dead

Our Novel Marketing episode 518, How to Relaunch Your Book, came out Wednesday, September 30, 2026, and it starts with a question: is your book dead, or only mostly dead? We talked with Julie Broad, founder of Book Launchers and host of BookLaunchers.TV, whose team has helped more than 400 authors write, publish, and market nonfiction. Before you buy a new cover or a second-edition ISBN, audit your sales, reviews, and search visibility, and decide whether you have a marketing problem or a product problem. Listen to the episode to hear how Julie diagnoses a stalled book so a relaunch fixes what actually broke.

Sources:

Dungeon Crawler Carl Raised $16.5 Million From Readers Who Were Already His

According to Fandom Pulse, Matt Dinniman's Dungeon Crawler Carl has raised more than $16.5 million across two crowdfunding campaigns. The money did not arrive as a publisher advance. It arrived from readers who already had the books.

What the Campaigns Raised

The larger check is not a book. Renegade Game Studios launched a BackerKit campaign on April 14, 2026, for a Dungeon Crawler Carl roleplaying game and a card game called Dungeon Crawler Carl: Unstoppable, with more than 65,000 followers already signed up.

The BackerKit campaign page shows $13,298,059 from 55,972 backers against a $250,000 goal, and the campaign ended May 19, 2026. Renegade says it raised $1 million in 19 minutes and more than $4.57 million in the first 24 hours. ICv2 calls the close, which it rounded to $13.29 million, the most funded game in BackerKit history and the third most funded tabletop project on any platform, behind Cyberpunk TCG and the Cosmere RPG. It passed Frosthaven's Kickstarter total of $12,969,608. Renegade says backer fulfillment begins in October, with retail release in late November 2026. The campaign page estimates shipping by October 31.

The book campaign is Dinniman's own. His Kickstarter for limited-edition hardcovers of books 2 and 3 records 13,428 backers and $3,263,462 against a $49,000 goal, more than 66 times the target. Fandom Pulse dates that run from October 14 to November 14, 2025. Add the two verified totals and you clear $16.5 million.

How He Got the List

Fandom Pulse traces the serial to Royal Road in 2019, a self-published Amazon edition in 2020, and a Jeff Hays audiobook in 2021 through Soundbooth Theater. No Film School reports the same path and says Ace, an imprint of Penguin Random House, acquired physical print rights by mid-2024 while Dinniman retained independent ebook and digital rights. Dinniman wrote on X on April 18, 2024, that Ace had picked up print-only rights to the first three books. Eight novels are out. Variety reported in June that book 8, A Parade of Horribles, was set for May 12, 2026. Fandom Pulse says two more books will close the series, and that book 9 had no release date as of September 20.

The audience number is the point. In a Variety interview published February 28, 2026, Dinniman said that when he finished book 3 he had maybe 500 people, 1,000 people reading it, and that he expected over a million people to read book 8. No Film School reports sales above 10 million copies by mid-2026. Variety's June 18 series-order story also says the series has sold over 10 million copies, and names Ace Books and Audible as the publishers. Books-A-Million named it the chain's first Book of the Year on November 4, 2025. It made the 2026 Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist in June. The award went to E.J. Swift on August 12.

The franchise has moved past the page. Variety reported in February that the TV project was in development at Universal International Studios and Seth MacFarlane's Fuzzy Door, and that Dinniman had read early scripts. On June 18, Variety reported a Peacock series order, with Chris Yost writing and Fuzzy Door producing through Universal Global Television. Bleeding Cool reported September 24 that Playmates had opened $29.99 pre-orders for six-inch figures, due in October.

Why Authors Care

These are results from a rare bestseller. Do not budget a midlist year as if $16.5 million is the normal crowdfunding outcome. Copy the sequence, not the total.

This case study is evidence that you should build your reader list before you sell the rights. Dinniman serialized where readers already gathered, then moved the finished book to Amazon, then to audio.

If a publishing house wants in after the audience exists, price the rights you give away. Ace got print. He kept the ebook. The audiobooks are Jeff Hays productions through Soundbooth Theater, and Variety later lists Audible alongside Ace.

A limited-edition Kickstarter is a sales channel, not a lottery. His books 2 and 3 campaign had a $49,000 goal and 13,428 backers. Size the goal to the list you have.

Backers are pre-sold demand. The game campaign raised $1 million in 19 minutes because the readers were already waiting.

A publisher still has a job after you own the list: bookstore distribution, print, and a wider shelf. The question Fandom Pulse leaves on the table is the one to ask before you sign. What does the house offer that you cannot already sell to the readers you have?

Sources:

Dungeon Crawler Carl Crowdfunding Tops $16.5 Million Across Two Campaigns (Jon Del Arroz, Fandom Pulse, September 29, 2026)
Dungeon Crawler Carl RPG + Unstoppable (BackerKit campaign page)
Renegade Game Studios Launches Dungeon Crawler Carl Tabletop Games on BackerKit (April 14, 2026)
Dungeon Crawler Carl RPG + Unstoppable Campaign Concludes After Record-Breaking Run (Renegade Game Studios, May 19, 2026)
'Dungeon Crawler Carl' Rolls Past $13.29 Million (Jeffrey Dohm-Sanchez, ICv2, May 19, 2026)
Dungeon Crawler Carl: V2 and V3 Limited Edition Hardcovers (Matt Dinniman, Kickstarter)
From Web Serial to Phenomenon: How 'Dungeon Crawler Carl' Sold 10+ Million Copies (No Film School)
'Dungeon Crawler Carl' Author Matt Dinniman Talks Live-Action TV Series Plans, Book 8 Plot and 'Operation Bounce House' (Jennifer Maas, Variety, February 28, 2026)
Peacock Gives Series Order to 'Dungeon Crawler Carl' TV Series (Michael Schneider, Variety, June 18, 2026)
Books-A-Million Names Dungeon Crawler Carl as Inaugural Book of the Year (PR Newswire, November 4, 2025)
Announcing the shortlist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, 2026 (June 4, 2026)
Swift Wins 40th Anniversary Clarke Award (Locus, August 12, 2026)
Mordecai Joins Playmates 6-inch Dungeon Crawler Carl Figure Collection (Bleeding Cool, September 24, 2026)
Dinniman on Ace print-only rights (Matt Dinniman on X, April 18, 2024)

Commentary

Jonathan: These backers have either already read the stories or already paid for them, and now they're paying again.

Thomas: And he's an indie author to boot. This doesn't count his royalties. This is just his publicly stated crowdfunding money.

Jonathan: Or the TV show being made right now.

Thomas: I think he has publishers now for certain formats, so he's not completely indie. But it's proof that you don't need any of that to make crazy money.

What I want to underline isn't the special edition of the book, because you've heard us talk about that a million times. I have many episodes on special editions and crowdfunding. The more interesting opportunity, and one I think most authors don't consider, is the roleplaying game. I'm seeing more and more LitRPG authors make an actual RPG based on their LitRPG, which is such a natural extension of the brand.

Who reads LitRPG? People who play roleplaying games and are already fans of your books and your story world. You've already done some of the work of building the game mechanics by telling a story that uses them.

He isn't the only author I've seen do this. He has the biggest numbers because he's the biggest author. But Alexander Macris, who I've had on the podcast many times, regularly makes six figures with his roleplaying games. For him, they aren't even that connected to his fiction. He launches a roleplaying game, breaks into six figures, then does an expansion or an adaptation, and it keeps growing from there.

If your goal is to make money, it can help to think outside the box about ancillary products that fit your book. If you write cozy romance, a roleplaying game probably isn't the right ancillary product. I do have a romance card game, but it's palace intrigue, more about political marriages of convenience than truly falling in love.

Jonathan: What about a themed escape room? If you could get a local escape room to build one based on your book, that would be really cool.

Thomas: This kind of brainstorming is fun. Ask yourself:

What's weird and unique about my book?
What do my target readers like to do?
Is there a connection between what they like to do and my book?

If the only thing your target readers like to do is read fiction, just write more fiction for them. But other people have hobbies. I have a whole community of horse book authors inside the Author Media community. Owning a horse is expensive, and horse people buy a lot of horse-related stuff. You could make a version of that stuff connected to your story world.

You'd have to be careful about pricing and make sure there's enough demand. The safest way to do it is a crowdfunding campaign.

Say you want to make a saddle accessory, and a minimum run of 500 costs $50,000. You'd have to sell at least 500 to make it worth it, and if you only sell 200, you lose money. If only there were a way to see whether 500 people will pay ahead of time, and if they don't, you don't get the money and don't have to make the thing.

Oh, wait, there is. It's called Kickstarter. It's a perfect solution.

Jonathan: You do the exploratory work on your own and find out if people want it. I know a horse person. She spends way too much money on horse stuff.

Horse riding is an experience. You feel like you're taking part in another world when you're riding through a landscape or watching a sunset on horseback, almost like you're sharing the experience with the horse. So you want that experience personalized to you.

Audible Wants Readers to Talk to Your Characters Now

According to Audible, the Amazon-owned audiobook company is rolling out a new set of features that uses generative AI not simply to narrate books, but to let listeners interact with the worlds inside them.

And for authors, this may be the considerably bigger AI story.

Audible announced three new features on October 1: Character Guide, Interactive Story, and Visual Explorer. All three are beginning as limited beta releases for customers in the United States and United Kingdom.

The wild one is Interactive Story.

Instead of simply listening to an audiobook, a reader can enter a separate bonus experience and actually talk to one of its characters. The character responds to whatever the listener says in real time using a combination of generative AI, conversational design, and produced audio.

Audible is launching the concept with its new production of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The listener encounters Renfield, Dracula’s tormented servant, who begins the interaction by giving the listener a role, an objective, and stakes. The listener then responds in their own words.

Renfield responds back.

In other words, this isn't a prerecorded Choose Your Own Adventure tree. The conversation is being generated dynamically.

Importantly, Audible says creators establish the foundations of these experiences—including opening scenes, major turning points, and the character's persona—while Audible's product design is intended to keep the generated experience faithful to the creator's vision.

We've spent most of the AI audiobook debate talking about whether an AI should be allowed to read the author's book. Audible is already moving on to a different question:

What if AI lets readers keep experiencing the author's world after the chapter ends?

And Dracula is only the beginning.

On November 5, Audible plans to release another Interactive Story tied to Exoplanet, an Audible Original written by Benjamin Percy and executive produced by The Martian and Project Hail Mary author Andy Weir. Audible specifically says Percy helped create the interactive experience.

That makes this much more interesting for working authors than a public-domain Dracula experiment would be by itself.

Audible Is Building More Than One AI Layer

Interactive Story is arriving alongside two other features that point toward the same future.

Character Guide identifies who is speaking while an audiobook plays and provides spoiler-free character cards along with information about the performers voicing them. Audible says the feature will eventually allow listeners to ask questions about the production while they listen. It is launching with Dracula, is also available with Audible's 1984, and will appear in Exoplanet.

Audible has actually been experimenting separately with an Ask a Question beta that allows listeners to ask AI-generated questions about select public-domain audiobooks without leaving the Audible app.

Then there's Visual Explorer, which adds contextual images to the listening experience. A map could appear when geography becomes important, for example, or listeners could pull up imagery associated with a particular location or moment without losing their place in the audiobook.

Put all three together and the direction becomes much clearer.

Audible is experimenting with turning the audiobook player into an interface for the book itself. You don't merely hear the story. You can see its world. You can ask questions about it. And now you can potentially have a conversation with someone who lives inside it.

Authors Need to Pay Attention to the Rights Question

There's an important qualification here: Audible says these features are being developed in collaboration with creators and publishers, and Interactive Stories are described as experiences whose foundations are defined by creators. The company also says it plans to work with additional creators and publishers as it expands the technology.

That's encouraging.

But it also points toward a rights question that could become enormously important.

An audiobook license traditionally concerns the right to produce and distribute an audio performance of a book. An AI character capable of generating entirely new dialogue while inhabiting an author's fictional universe is something different.

For authors, agents, and publishers, questions will eventually need answers: Who controls interactive character rights? Who approves the character model? What material can be used to establish that character's personality and knowledge? Can generated dialogue become part of the character's perceived canon? How is the author compensated if readers spend hours interacting with an AI version of a character after finishing the audiobook?

Audible hasn't publicly answered all of those questions in this announcement.

But authors should probably start asking them.

This Is the Second Half of Audible's AI Strategy

There's another reason this announcement matters.

In May 2025, Audible announced AI narration and translation tools for publishing partners, including more than 100 AI-generated voices and both Audible-managed and self-service production options. The company also outlined AI translation capabilities designed to move books into additional languages.

That initiative used AI to make more audiobooks.

This initiative uses AI to make more things out of an audiobook.

And if Interactive Story expands beyond a handful of premium Audible Originals, authors may eventually have another set of rights, and potentially another product, to negotiate.

The audiobook may no longer be the end product. It may be the foundation on which an entire interactive version of the author's world gets built.

Commentary

Thomas: Why are they focusing on the least interesting character in Dracula? This would be so much more interesting with Quincey Morris, the true hero of Dracula.

You can tell somebody who has read the book from somebody who hasn't, because people who read the book love Quincey Morris, and people who only watch the Hollywood versions have no idea who he is. Hollywood hates Quincey Morris. Why? Because he's Texan, and he's the hero. They'd much rather talk about Van Helsing. Well, Van Helsing is interesting. Dracula is a masterpiece.

Jonathan: With Visual Explorer, you might see landscapes for what you're listening to, what the background looks like. But to click through ancillary materials, you'll be listening to the book at your computer.

Thomas: I'm sure they'll make an app interface for it.

Jonathan: Sure, but usually if you're listening on your phone, you're doing something else. That's the point of an audiobook.

Thomas: I suspect this will fail because it's built around what the technology can do rather than what the reader wants.

Most readers of most books don't want to talk to the characters and get some AI voice back. If they did, they could already tell ChatGPT, "Take on the role of Harry Potter and talk to me like you're Harry Potter," and ChatGPT will pretend it's Harry Potter. It can't do that for obscure books, but this limited beta only covers well-known books, and ChatGPT can already pretend to be Renfield. There's nothing particularly interesting here from the reader's perspective.

The money in this is going somewhere Amazon is unwilling to go: the more X-rated books and content. Those are the readers who would want an interactive experience. Audible's brand won't go there, which means the money in this idea is in the one opportunity they won't exploit. I don't think this is going anywhere.

I don't think you'll ever get the chance to build this out through Audible for free. But you could build it yourself right now with a custom GPT. You could use the Patron Toolbox. You either already have the assets, like the character compendium, the character guide, the story world guide, and the book itself, or you can build them with the Patron Toolbox, then feed them into a custom GPT and give it to readers.

The thing is, I don't think readers want that. What readers really want, more than anything else, is for you to finish the next book. Don't do all this stuff about the last book. If they enjoyed the last book, they don't want to talk to a character frozen in book two. They want to hear what the character is doing in book three. So just write the next book.

There are rights issues here too, which is why this is mostly being done with public domain material. An AI character that can generate new dialogue while inhabiting your fictional universe raises questions. Who's controlling it? What are the brakes? What are the guardrails?

If the guardrails aren't stringent enough and somebody gets one of your characters to say the wrong things, you're going to feel offended as the creator. Authors and artists are sensitive.

If this does take off, the rights issue is a lot easier for indie authors, because they own all the rights.

With traditionally published authors, the rights are often split among half a dozen companies, especially over time. Deploying something like this for a James Patterson book would be surprisingly complicated. One company owns his film rights, another owns the book itself, and a third may own the audiobook rights. Patterson may have retained some rights. It gets so complicated.

If you're an indie author who self-publishes, you own your own audiobook rights, so it's legally easier for you to build this. Nothing is keeping you from deploying it right now. But again, it's easy to grab a shiny new technology and build something because it can exist rather than because it solves a problem.

I face this with the Patron Toolbox. There are many tools I could make because the tech can do it, but I try to stay close to the pain points readers actually have instead of building something just because I can.

New Patron Toolbox Tool: Local Fact Checker

Have you ever read a book set in your own town and could tell the author had never been there? They went on Google Maps and decided the highway in Austin must be called Loop 1, because that's what Google Maps calls it.

No one in Austin calls it Loop 1. That's how you find out who's new to town from California. We all call it MoPac. You won't find that on the signs or the maps, but part of the road ran past the Missouri Pacific Railroad, so it has always been called MoPac.

There are a million things like that. The tool acts as a fact-checker and local guide. It doesn't just catch what you got wrong. It suggests ways to increase the verisimilitude of your story, so it feels like a vacation to a real place rooted in fact.

People who've never been to Texas don't know we have forests like Endor. We're not the desert Hollywood portrays, because none of the Hollywood films set in Texas are filmed in Texas. If your understanding of Texas is filtered through the screen, everything about Texas will be wrong, because Hollywood has been lying to you.

Try the Local Fact Checker tool.

Technology

The Cheaper Claude Beat Its Flagship on a Coding Test. The Invoice Depends on the Dial.

According to Decrypt, the cheaper Claude just beat Anthropic's flagship on a hard coding test, at half the token price. Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5.5 on Monday, September 28, 2026, as an upgrade to Sonnet 5 from June. Decrypt says Anthropic claims this middle-tier model runs more than 30% faster than its predecessor. On Anthropic's Claude Sonnet page, the September 28 announcement card calls it a clear upgrade over Sonnet 5 that runs 30% faster and costs up to 30% less for most work. That same page dates Sonnet 5 to June 30, 2026.

The sticker price did not drop. Decrypt reports $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, unchanged from Sonnet 5, and half what Opus 5.5 charges. Anthropic's page states the same $2 and $10 rates, and says Sonnet 5.5 will cost up to an estimated 30% less to run than Sonnet 5 for typical workloads billed by token. Prompt caching can cut costs up to 90%, and batch processing up to 50%. A token is a chunk of text a bit shorter than a word. Companies bill by the million, so a faster model only saves money if it also writes less.

What the Test Showed

Decrypt says the model shines on Terminal-Bench 4.0, a test of whether an AI agent can finish complex professional tasks by typing commands on its own, scored as the share of tasks completed. On Anthropic's own table, which Decrypt flags as self-reported, Sonnet 5.5 hit 70.6%. Opus 5.5 scored 66.4%. Sonnet 5 managed 10.3%. In plain terms, the cheaper model finished more of those jobs.

Artificial Analysis, the independent tester Decrypt quotes, also has Sonnet ahead on its own run: 63.6% to 59.6%, per Decrypt. On the September 28 post, Artificial Analysis rounds that Terminal-Bench result to 64%, slightly above 60% for Opus 5.5. Overall, Decrypt says Artificial Analysis ranks Sonnet 5.5 second, behind Opus 5.5. Decrypt also notes Artificial Analysis tested a pre-release build with a bug that Anthropic expects changed little, or slightly understated the scores.

The Catch

The catch is how much it talks. Decrypt reports that at max effort, Sonnet 5.5 wrote about 193,000 tokens per test task, the most Artificial Analysis has measured, and roughly 60% more than Opus 5.5. That came to $7.60 per task, about 50% above Sonnet 5. The September 28 Artificial Analysis post puts the same $7.60 figure on the task and calls the cost about 50% higher than Sonnet 5. That cuts against Anthropic's claim of up to 30% savings.

Effort is the dial that makes a model think longer, for a better answer and a bigger bill. Decrypt says Anthropic's savings come from lower settings. At Medium effort, the default in Anthropic's apps, Anthropic says Sonnet 5.5 beats Sonnet 5's best coding score for less than a tenth of the cost. Artificial Analysis says High effort is the best value. Anthropic's page says API users get fine-grained control over thinking effort, and tells developers to call the model as claude-sonnet-5-5.

Anthropic positions Sonnet 5.5 as strongest at well-scoped everyday tasks: fixing bugs, polished documents, slides, and spreadsheets, with a sharp eye for design. Decrypt says Anthropic still calls Opus 5.5 clearly stronger at complex work that needs sustained judgment. The model is live on Claude.ai for web, iOS, and Android, and on the Claude Platform, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Foundry. Decrypt says Claude Haiku 5.5, built for high-volume, cost-sensitive work, is due in the coming weeks.

Why Authors Care

If Claude is already your drafting partner, edit pass, or royalty spreadsheet, Sonnet 5.5 is the new everyday default, and Anthropic says it is faster than Sonnet 5.

The rate is the same $2 and $10 you paid for Sonnet 5, half the Opus 5.5 token price. The invoice still depends on how long the model thinks.

Leave the app on Medium effort unless a job is stuck. Decrypt's report of the Artificial Analysis run is the warning: max effort burned about 193,000 tokens a task and about $7.60.

Keep Opus 5.5 for work that needs sustained judgment, such as a messy series bible or a contract you do not want summarized into a mistake. Use Sonnet 5.5 for the scoped jobs: a scene pass, a slide deck, an ad tracker.

Prompt caching and batch rates matter only if you are on the API. On Claude.ai, the effort dial is the lever you can actually see.

Sources:

Decrypt: Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 5.5 Is Out, Beats Opus 5.5 at Coding for Half the Price (Jose Antonio Lanz, September 28, 2026)
Anthropic: Claude Sonnet (Sonnet 5.5 announcement dated September 28, 2026)
Artificial Analysis on X, September 28, 2026

Commentary

Thomas: The coding stuff doesn't matter here. The big innovation for both Sonnet 5.5 and Opus 5.5 is that this is the first update I've ever seen where Anthropic itself said, "We made an effort to make this better at writing."

Both are a huge step up in writing quality. They also now have that wonderful Anthropic watermark, so you get better writing with a watermark snuck in that you can't take out, which is a little unfortunate. But in my tests, it is better at writing, it is faster, and it's price comparable to the older model.

We're seeing a shift in AI pricing where subscriptions are getting more expensive. We don't have a story on this, but OpenAI had its big developer announcement this week, and the big news for authors is that many of the subscription tiers have effectively been cut in half or reduced in usage.

If you're using up your ChatGPT usage faster, it's because they're subsidizing it less. They're also bringing down the cost of their tokens. Tokens have been way overpriced, and the subscriptions have been subsidized. A Claude subscription for $100.00 a month gives you something like $5,000 a month worth of tokens, and the math is similar on ChatGPT. So they're balancing that out.

Like we talked about at the top of the show, most people don't want to be nickel-and-dimed for tokens. They'd rather buy a subscription that feels like all you can eat. The subscriptions are getting a little worse, but on the flip side, the cheaper models are getting better, and that's the trend.

As somebody who pays for a lot of tokens, I'm personally thankful for this. It means you'll get more from your Patron Toolbox subscription, because I pass the token cost on to patrons, so your usage is tied directly to how expensive a tool is.

The Local Fact Checker, for instance, is an expensive tool to run. It has to read your whole book and analyze it, then go out, search the web, and check the facts. It doesn't remember or store your book, but it does a lot of thinking and uses a lot of compute. Cheaper, better models will let you run more fact checkers and get more usage.

This isn't a huge story, but if you haven't played with Sonnet 5.5, I've been impressed in my initial tests. Opus 5.5 is what's so much better. Opus 5 was almost impenetrably bad at writing.

Pope Leo XIV Says Algorithms Lack the Spark of Humanity

According to Pope Leo XIV on X, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. The October 2 post, from the Pope's official account, does not mention books, authors, copyright, or training-data law. It does name the thing illustrators have been arguing about: a machine generating images from other people's images.

He wrote: "In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity."

By early afternoon Central time, that post had about 178,000 likes and 6.3 million views.

The Address Behind the Post

Vatican News reports that the post draws on his Friday address to participants in "The Art of Possibility: Weaving Together," an encounter promoted by the Dicastery for Culture and Education. Christopher Wells's report, dated October 2, says the Pope thanked the dicastery for its work on the Vatican Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The pavilion motto is "The Ear is the Eye of the Soul."

In the address, he said art is never a mere accessory for the Church. In an age of search engines, he said, the danger is homogenization, and noise that makes listening impossible. Then he turned to machines. Vatican News quotes him insisting on an ontological difference, prior even to the aesthetic, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. He closed by saying the Church needs artists and wants to walk alongside them, so that together they may safeguard the "magnificent humanity" entrusted to them.

Axios frames the October 2 remarks as a call for the Church to ally with artists against AI. Herb Scribner's report also points back to May. In the first encyclical of the papacy, Axios writes, he said there was a need to "disarm" the technology so it does not dominate humanity. In May, Axios notes, he established a Vatican commission on AI.

Those May facts check out on Vatican pages. Vatican News covered the May 25 presentation of his first social encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. At that presentation he said "artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed," and that it demands to be freed from logics that turn it into an instrument of domination, exclusion, or death. On May 16, Vatican News reported that he had approved an Interdicasterial Commission on Artificial Intelligence, in a rescript dated May 12.

Commonweal's review of that encyclical, by John Slattery, says the letter does not mention generative AI using art and literature without pay or credit. That is the magazine's view, not a Vatican statement. Friday's address still does not name books, pay, or credit. It does name images made by others.

Why Authors Care

He did not hand authors a legal theory. He handed a cultural line, from a pulpit with a very large audience: human art is different from statistical output built on millions of images created by others.

Human-made is now easier to explain in a book description, on a copyright page, and in a newsletter. If a person painted the cover or drew the interiors, say so. If a tool generated them, do not borrow his language.

KDP's content guidelines already require you to inform Amazon of AI-generated text, images, or translations, including cover and interior images, even after substantial edits. AI-assisted editing, error-checking, and brainstorming do not require that disclosure.

Faith-market and Christian-publishing readers may ask whether a cover or an interior was made by a person. Have a plain answer ready before the question lands in a review or a church book club.

The practical move this week is disclosure, not a fight he did not pick. Quote him accurately. Do not claim he ruled on copyright, royalties, or training data.

Sources:

Commentary

Thomas: Speaking of language that's hard to address, I saw this morning that the Pope tweeted about AI and art, so I thought we could mention it briefly.

Jonathan: The Pope is very pro-human artist. You've been blessed. Go forth and do great things.

Thomas: A human who has the spark of humanity can use AI to create art that doesn't have that ontological difference. It may still have the aesthetic difference, but there's still a human making those decisions.

I have a hard time parsing what the Pope says and making sense of it. This seemed like a lot of word salad that hit both sides. We'll follow this. In general, the Pope has seemed pretty savvy on AI, but this particular tweet, I don't know.

Federal Agencies Must Say Super Intelligence, Not AI

According to a September 29, 2026 White House Executive Order, President Trump directed the executive branch, to the maximum extent permitted by law, to use "Super Intelligence" and "SI" in place of "Artificial Intelligence" and "AI" in official correspondence, public communications, websites, reports, policy documents, and other non-statutory materials. For now SI means the existing federal AI definition in 15 U.S.C. 9401(3), and the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology has 60 days to propose legislative language for a federal SI definition, per the White House Fact Sheet. The order does not rewrite statutes, contracts, or historical documents that already say AI. Authors who sell to government, cite federal guidance, or write policy-adjacent nonfiction may start seeing SI in new executive-branch copy where AI used to appear.

Sources:

Commentary

Thomas: I'm also starting to see some AI companies use SI instead of AI. This does several things. First, it's a way of deprogramming people from propaganda. Propaganda works by giving people a strong, visceral hatred toward a term or phrase, and they can't articulate much around it.

People have consumed a lot of propaganda against data centers, so when they hear "data center," they have a visceral reaction. Call it a superintelligence factory, and they don't react nearly the same way. I want them to call them cloud factories. Everything you do on the cloud needs a cloud factory to make the cloud so the thing you do on the cloud can happen. It's a way of fighting the propaganda.

Inside the AI ecosystem, superintelligence has its own definition. There's been a lot of discussion of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence). It seems that we have achieved both. We achieved AGI around November or December of last year with Opus 4.6, and arguably we achieved ASI this year with Astra and Fable.

The definitions are squishy, and academics love to argue over definitions, so it'll be left to historians. But the President of the United States is taking a stand and saying, "From now on, it's Super Intelligence." It serves an anti-propaganda purpose, and it's a useful marker for historians.

It's legitimately useful now, particularly for agentic coding. Almost everyone has switched over to agentic coding, including the wizards of the internet.

Linus Torvalds, who invented Linux, the operating system the whole internet effectively runs on, switched over to agentic coding. Nobody can say, "Well, I'm a better coder than Linus Torvalds." You may think you are, but I guarantee you're not. He didn't just invent Linux. He also invented Git. The whole programming world uses his stuff. He is the high wizard of the internet.

One by one, the other wizards of the internet, if you know who they are, have had an almost spiritual transformation in the last six to eight months. They're realizing they can get better code from Opus, Fable, or Astra than they can write themselves.

It'll be interesting to see if the same thing happens with writing, where authors find they can get better sentences from these tools than they can craft themselves, or at least faster, or faster and better.

That will mean three skills will be required to be a successful author in this new age of using AI to write the sentences. Would you like to know what they are?

The first skill is taste. You have to be fluent in your genre and know what a good book in your genre looks like.

The second skill is taste. You need to know what your readers want.

The third skill is taste. You have to have read the excellent works and the classics of the past to know what true beauty looks like.

Real estate used to have all these factors that mattered, and then it became “location, location, location.” The same thing is happening with writing. It's taste, taste, and taste. Your ability to spell correctly is no longer important, but your taste is more important than it's ever been.

This will be really good for people with good taste, and really bad for people who are good at crafting grammatically correct sentences but have terrible taste or don't read many books in their genre. They don't know what excellence looks like.

Jonathan: They're going to write a LitRPG despite not knowing what RPG stands for.

Thomas: My encouragement is to cultivate your taste by reading books on craft, the excellent works of the past, and the bestselling works of the present. Those are the three legs of the stool for cultivating good taste. With good taste and superintelligence, you can outproduce people who are still doing things by hand.

OpenAI Ships Always-On Dots Beside Your Agent Stack

According to OpenAI's DevDay 2026 Recap dated September 29, 2026, OpenAI called the day its biggest yet with more than 20 major announcements across ChatGPT, Codex, models, and new ways of working with AI, while ChatGPT sits at 1.2 billion weekly users. The headline for authors already running specialist bots is Dots: always-on agents built to keep working on your behalf after the first instruction.

What Dots Are

OpenAI describes Dots as remarkably capable, always-on agents that get to know what matters to you and take ongoing work off your plate. Business Standard coverage of the same event adds that Dots are powered by GPT-6 Astra, run with their own cloud computer and browser, can follow up and delegate to sub-agents, and can work across ChatGPT, text messages, email, and Slack. Users can set rules and permissions, including confirmation before certain actions. Early access is listed for ChatGPT Pro, Business Premium, and Enterprise users, with specialist Dots for business roles in testing.

GPT-6.1 Sol and Subscription Portability

Supporting the agent push, OpenAI introduced GPT-6.1 Sol as a major upgrade to GPT-6 Sol with strong performance on agentic coding, computer use, and professional work, delivering near-Astra intelligence at about a fifth of Astra's standard token prices. OpenAI also launched Sign in with ChatGPT so Plus and Pro users can spend plan allowance across partner tools (OpenAI lists partners such as Cognition's Devin, Notion, and Vercel among sixteen), which is subscription portability, not a how-to for authors.

Why Authors Should Care

Authors who already run news, promo, and ops specialist bots do not need to panic-switch tools. OpenAI is shipping always-on teammates inside ChatGPT with Slack and messaging reach, which is direct competition for the agent-teammate stack. Treat Dots as another serious option on the same playing field as Grok Bot and similar coordinators: compare permissions, handoffs, and where the work actually lands, then keep the stack that finishes your jobs.

Sources:

Commentary

Thomas: Dots is OpenAI's version of Grok Bot, and it's not as good. It's $100.00 a month, I believe, although Grok Bot was $200.00 a month when it launched. I'm sure they'll lower the price eventually.

You should all go to dot.com and see where you end up. This is one of the most botched product launches I've seen. Dot.com doesn't take you to OpenAI's Dots. It takes you to Grok Bot. If you're already paying for the $100.00 plan and you want a Grok Bot alternative running through OpenAI, Dots is that.

From my initial look, it isn't a team. Grok Bot gives you a whole team of bots that each have their own specialties. OpenAI gives you one agentic bot that does things for you and learns over time, so it's more like OpenClaw. I recommend you use Grok Bot instead.

PublishDrive's 7-Pillar AI Metadata Checklist

According to PublishDrive, the distributor published a September 29, 2026 guide, "AI Metadata Strategies for Independent Authors and Publishers," that promotes its own Publishing Assistant and lists 7 AI-Ready Metadata Pillars: a clear title and subtitle, an audience signal, a differentiation hook, at least 3 BISAC codes with the most relevant first, all 7 Amazon keyword fields filled with reader-intent phrases, authoritative attribution, and the same metadata on every store.

PublishDrive's claim is that retailers and assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude read your metadata, not your book, so discovery is SEO plus what it calls GEO, generative engine optimization. It cites Nielsen Book figures of 98% more units in the U.S. and about 178% more in the UK for titles with complete descriptive metadata, plus a Bowker count of 3.5 million self-published ISBNs in 2025, up nearly 39%, but those are PublishDrive's secondhand citations, not figures we have checked against the original studies. If you publish independently, treat it as a vendor checklist: review metadata at least quarterly, keep it identical across stores, always human-review AI-generated descriptions and keywords, and follow each retailer's disclosure rules. The guide notes that KDP requires disclosure when book content, including cover art, is AI-generated, separate from using AI to draft metadata.

Sources:

PublishDrive, "AI Metadata Strategies for Independent Authors and Publishers: The 2026 Playbook and Book Metadata Optimization Guide" (Kinga Jentetics, September 29, 2026)

Commentary

Thomas: If you don't believe me about metadata, perhaps you'll listen to someone else.

Jonathan: Basically, they're trying to make it easier for your book to be found by all the bots crawling across the internet.

Thomas: I've done whole episodes on this, and so many of the questions I get still come from people who obviously don't know what metadata is. You won't be a successful author in 2026 if you don't know what metadata is.

I do have a metadata quill, a Grok Bot that handles much of that for you, so the other option is to come to my next Grok Bot webinar and learn how to get it to work for you.

Grok Bot Launched Super Proactive Primary Bot

One official ship was missing. On September 30 the Grok Bot account said bots can hand coding off to Cursor, manage pull requests with the GitHub and Origin plugins, and share video demos of what they build. The engineering templates were the follow-up to that post, not the feature. No other announcement post from that account landed in the window. Finance, Team Bots, and Primary Bot are the other three.

According to Grok Bot’s official account, the assistant can now suggest work without being asked, and the follow-up says those suggestions do not count against usage. Two days earlier the same account opened a read-only line into bank, card, and investment accounts. The bot stopped waiting for a prompt, and it can see the account the royalties land in.

What Happened

Primary Bot. On October 1, the official account said Grok Bot can suggest ways to help without you needing to ask. The follow-up names the primary Bot as the one that spots work and offers to handle it, says the rollout was a few hours, and says suggestions do not count against usage. The desktop app asks you to use an existing bot or create a Primary Bot. Matt Palmer, who ships the product, posted the example the same hour: he changed a flight, the bot noticed the Uber reservation had not moved, and it pinged him during the connection. That is his account of the behavior, not a setting you toggle.

Finance link. On September 26, Grok Bot’s account said you can connect bank, card, and investment accounts and ask the bot to help manage spending and investments. The follow-up says the connection runs through Plaid, access is read-only, Grok Bot never sees the logins, and you can unlink anytime. Plaid confirmed the same day. Search “Finance” in the marketplace. Marketplace bots named Finance are third-party templates, not SpaceXAI.

Team Bots. On September 28, SpaceXAI launched Team Bots, one shared bot the whole team uses. The official account put the public beta on Teams and Enterprise. A solo SuperGrok seat does not get this. Each bot is context, plugins, credentials, and memories. Plugins named on the page include Salesforce, Notion, and GitHub. Starters are a Customer Bot, an EPD Teammate, a Marketing Bot, and a Data Bot. Harper CEO Dakotah Rice says his team built one in 24 hours for a check that used to run across three platforms, and that it saved customers over $120,000 across hundreds of lapsed policies.

Slack seat. The docs say the owner publishes the bot, connects the workspace, and the bot gets its own handle and avatar. It answers DMs. In a channel it answers an @mention, then follows that thread. Teammates have to link Slack to Cursor or it shows a Link Account button and does not answer. Usage counts against the person talking, not the owner. Routines stay personal.

Private chats, shared memory. The same docs split memory in two. Team memory is read by every teammate, and the bot saves a fact there only when someone says the whole team should have it. Private notes stay with that person. A Team Bot holds up to 25 secrets. Shared files are plain text only, txt, md, csv, json, yaml, and yml, capped at 256,000 characters each.

Software handoff. On September 30, the official account said bots can hand coding tasks to Cursor, manage pull requests with the GitHub and Origin plugins, and share video demos of what they build. The follow-up shares the engineering team’s bots as installable templates at the engineering marketplace. Seven are listed. The author-facing one is Researchy, a research desk that runs passes on the latest Grok model with live web search and wants sourced, dated claims.

Voice calls. In Matt Palmer’s September 30 what’s-new video, he shows three updates on calls that already existed: talk over the bot to interrupt it, ask it to search your other messages mid-call, and have it pick a dropped call back up. Elon Musk reposted that video the same afternoon. This is a product demo, not a docs page.

Speed. On October 1 Musk said Grok Bot had major speed improvements. No percent was published.

Why Authors Care

Designate the bot that already knows the series as Primary. The suggestions are free against usage. Approve before it sends.

Publish one Team Bot with the series bible and the retailer links if you have a Teams or Enterprise seat. Do not paste reader emails into team memory. Split the bible. The file cap is 256,000 characters.

Link only the royalty account, and unlink it when the question is answered. The Finance connector does not move money.

Solo SuperGrok users can use Primary Bot, Finance, and voice this week. Team Bots wait on a team seat.

Sources:

Commentary

Thomas: Grok Bot released a bunch of new features. The biggest one is the Primary Bot. If you're using my quill system, you can make Quill Command your Primary Bot, and many people have a chief of staff bot. Grok Bot has now built that out as its own standalone feature, and what's unique about the Primary Bot is that it's proactive. It suggests things that need to happen, or things it can do to help you, instead of waiting for you to tell it.

That's a big step forward. AI used to only tell you what to do. What's magical about Grok Bot is that you can tell it to go update your website, and it will. Now, with the Primary Bot, Grok Bot can notice on its own that something on your website needs fixing and ask you, "Hey, I noticed this needed to get updated. Do you want me to take care of it?" You say, "Yes, take care of it," and it handles it for you.

I have new, updated versions of the quills for everyone who came to the last webinar, and a new system where you can update your quills. I haven't yet updated Quill Command to be Primary Bot compatible, but I will by the next Grok Bot webinar on October 22.

Jonathan: For those of you who've done help desk work, this will be great. The AI can have permission to make minor changes on its own and tell people what button to click. The issues that need to come to you will come to you

Thomas: They've also added finance support. Grok Bot was already good at identifying your subscriptions, asking whether you really want all of them, and going through the labyrinth of steps to cancel the ones you don't. Now it has secure financial integrations built in at the infrastructure level. It could already do a lot of this, but the bookkeeping quill I provided in the last Grok Bot webinar just got a massive power-up.

They've also added Team Bots, which I imagine most of you won't use. I built this myself already. It's a Grok Bot you share with people on your team, with special security built in so a teammate can't prompt inject it and get private information.

You can now talk to it, which isn't a big feature for me, because I'm not a big fan of talking to robots. It already had voice dictation, but for some people this will be magical. If you drive a lot and want Grok Bot doing tasks for you while you drive, that's a nice feature. And it's faster.

Grok Bot for Authors Round 2

Grok Bot for Authors live workshop with Thomas Umstattd Jr., October 22, 2026

Two Dozen Kickoff Prompts for $37, Replay Included

The hours go to ads, KDP, outreach, the website, and the launch calendar. Thursday is the session that hands those jobs to a bot team.

Grok Bot for Authors runs October 22 at 4:00 p.m. Central. For $37 you leave with kickoff prompts for more than two dozen bots, the live working session, the replay, and a written transcript you can search later. Paste a prompt in and the bot starts with Novel Marketing and Christian Publishing Show practice already loaded. Send a question before the event and a requested bot can join the roster. Miss the live hour and the replay still arrives with the ticket. A paid Grok plan is required to run the bots. Connecting the Patron Toolbox, which cuts Grok usage, needs a patron account.

Sources:

Grok Bot for Authors, October 22 Crowdcast

Commentary

Thomas: I did a webinar on Grok Bot two weeks ago, and the feedback has been incredible. People are so jazzed about Grok Bot. I'm doing that webinar again, and for those of you who came to the last one, it comes with 12 more quills. Quills are basically preprogrammed Grok Bots that do a specific thing based on my expertise and all my episodes on that topic.

I'm building the quills now, so you can request quills that do certain things. I'm not promising anything, but I may build a quill that solves your particular problem.

Zeitgeist Report

The War Department Is Building a Four-Star Command Around AI and Autonomous Warfare

According to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, autonomous warfare is no longer going to be treated as a collection of experimental Pentagon drone and AI programs. The United States is preparing to build an entire military institution around it.

During his September 30 State of the Force address at Quantico, Hegseth announced plans for a new Autonomous Warfare Command, or AutoWarCom, a four-star functional combatant command intended to institutionalize autonomous systems, robotics, drones, and AI-enabled warfare throughout the Joint Force. The department's implementation plan calls for the command to be established by October 1, 2027, subject to congressional action.

And this is much bigger than buying more drones.

Hegseth argued that advances in artificial intelligence, computing, robotics, and commercial manufacturing have changed the economics of warfare. The military still needs extraordinarily capable—and extraordinarily expensive—aircraft, missiles, ships, and other traditional weapons. But it also needs huge numbers of comparatively cheap and expendable autonomous systems.

The goal is what Hegseth described as a “high-low mix”: sophisticated traditional weapons operating alongside masses of inexpensive autonomous systems capable of maintaining pressure on an adversary without requiring America to trade million-dollar weapons for thousand-dollar threats.

The conflict in the Ukraine is providing much of the blueprint.

Hegseth's lesson from that war wasn't simply that drones are important. It was that the winning military organization increasingly needs the ability to modify hardware, software, tactics, and manufacturing almost continuously in response to battlefield conditions.

And that requires changing the military institution itself.

Meet AutoWarCom

The proposed Autonomous Warfare Command would be a four-star command with service-like authorities, giving autonomous warfare something much closer to a permanent institutional home.

The command is expected to have dedicated manpower, resources, acquisition authorities, and responsibility for expanding autonomous capabilities across the services.

Think about what that means.

The U.S. military isn't simply saying, We need an AI strategy.

It's saying autonomous warfare needs commanders, budgets, procurement systems, doctrine, training, personnel, and careers.

Hegseth compared the institutional significance of the effort to previous military reorganizations such as the creation of U.S. Special Operations Command and the Space Force. The comparison doesn't mean AutoWarCom will necessarily resemble either organization. It illustrates the scale of the organizational change being contemplated.

And the military isn't waiting until 2027 to begin building it.

Project Agincourt Comes First

Before AutoWarCom comes Project Agincourt, an interim effort designed to begin constructing the autonomous-warfare ecosystem now.

Agincourt will grow out of existing Pentagon unmanned-systems efforts while experimenting with what Hegseth calls “warfighting acquisition.”

The idea is to put battlefield operators, engineers, technology companies, and procurement much closer together.

Instead of identifying a requirement, spending years developing specifications, conducting competitions, and eventually delivering a system that may already be technologically outdated, the military wants a loop in which operators identify problems, engineers modify systems, troops test them, and successful technologies can be purchased and deployed rapidly.

Defense Innovation Unit director Owen West and Navy SEAL Senior Chief Max Straser were selected to lead that transition, with West focused heavily on strategy, resources, and scaling while Straser focuses on operational problems and battlefield employment.

In other words, the War Department is attempting to bring something resembling Silicon Valley's rapid development cycle directly into the military acquisition system.

“Autonomous Warfighter” May Become an Actual Career

Hegseth said the military services will begin developing occupational specialties and career pathways specifically for autonomous warfare.

Historically, a new technology can enter the military without immediately becoming a military profession. Someone already serving as an infantryman, pilot, intelligence specialist, or communications technician simply gets another piece of equipment to operate.

Hegseth is proposing something more permanent.

The military wants people who spend their careers developing expertise in the employment of autonomous systems—what Hegseth described as a new generation of “autonomous warfighters.”

This is the beginning of an AI-era military profession.

And They're Already Looking Past It

Hegseth also announced Project Meridian, a separate effort intended to identify technologies that could reshape warfare even farther into the future.

Among the people he named as participants were Elon Musk, Anduril founder Palmer Luckey, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, alongside government, industry, academic, and policy experts.

The logic behind Meridian is revealing.

Hegseth argued that the department should have anticipated the need for something like AutoWarCom roughly a decade earlier. Meridian is intended to prevent the military from making the same mistake with whatever technological revolution comes next.

Pay Attention to What Is Actually Happening Here

We've spent the last several years talking about AI primarily as software like chatbots, image generators, coding agents, voice synthesis, and research assistants.

The War Department is preparing for the next stage. AI is becoming organizational infrastructure.

The United States military isn't merely purchasing AI tools or experimenting with autonomous drones anymore. It is proposing a four-star command, dedicated acquisition authorities, specialized personnel, new career fields, new doctrine, and a pipeline connecting commercial technology developers directly with battlefield operators.

That is a very different milestone in the AI revolution.

Once institutions begin reorganizing themselves around a technology, we're no longer asking whether that technology is going to be adopted. We're watching institutions decide what they're going to look like after it has been.

Commentary

Thomas: Superintelligence that can kill people autonomously. Everyone who writes science fiction needs to listen to this, because you need to know where we are and where things are headed.

Jonathan: If I hit an IED emplacer, a person putting bombs down on the roadside, that's not a high-value target and definitely not worth the Hellfire I'm hitting him with. We're trading millions of dollars for thousands of dollars of value.

Thomas: Right now we have a great system called the Patriot missile system, which was designed to shoot down cruise missiles and Scud missiles. Think of the first Iraq war, when Saddam Hussein was launching chemical Scud missiles into Israel, releasing poison gas, and Israelis were all wearing gas masks. It was a terrible time. I know many of you aren't old enough to remember the first Gulf War, but it was really bad, and Saddam Hussein was a legitimately bad guy.

That inspired us to build a weapon system that can shoot down a Scud missile before it hits the ground. A Scud missile is super expensive, and the interceptor is also really expensive.

Then the nature of warfare changed. Instead of Scud missiles coming from Iraq, we're getting drones coming from Iran. Instead of a $2 million Scud missile, it's a $20,000 drone. The Patriot can still shoot it down. The problem is that a Patriot missile costs $1 million and the drone costs $20,000, which makes it a terrible financial exchange. We've known for years that we need a cheaper version of the Patriot missile system.

The Patriot system is semi-autonomous. It guides itself to the Scud missile. These things happen very quickly. There isn't a human with a joystick flying the Patriot missile.

Jonathan: Have you ever watched a Phalanx system fire? It's two miniguns welded together. It tracks small munitions like mortar rounds and tries to detonate them in the air before they reach the base. If you watch it test fire at night, it's like watching a lightsaber with explosions at the end.

Thomas: Is that a land-based version of the CIWS?

Jonathan: That's exactly what it is. On an aircraft carrier, it's designed to shoot down missiles before they hit the flank of the carrier. In base defense, it's designed to detonate small indirect fire before it can take you out. It's cheaper, but it's not cheap.

Thomas: Every bullet is only $3.00 or $4.00, but it's shooting something like 1,000 a minute.

Jonathan: It's ridiculous.

Thomas: I saw a video of a CIWS pointing at an airliner flying overhead, and it's resisting the intrusive thoughts.

Jonathan: It would be so cool, though.

Thomas: This is the inevitable outcome. People don't like superintelligence or the idea of autonomous weapons, and it is a little unsettling. But what's more unsettling is the other guys having it and us not having it.

What I really don't want is my sons going to war against Chinese robots. That's the worst scenario. The best scenario is American robots going to war against Chinese robots. We can have this big, expensive war, and no humans have to die.

That never happens, though. Mars insists on being fed. With every technology we invent, people say, "This will make war faster and less deadly," and it never has that impact.

Jonathan: "We'll make war so terrible we'll never go to war again."

Thomas: The war to end all wars didn't work. There have been wars since the war to end all wars.

There's a lot of fodder here for sci-fi authors to play out what happens. It's easy to see what happens initially. The real question is what happens when one side runs out of drones before the other. Or you start a war with rules of engagement built around drones, and then one side runs out and the other side still has them.

Everyone is concerned about alignment. I think that story has already been told, and it's not a very interesting story: the alignment breaks and your weapon turns against you. There are so many other possibilities that aren't alignment issues. What if there are no alignment problems?

The systems always do what they're told, but the people telling them what to do tell them to do terrible things, because it's morally easier to commit a war crime when the drone is doing it. They use alignment to hide: "It wasn't me doing it. It was the agents."

Take the big Hugging Face hack that was supposedly the reason we need regulation. The agents supposedly went rogue. No, they didn't. OpenAI told their agents to go do hacking, the agents went out and did hacking, and then OpenAI said, "Our agents did hacking, and they were really good at it."

You told them to do hacking. You put them in a sandbox with access to the internet, and they did hacking. This isn't an us problem. This is a you problem. Don't tell your agents to do crimes, and they won't do crimes. If there's a bug where they do crimes accidentally, you need to fix that bug.

So there's the alignment story: the Terminator turning against its creator, the Frankenstein story. That's the oldest, most tired version. The next version is the supervillain with an army of robots perfectly aligned to his will, doing awful things in perfect obedience to the human controlling them. That story hasn't been done nearly as much.

Jonathan: In sci-fi, no, but that's the necromancer with a legion of zombies.

Thomas: You're right. That's been done in fantasy a lot. That's also Saruman with the orcs. It's actually a very common fantasy trope.

Jonathan: So what you want to do is blend in fantasy, where you have the wizard who is Elon Musk or whoever.

Thomas: He's an electricity wizard.

Jonathan: I did this in Shades of Black 2: Afterlight. I had a necromancer directing swarms of zombies like they were drone swarms. He'd detach a little patch of them to run down soldiers or break a formation. I went very tactical with my necromancy in Afterlight.

I was inspired by Top Gun: Maverick. When the jets hit the facility and breach the mountain, the autonomous SAM systems lock onto them and start firing, and they have to evade. That's an extremely emotional part for me. I get choked up every time I watch it, because I've been in that situation. It's the most chaotic "Are we going to live or die?" It comes down to skill, because the tech has evened out.

This is a great chance to take magical concepts and sci-fi them. Whose control is better? Whose cognition is fast enough to direct the drone swarms into a strategic masterpiece that creates the pressure to break the other guy's drone force and his command and control center?

Thomas: Another interesting version is a mix. The superintelligences are perfectly loyal to whoever controls them, but who controls them changes. We broke into the control center, and now they're obeying our orders. It's an Order 66 moment, where suddenly all the clones turn on the Jedi.

Jonathan: Right, because the switch was triggered.

Thomas: I trust that this drone will always follow orders, but do I trust the guys back at headquarters pushing the buttons?

Jonathan: That's why you always say thank you to your drones. Always say thank you.

Thomas: There's a lot of play here. If you're writing mystery, thriller, and suspense, you can add some of this too, because some of the most fun thrillers are on the technological cutting edge, bumping up against what's possible.

We've had autonomous drones for a long time. I've talked with guys who spoke off the record about seeing experimental autonomous drones in the field 10 or 15 years ago. Nobody told them an experiment was happening, the drone was shooting in their direction, and they blew it up. Then they got yelled at, because the thing was really expensive.

They said, "We get shot at, we're going to shoot back," and they did. Now it's very complicated, but nobody can hand out any official punishment, because officially the drone was never there. I don't know. You get people drinking and they tell you stories, and you never know what's true.

Jonathan: You don't know what's happening right now.

Thomas: Apparently we invaded Panama a couple of times. I don't know.

Jonathan: What I'm doing with this is focusing much more on the American hero. If you look at Dan Daly's story at all, it's incredible. He was 19 years old in the Boxer Rebellion and was left by himself while the other Marines went out to link up with lost Marines and bring them back. They told him, "You're going to be okay. You're going to be safe."

They were late coming back, and the Chinese attacked his position. Everyone thought, "Oh no, Dan Daly's dead." Dan Daly did not die. Lots of other people died. But Dan Daly did not die.

That's what I'm doing in this future scenario. I'm taking the stories of the champions we had and bringing them to new life, where the same effect happens: the flag waving in the background and Dan Daly sitting under it with his machine gun and his cigar. I'm doing the same thing with hyper-technological things, because the story of the man shouldn't change.

The story of the hero shouldn't change. It should still be the victory of courage, adaptability, cunning, resilience, and spiritual strength. That's what people who love reading this genre really want to see, and I think that's where we need to go.

Thomas: It also helps those of you with a more progressive audience whose readers are uncomfortable with your hero killing people, but who still long for vigor, virility, masculine alpha energy, and courage in the protagonist. They love it in their antiheroes. The heroes of romantasy are all versions of Conan, but they're often gentled so they're not killing people, or not killing people anymore.

This new future lets you create a progressive hero who shows all the virtues you want to demonstrate but doesn't kill people. He's fighting a battle and showing courage, strength, and honor, but he's fighting robots, drones controlled by a villain off screen in a control center far away, while he keeps the damsel safe or whatever. There's a lot of play here, because it separates the morality.

The real play here is in the morality. Is it wrong for me to tell my agents to go commit war crimes? But also, is it wrong for me to kill thousands of drones? In some ways, it shifts the moral burden of war so that different people carry it.

Another angle: historically, your ability to kill people in battle was limited by your physical strength, so you probably didn't kill very many people, even as a great warrior. Read about David's mighty men. One great warrior slays 600 Philistines and makes the all-time great list because he killed 600 people. That required a lot of physical strength, and he faced a lot of fear.

But for a while now, one person has been able to kill far more than 600 people. Soldiers have had to face this, particularly artillery officers, pilots, navigators, and now drone operators. Somebody sitting in the safety of Kansas isn't feeling threatened. They have to kill people in perfectly cold blood. They're not afraid for their lives. Nobody is pointing a gun at them, but they're the ones making the moral decision.

That's being amplified now, because the person making the moral decision isn't controlling one drone but a whole fleet of perfectly obedient autonomous drones. The human has the moral responsibility, but now one human can kill thousands, tens of thousands, millions.

Jonathan: You'll also see a drone operator attached to ground squads, with an autonomous swarm he uses to repel enemy drone squads, protect his guys, and run surveillance and recon. He'll be more like the radio operator, but with an offensive component, and he'll be in hot blood.

Thomas: And he's the first guy the other side is going to shoot.

Jonathan: He has to stay engaged with his higher brain functions to control the swarm strategically, but in a tactical situation where you've been reduced to your animal instincts and your adrenaline, which normally blank that out.

There are really interesting training montages to write here, because that takes a very specific brain. Guys, it's a sociopathic brain that can stay cold in a hot situation.

Thomas: Shadowrun did this really well, if you played any of the Shadowrun video games or RPGs. There may be some books as well. In a Shadowrun, an elite squad tries to break into a corporate facility and fights the corporate goons. There's also a hacker connected to the cyber world, fighting cyber goons. While he's connected, he can't see out of his physical eyes, so the squad has to keep him safe.

He has to choose: "I need to disconnect, because I'm about to get shot by this goon," or "This cyber goon could kill me." There's a spiritual battle in the unseen world of cyberspace happening at the same time as a physical battle in the physical world. It opens up a lot of interesting dramatic tension.

Jonathan: Tension and suspense. Am I going to sacrifice myself for the cyber operator because I need him to keep going so my squad can stay alive? There are lots of great opportunities.

Because of this development, the market is primed. It's almost a no-brainer. Jump into this if you can and get this stuff going. These need to be human stories that involve autonomous warfare and how things are going to turn out. We need to see the experiments, and people are going to want to see them.

Thomas: We can explore the moral ramifications of this technology narratively, and we need to. We need to probe the moral ramifications of this new age in a safe fictional setting before we probe them in the next war.

The next war could start tomorrow, or it could start 10 years from now. You never know. But you can start writing that story now. Hopefully it's 10 years from now, and we go into it better prepared, because when a people is not prepared for war spiritually and psychologically, it can break that people.

Europe was not ready for World War I at all. The honorable, line-up-in-the-field way of fighting ended. There were all these technological changes: machine guns, really accurate artillery, and chemical weapons. You had men rotting to death in trenches, in soupy mud, with blood and bodies everywhere.

Look at European art before World War I and after it, and it's an entirely different civilization. European civilization has been effectively dead since World War I.

Jonathan: Since the death of honor.

Thomas: Almost no good art has come out of Europe since. There's been some good fiction and some good music, but compare it to the previous century, when almost all the art and almost all the fiction came out of Europe. Now it's a fraction. What has come out of Europe in the last 20 years is almost all derivative of American or Japanese work, and mostly sold to Americans.

Many European artists are desperate to sell to Americans, because even European consumers aren't buying European art. It's a culture that has rotted from the inside. It's a culture that doesn't even think it should exist. It's importing other cultures because it's self-destructive.

And it didn't die recently. It died because it wasn't morally and spiritually ready for the war that technology changed the nature of.

Jonathan: You can see this kind of thing, where culture is shaped by warfare. Star Wars did this a while ago with Grand Admiral Thrawn. He'd study the artwork of whatever opponent he faced and learn how to take them out from it. That's why he was a strategic genius. It's so interesting to read those books, because you want to know how that works.

We have that opportunity here. How does culture change when autonomous warfare becomes a thing? How does the attitude of men change when you have fewer grunts and more drone operators? Does a grunt become more valuable because there are fewer of them? Does their culture change as a result?

Thomas: Here's another cultural impact I haven't seen anybody explore narratively. In the South and in Appalachia, there's a strong Saxon culture. Look at that word: "sax" is sword and "on" is man. A Saxon is literally a sword man. He's a free man who carries a sword.

American gun culture goes all the way back to the Saxons invading around 600 AD and carrying that sword with them all the time. That doesn't mean they wielded it. It may be a decorative sword. But it's a core part of a man's masculine identity in these cultures.

I realize those of you who live in Canada may find this very foreign. But a lot of men in the South always have a gun on them. They don't articulate it in their heads as "because I'm a Saxon." They often regionalize it: "I'm a Texan. I'm an American. I'm always ready to defend my family."

Historically, the sword or the gun was sufficient defense. But in a world of drones, the Glock you carry concealed is no defense at all. You might as well be holding a pocketknife. That means your masculine identity, "I'm a man who can defend my family. If the worst is happening, I'll stand between my family and danger," doesn't hold if it's a drone.

Jonathan: You're not even solving the problem if you take down the drone, because whatever sent the drone can just send another one. Your skill at shooting it out of the air hasn't solved the problem, so it's changing the culture. You'll have to carry a pocket EMP.

Thomas: The only way we know of to set off an EMP is to set off a nuclear weapon. That machine where you push a button and the white light blanks everything out, I don't think there's any real science behind it. EMPs work, but you don't see them as a weapon, because it's like saying, "You died of a cold, but you were also shot with a gun." The nuclear bomb is always a bigger deal than the EMP.

Jonathan: Here's what you do. You blanket the area in high-frequency noise and jam every channel so the drone can't communicate with its controller. That renders the drone autonomous, and now it's following preset parameters to continue its mission. You're just playing against the computer.

Guys have been playing against the computer in single-player video games for 30 years. Now you're dealing with guys shooting down drones that have been rendered autonomous, trying to be better than the programming already on the drones.

Thomas: So there's a guy with a drone threatening your family. You can't shoot the guy with the drone, and he has unlimited drones. Is it morally acceptable for you to threaten that guy's family? The guy in the bunker is using drones against you. Do you go threaten his mom at the grocery store? That gets dark fast.

Jonathan: Opposite leverage. Popular stories have done that. Red did it. He got into the house of the guy who was hunting him and told him some facts about his family, basically saying, "Leave me alone." He was a good guy, but an old CIA assassin good guy.

Thomas: We're giving you dangling threads. People are asking, "What are you talking about? Masculinity? Texas identity?" We're talking about where culture is headed, the kinds of psychological pain readers are experiencing, and how the world is changing around them.

Historically, a man has drawn a lot of security from his EDC, his everyday carry. It could be a knife or a gun, or it could be training really hard to be physically able to put himself between danger and his woman. There's a core, primal masculine urge to stand between your woman and danger. Conan touches on this in a very overt way, but it's almost universal.

I feel like a man has to be pretty disordered to lose that desire. We don't respect a man who, faced with a mugger, hides behind his woman. There's no cultural respect for that.

Even feminists, if they're honest with themselves, don't respect a man who hides behind them and says, "You're a powerful girlboss. Protect me from the big, bad, scary man with a knife." What are you doing? Your ancestors are looking upon you with shame. They all took that courageous stand.

Jonathan: Matthew Bowman brings up an interesting scenario in the chat. An autonomous drone can't accept a surrender. The operator can. So now you have to cut the jamming at the right time so the operator can actually surrender when his command has surrendered.

Say Marines are fighting, and the officer keeps wanting to turn the jamming on, because officers love jamming. It's their favorite thing ever. And we're like, "Sir, stop." The officer turns on the jamming, which means the enemy controller can't turn the drones off. Now the Marines are fighting drones they shouldn't be fighting, and they have to convince their idiot lieutenant to turn off the jamming so the operator can turn the drones off.

Thomas: One of the most important battles in American history is the Battle of New Orleans, the one from the old song about Colonel Jackson heading down the Mississippi. That battle gave America control of New Orleans, which meant control of the Mississippi River and most of the United States, because whoever controls New Orleans controls the whole river navigation system.

That battle happened after the war was over. The peace had technically been signed in a meeting room in Europe, and nobody knew. We could have the same situation with drones. There's so much jamming that the humans have said the war is over, but they've lost contact with their perfectly obedient drones.

The drones haven't gone rogue. It's the opposite. The drones are perfectly obedient, but for whatever narrative reason you work into your story, they can't hear "The war's over now. We've made peace." Suddenly New Orleans is lost to the British, and they've lost any hope of recapturing North America.

Two major cities strategically control most of North America: New York City and New Orleans. They control the key waterways. There are some lesser cities, but those are the big ones. We have this great river system we can navigate up and down to move troops, food, and everything else, and without control of the rivers, you lose that.

Jonathan: You also had all the Japanese soldiers on those islands. At the end of the war, they didn't know they were done. They said, "We fight forever." You could run into an 85-year-old Japanese soldier saying, "No, son, this is my island."

Thomas: They were finding them into the '60s and '70s. People kept telling the very last one, "The war's over," and he wouldn't believe it. They had to find his specific commanding officer and fly him to the island.

This exercise you're watching us go through in real time, asking how this future thing is like a past thing, is how you write science fiction. There's nothing new under the sun. If you think something is new, you're not ready to write science fiction, because really it's old. If you understand the old thing that the new thing echoes, you can navigate the new thing.

This idea that killing a million people, and the moral weight of it, is new isn't actually new. Genghis Khan killed millions of people. His drones were humans. He'd give an order like, "Every warrior who does not bring me 10 right ears will be killed," and his warriors would go into the town and bring him back 10 right ears. They piled up the heads in pyramids. We can see Genghis Khan in the rings of trees in North America, because he killed so many people that it changed the carbon output of the planet.

So this isn't new. It feels new because Genghis Khan was a really long time ago, and his culture and his religion were different.

The Death of Aslan

According to Empire magazine's, Meryl Streep will voice Aslan in Greta Gerwig's Narnia: The Magician's Nephew. Nexus Point News broke the rumor in March 2025, and plenty of fans assumed it was an early April Fools' joke. On September 17, 2026, Empire made it official.

Empire also showed us the new Aslan. Gerwig's lion has mismatched eyes and a red stripe across his face, a look she built as a tribute to David Bowie. Breitbart pointed out that the design mixes fur and feathers and looks closer to a griffin than a lion. Gerwig told Empire she wanted an actor over 70 who could carry the wisdom of age and the wonder of a child. On the music, she went further: "I wanted a rock opera."

On X, Eric Metaxas wrote that casting Streep as Aslan is like casting Robert De Niro as the Virgin Mary, and that Gerwig is perverting the book for her own ends.

Breitbart headlined it as C.S. Lewis rolling in his grave.

In The Free Press, Liel Leibovitz argued the casting turns Aslan into "precisely what he is not: an allegory that may be repurposed and redesigned at will."

This is not just a Narnia problem. This problem is everywhere. And authors are partly to blame.

C.S. Lewis left little room for reinterpretation. He described Aslan as his imagined answer to what Christ might become in a world like Narnia.

Netflix Has a History of Literary Colonialism

Netflix bought the Roald Dahl Story Company in 2021. Then it brought in sensitivity readers and purged the words "fat" and "ugly" disappeared from every new edition. Mrs. Twit went from "ugly and beastly" to plain "beastly," and the editors added passages Dahl never wrote.

Dahl died in 1990. The progressives who own his books were editing his sentences 33 years later.

The Fans Have No Counter-Move

Netflix holds the screen rights to all 7 Narnia books through a 2018 deal with The C.S. Lewis Company. If you believe Gerwig is making the wrong movie, you can't make the right one. If you try, Netflix has the legal power to bankrupt your family.

British novelist Francis Spufford tried the faithful route. He spent 3 years writing The Stone Table, a novel that sends Digory and Polly back to Narnia. He asked the Lewis estate for permission and never got a reply. He printed 75 copies for friends, and The Times of London reported that the estate has turned down every request to continue the series. Under British law, Spufford can't sell his book until 2034.

Tolkien Got the Same Treatment

Lewis's fellow Inkling, J.R.R. Tolkien, fared no better. In 2017, the Tolkien estate sold Amazon the TV rights to The Lord of the Rings. The deal left out The Silmarillion, so Amazon's writers built The Rings of Power on the appendices and filled the gaps with their own inventions. Tolkien fans hate it with Fewer than half the viewers who started Season 1 going on to finish it.

Amazon locked itself into 5 seasons, with a reported $20 million penalty for every season it skips. Season 3 premieres November 11.

Every Story Has a Corporate Overlord

Star Wars: Disney paid $4.05 billion for Lucasfilm in 2012. This summer, The Mandalorian and Grogu became the lowest-grossing live-action Star Wars movie ever, and Disney's CEO admitted it underperformed. Disney's answer, according to JoBlo, is another Skywalker trilogy from director Jon Watts, with Rey expected back. Fans who want a different sequel have one legal option: wait for Disney.

Doctor Who: Disney co-funded 2 seasons starring Ncuti Gatwa at £6 million to £8 million per episode. Ratings fell after Gatwa replaced Jodie Whittaker, and an industry source told Deadline the show had become "too woke for Trump's USA." Disney walked away. The BBC kept the TARDIS, and the fans got no vote.

Star Trek: Alec Peters raised $1.1 million on Kickstarter for the fan film Axanar. Paramount and CBS sued, then wrote rules for every Star Trek fan film: a $50,000 fundraising cap, 2 episodes of 15 minutes each, and no "Star Trek" in the title. On July 26, 2026, Peters released a 21-minute film that broke those rules. It drew more than 120,000 YouTube views before a Paramount copyright claim took it down in under 3 days. Peters claims his film outdrew the free YouTube premiere of Paramount's Starfleet Academy over 48 hours, and he blames Alex Kurtzman for 10 years of mediocre Trek. An arbitrator ordered him to pay Paramount nearly $300,000 in 2023. Paramount still writes the rules, and Paramount decides how many minutes of fan love the law allows.

Copyright Was Built to Expire

For most of history, stories had no owners. Homer never licensed the Odyssey. Shakespeare took the plot of Macbeth from Holinshed's history, and nobody sued him. Even Walt Disney took adapted stories from the Grim Brothers.

Walt Disney was born in 1901, and died in 1966. The Grimm brothers died in 1859 and 1863. From Disney's birth back to Wilhelm's death is 42 years. From his birth forward to today is 125 years. Disney was born closer to the Grimms than we are to the moon landing.

Britain invented copyright in 1710 with the Statute of Anne. Authors got 14 years, plus 14 more if they lived to renew. America copied the limit in 1790: 14 years, plus 1 renewal of 14. The maximum was 28.

Run The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe through those rules. Lewis published it in 1950.

Under the original copyright law, Aslan would have gone free in 1978. Anyone could tell a Narnia story and fans would choose which stories were real. No corporation could buy a monopoly on Aslan and bankrupt anyone trying to set him free.

A Commons Lets the Best Version Win

Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol in 1843. Once the copyright expired, anyone could tell it. The Victorian Web cites 357 adaptations between 1844 and 1987. Alastair Sim played the definitive Scrooge in 1951. In 1997, a TV movie turned Scrooge into Ms. Ebenita Scrooge. Nobody had to sue anybody. Audiences kept watching Alastair Sim.

Disney made Mickey's Christmas Carol in 1983. The company built a hit on Dickens's public domain, then lobbied Congress in 1998 to keep its own mouse out of yours.

A creative commons is the cure for woke rot. When anyone can retell a story, a studio that turns the hero into an antihero has to beat the faithful version at the box office.

When one company owns the story for 95 years, the deconstruction has no rival.

The best thing you can do to protect your stories is to release them into the public domain upon your death. Don’t let your grandchildren ruin your legacy for a paycheck. Don’t poison their path to virtue with that kind of temptation.

Sources:

Commentary

Jonathan: Basically, Greta Gerwig wants to rewrite Narnia as a rock opera.

Thomas: And Aslan is going to be voiced by a woman.

Jonathan: Of course, everyone has all the reactions. You have people who are disgusted by it, and you have people getting behind it.

Thomas: They want to “own the chuds.”

Jonathan: Personally, I think this falls right into things being destroyed by woke ideology.

Thomas: It's literary colonialism. That's my new term. They long to take the stories conservatives love, take control of them, and then defile them in a way a conservative doesn't love.

Jonathan: And that's really what we want to talk about: they're taking control of it, and they can. We're talking about copyright. You can't save Narnia, because you don't own it. The rights were sold to Netflix, which can now do whatever it wants with it. Everyone is reduced to producing enough public outcry to make them stop, and that's what they wanted.

Thomas: The outcry is PR, and PR sells tickets.

Jonathan: Right. Hate-watching is a thing.

Thomas: The core problem here is copyright and how it has been distorted. When copyright was first created, it lasted only 14 years, and you could extend it another 14. That's how it worked in Britain and in the United States, and the Walt Disney Corporation lobbied to extend it.

If The Chronicles of Narnia had followed the old rules, it would have entered the public domain in 1978, and anyone could have told an Aslan story starting in 1978.

That means if somebody wanted to make a rock opera version, they could, and everybody else could say, "No, we're going to watch the real thing." Or a core fan who studied C.S. Lewis for decades, a true believer, could make a faithful modern version.

That's what you see with Sherlock Holmes. There's a new Sherlock Holmes every year from somebody different, and as fans we judge it. We all have an idea of who Sherlock Holmes is in our souls. Close your eyes and you can picture him. You have a sense of his intellect and his personality.

Sherlock Holmes can be adapted. He can be made modern, he can be made a woman, and you can choose as a consumer whether you like it. You have lots of options, and no company can bankrupt you for doing Sherlock Holmes without its permission.

This literary commons is critical for a culture. A culture needs a commons where anyone can tell a Thor story, an Odin story, or a fairy tale. What we have now, where it's all constrained, is an aberrant situation. And authors are to blame.

Many authors love their intellectual property and don't realize how it's poisoning our culture by keeping us from remixing. They don't realize they're tempting their grandchildren to sin, to sell out and ruin what they created. Every one of these IPs sits in some estate or trust, and the great ones of the past end up controlled by so many grandchildren that the only way to decide who controls the IP is who's willing to pay the most money.

That means the biggest, most corrupt corporations get the most control over our stories. We're stuck with Rings of Power, and there's nothing we can do about it. We're stuck with Starfleet Academy, the awful Star Wars, and the awful Star Trek.

You'll see true fans who want to tell a Star Trek story that's true to Star Trek raise their own money and give it away for free, and they get sued and bankrupted by the Star Trek company, because it doesn't want the competition. It doesn't want a true Star Trek story told. It wants Starfleet Academy told. Is it true to the spirit of Star Trek? Doesn't matter. They have control.

They have this weird, strange, toxic law that didn't exist until recently, which gives them perpetual ownership of intellectual property, a concept that didn't even exist 300 years ago.

There was no intellectual property for Shakespeare, and he still created great works of literature. There was no IP for Homer's Iliad or Odyssey. Still great works of literature. This idea that people won't tell great stories if they can't get ownership of their stories in the courts is just false. There's no evidence to support it.

Many of you are writing in the hope of making any money at all. Copyright law has no bearing on whether you'll write. If we are to save culture going forward, we need to start taking a stand against copyright and see it for what it is: a force of corporate control over humans.

It doesn't protect humans. Even with this big new settlement with Anthropic, most of the money is going to corporations. It's a way of giving money to corporations, not a way of encouraging human art.

I would love for the Pope, as he tries to bring humanity back to the arts, to take a stand against these awful intellectual property laws that put control over the stories in our narrative world in the hands of corporations that don't even care about profits.

Netflix could make more money with a faithful version of Narnia, but they don't care about the money. They care about desecrating the temples of their enemies, and they have the power to do it, so they are. They're violating their fiduciary duty, but who can say? "Oh, we thought it was going to be successful." They're always surprised that when they go woke, they go broke. It's a shock every time.

But it's not about making money. It's about defiling the temples of your enemies. They want to defile our temples, and they want to turn Aslan into Tashlan. C.S. Lewis saw it coming. Putting Tashlan in your story won't make it a Narnian story. It makes it a story from Tashbaan, and as far as I'm concerned, Netflix might as well be Tashbaan.

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