Week Ending June 27, 2026

BookFunnel launched a feature that lets you bundle things into your ebook, and it’s something Amazon simply cannot match. KDP’s Global Fund grew 11% in April while traditional publishing went negative in real terms after inflation. A Harper’s Bazaar literary prize goes to an entry that scores 100% AI on a leading detector. Kobo blocked 45% of all submissions to stop the AI book flood. Apple hiked Mac prices up to $300 more because of chip shortages and Taiwan war games. And the Pope has something to say to every author with an unfinished manuscript, including George R.R. Martin.

Publishing News

BookFunnel’s New Tools Let Authors Bundle Bonuses That Amazon Can’t Match

BookFunnel now allows authors to bundle multimedia uploads. This will transform direct sales. Historically, Amazon is tough to compete with. When the product is the same, readers will choose the better ecommerce experience and ecosystem. Amazon always wins there, making direct sales a hard battle.

But what if the product is not the same? What if the version on your website was objectively better?

BookFunnel now makes it simple for authors to sell editions on their own sites and crowdfunding campaigns that include the ebook plus maps, character art, workbooks, templates, and other bonus materials in one purchase.

Amazon gives readers an ebook. With BookFunnel you can give readers the ebook plus a reason they should buy from you directly.

Multimedia Uploads Turn One Book into a Richer Experience (April 22, 2026)

The new Multimedia Uploads feature lets authors deliver almost any digital file (up to 300MB) through BookFunnel’s existing delivery system. Readers receive everything at once and access it from their BookFunnel library.

This creates a clear value gap. The Amazon edition contains only the core text. The direct edition can contain the core text plus the extras that make the world or the teaching come alive.

Potential multimedia companions for a novel ebook include a world map, character art gallery, character bible or dossier, family trees or lineage charts, cut scenes or deleted chapters, an alternate ending, a timeline of events, a language or magic system guide, a fashion or costume guide, behind-the-scenes author notes, a world-building encyclopedia, reader discussion questions, a character relationship map, a bonus novella or prequel story, a recipe collection, and coloring pages.

Potential multimedia companions for a nonfiction ebook include a printable workbook, an implementation tracker, a templates pack, checklists, a quick reference guide, a case study library, video walkthroughs, swipe files, spreadsheet tools, a habit or routine tracker, decision-making frameworks, script or email templates, mind maps, an assessment or diagnostic tool, an action plan template, bonus interviews, printable wall posters, a community onboarding guide, an expanded glossary, before-and-after examples, a monthly review template, and course companion materials.

These ideas work especially well when bundled together. A novel could offer “The Complete World Experience” bundle (map, character art, timeline, and bonus story). A nonfiction title could offer “The Full Implementation Kit” (workbook, templates, trackers, and video walkthroughs).

BackerKit Integration Brings the Loaded Edition to Crowdfunding (April 28, 2026)

BookFunnel also connected to BackerKit so crowdfunding backers receive the full bundle instantly when they pledge, follow, or reserve. Authors can now offer “Instant Access” rewards that include the ebook plus all the maps, art, and bonus files without manual fulfillment. This strengthens early campaign momentum because backers get immediate, tangible value instead of waiting.

Sources

BookFunnel Blog: More Than Books – Introducing Multimedia Uploads

BookFunnel Blog: Meet the New BackerKit + BookFunnel Integration

BookFunnel Author Knowledge Base: Deliver Ebook and Audiobook Sales

BookFunnel Direct Sales Tag Archives

Jonathan: The key thing this unlocks is the ability to deliver PDFs, downloads, and additional ebooks every time somebody buys. If you’re running a Kickstarter or selling direct from Shopify or Payhip, you can deliver all the goodies in one easy click. That’s what makes it a much more special experience than ordering from Amazon.

Thomas noted that while you’ve always been able to sell companion products through your website, the delivery has been complicated. Now BookFunnel delivers it all in one place, and they’ve added integrations with Wix and essentially every store you’d want to use.

Thomas: For nonfiction, this is a game changer. Nonfiction ebooks have always struggled against physical books because readers want to dog-ear pages, highlight, and flip around. But if you include printable workbooks, implementation trackers, templates, checklists, and swipe files, you give readers assets to help them actually do what you’re teaching. That solves the “why should I buy direct when Amazon is easier” problem. Your version comes with things Amazon simply can’t offer.

One strategy worth considering is to sell those add-ons separately for $5 or $6, then make clear that buyers who purchase direct get them included. Suddenly your $5 ebook looks like a bargain compared to paying $5 on Amazon plus another $6 for the bonuses.

Jonathan: Fantasy readers in particular want the artwork. Create a phone wallpaper or home screen background and include it with the ebook. Every reader who uses it becomes a walking advertisement for your book.

Amazon has added a companion PDF feature on Audible, but it’s a single document. Until BookFunnel poses a serious threat to Amazon’s market share, this is an arbitrage opportunity for authors selling direct.

One caveat worth noting is that selling direct only helps if people already know who you are. If your problem is obscurity, opening a direct store just adds a new problem without solving the original one. But if you already have an audience, this feature makes your ebook genuinely more appealing, especially given that ebook margins can run close to 95% when selling direct.

The 300MB ceiling applies to files delivered through the bundle feature. For audio, BookFunnel supports audiobooks through a separate delivery action, so if you want to include a soundtrack or short audio content, set that up as its own delivery action rather than trying to bundle it as a file.

Did an AI Written Book Just Win Another Literary Award?

According to a June 20, 2026, post by writer Nabeel S. Qureshi on X, another apparently AI-generated story won a literary prize judged by a panel that included novelist Ruth Ozeki. Qureshi highlighted the result and called for prizes to add Pangram checks or update rules to address AI writing openly.

Harper’s Bazaar UK published the winning story on June 18, 2026. The competition ran under the theme “The Conversation.” Kavyta Kay won for “Back and Forth.” She receives a two-night stay at Devon’s Burgh Island hotel. The magazine published the full story along with runners-up entries.

The judging panel discussed the shortlist at Claridge’s. Members included Harper’s Bazaar UK editor-in-chief Lydia Slater, features director Helena Lee, Women’s Prize-winning novelist Ruth Ozeki, literary editor Erica Wagner, 4th Estate publishing director Michelle Kane, and Peters Fraser & Dunlop CEO Caroline Michel. Michelle Kane described the winning entry as “rich and immersive, layered with meaning.” Ruth Ozeki said it “evokes with precision and power two parallel worlds, two trees, two times, two countries, two cultures, and two opposing sets of human values.”

Nabeel Qureshi and readers ran the published story through Pangram Labs. The detector returned a 100% AI-generated result. Pangram claims low false-positive rates on medium-to-long texts. Independent tests cited by the company and discussed in the X thread include evaluations from University of Chicago researchers at the Becker Friedman Institute in 2025 and University of Maryland studies that ranked it highly against other detectors. The same tool flagged multiple regional winners in the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the 2025 overall winner when Pangram tested the full archive earlier this year.

The X post triggered widespread discussion, accumulating hundreds of thousands of views within days. Writers pointed to recurring stylistic patterns now associated with AI fiction, including anthropomorphized natural objects that hold human emotion or trauma, specific phrasing around “knowing” and “waiting,” and a polished yet generic profundity. Some argued the judges either missed obvious tells or had not trained themselves on current AI capabilities. Others countered that literary merit should outweigh origin, that AI functions as an advanced editing tool, and that no detector is infallible on revised text. The winner, Dr. Kavyta Kay, is an academic at Leeds Beckett University whose published work focuses on race, identity, and diaspora themes that overlap with the story’s cultural elements. As of June 25, Harper’s Bazaar and the winner have not issued a public response.

This case follows a clear pattern that emerged in 2025 and intensified in 2026. Prestigious outlets and prizes continue to select work that detectors and attentive readers flag at high confidence levels. The Commonwealth Foundation responded to similar allegations in May 2026 by noting that shortlisted writers had personally confirmed their work as original. The debate over detection reliability, hybrid human-AI processes, and evolving norms persists.

Authors should treat this as an immediate signal. Contest rules that only require “original work” now face practical pressure. Some competitions will likely add explicit AI policies, mandatory disclosures, or verification steps. Others may carve out space for labeled AI-assisted entries. Writers who want to stay competitive in traditional prize circuits should test their own drafts against current detectors, strengthen personal voice and specific lived detail that remains harder for models to match consistently, and monitor rule changes in major calls. Those who use AI tools should track emerging disclosure expectations to protect both eligibility and reputation.

Prizes that fail to address AI capabilities directly risk repeating this cycle. The question now centers on whether major awards will update their processes or normalize machine-generated and machine-assisted fiction alongside human writing.

Sources

Nabeel S. Qureshi on X (June 20, 2026)

Harper’s Bazaar UK: “Read the winning entry of the 2026 Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Competition”

Pangram Labs: “AI is Writing Prize-Winning Fiction” (May 21, 2026)

Commonwealth Foundation statement on 2026 Short Story Prize allegations

Thomas: With all of these stories about AI winning awards, it’s worth flagging that Pangram is not nearly as accurate as it claims. It says 99.98% accurate, but the Nerdy Novelist recently ran tests and found it’s not nearly that reliable. It’s overly sensitive and can flag work as AI either far too aggressively or completely off base. We’re not saying this story was written by AI. We’re reporting that someone else made that claim. It’s also worth noting that person happened to be someone who didn’t win the award.

Jonathan: I suspect long term people are going to stop caring. I listen to Viking war chants, and I’m pretty sure 75 to 80% of them are totally AI. Nobody’s making Viking war chants for me except AI.

Thomas: I listened to a Christian song on a Spotify playlist and enjoyed it. I started if it was AI and then decided I didn’t care. Audiences may eventually stop demanding to know whether content was AI-generated and simply judge it on whether it’s good.

The longer-term trend, though, may be toward the easiest money in the industry, which is writing in the style of AI but with human authorship and documentation, then pursuing litigation against anyone who falsely accuses you of using AI. Detection tools are unreliable enough that false accusations will be legally actionable.

Kobo Joins the Butlerian Jihad Against AI Books

According to The Bookseller, Rakuten Kobo rejected 45% of every book submitted to its Kobo Writing Life self-publishing platform last year. Over 80% of those rejections happened because Kobo suspected the manuscripts were largely or entirely AI-generated and of low quality. CEO Michael Tamblyn called the flood a “firehose” of machine-written content that would have been barely a factor in previous years.

Kobo has effectively declared its own Butlerian Jihad.

In Frank Herbert’s Dune, the Butlerian Jihad was humanity’s crusade against thinking machines that had enslaved minds and souls. The commandment was clear. Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind. Kobo appears to have adopted a similar stance toward the wave of low-effort AI books threatening to bury real authors and degrade the entire self-publishing ecosystem.

Kobo’s Hard Line

Kobo does not merely ask authors to disclose AI use. The company actively rejects books that create what it calls an “unsatisfactory or incomplete experience for readers.” Its official guidelines explicitly list wholly or partially AI-generated content as a reason for rejection under that standard. Too short, lacking substance, formulaic, and generic are the books Kobo is turning away by the tens of thousands.

Tamblyn has been blunt. The platform received hundreds of thousands of machine-written manuscripts, most were obvious, most were low quality, and Kobo decided it would rather reject nearly half its submissions than let the catalog become a dumping ground for AI spam that no reader actually wants.

Amazon’s Different Approach

Amazon has chosen a different path. KDP requires authors to disclose when they use AI to generate text or images. Once disclosed, those books can remain on the platform as long as they meet Amazon’s quality and content guidelines. Amazon does not automatically reject AI-generated or AI-assisted books. It focuses enforcement on undisclosed spam, duplicate content, and titles that produce poor customer experiences.

In practice, Amazon plays the role of the pragmatic empire. It taxes the AI output through disclosure rules and removes the worst offenders after the fact. Kobo has decided it would rather stop the worst offenders at the gate.

The contrast is sharp. Amazon treats AI as a tool that authors must label. Kobo treats obvious AI authorship as a quality defect serious enough to justify rejecting nearly half of everything that comes through the door.

Why This Matters for Authors

For indie authors who use AI responsibly as a research assistant, outline generator, or editing aid, the Kobo policy creates new friction. A distinctive human voice or substantial human revision may still clear the bar. Pure prompt-to-book manuscripts with minimal human shaping will not.

For authors who avoid AI entirely, Kobo’s stance offers protection. A cleaner catalog means real books have a better chance of being discovered instead of drowning in an ocean of machine-generated noise.

For readers, the move could improve the overall experience on Kobo, assuming the detection process does not produce too many false positives. A platform that actively fights low-quality spam signals that it still values the relationship between writer and reader.

The Larger War

Kobo’s decision reveals a deeper tension across self-publishing. Platforms built on the promise of “anyone can publish” are now confronting the reality that anyone with an AI prompt can publish at industrial scale. The result is a new form of gatekeeping driven not by editorial taste but by survival. If every platform becomes a firehose of undifferentiated AI content, readers will leave and the entire channel loses value.

Kobo has chosen to fight that future with rejection. Amazon has chosen to manage it with disclosure and post-publication enforcement. Both approaches carry risks. Overly aggressive filtering can punish legitimate authors. Lax standards can drown everyone in mediocrity.

The Butlerian Jihad has arrived in self-publishing. One major platform has decided the machines must be stopped at the border. Another has decided the machines can stay if they declare themselves. Authors now face a practical question, namely which platform’s philosophy better serves the books you actually want to write and the readers you want to reach?

Sources

The Bookseller: Rakuten Kobo rejects 45% of submissions after slew of AI-generated books uploaded

CBC News: How the publishing industry is navigating a surge of AI-generated content

Kobo Writing Life Help Centre: Why was my Book Rejected or Blocked?

Michael Tamblyn statements on Threads and LinkedIn (May 2026)

Thomas: Compare this to Amazon, which is fine with AI content as long as you disclose. Amazon doesn’t want to police what’s written with AI, what used AI for editing, or what’s been falsely flagged. They just say disclose it, and even then, the disclosure isn’t particularly prominent on the sales page. Amazon is friendly to AI because Amazon’s real money doesn’t come from selling ebooks. It comes from selling AI services to other AI companies. Amazon is a part owner of Anthropic and benefits from the AI ecosystem growing, so they’re not going to take overtly anti-AI actions.

Rakuten, by contrast, is an advertising platform that is being hurt by people getting their answers from AI instead of browsing webpages where Rakuten can place ads. They have a financial incentive to push back against AI. Their market power is limited, and most American authors don’t know what Kobo is. That said, Kobo is quite popular in Canada, and this move will likely be popular there too.

Jonathan: I don’t see this as a bad thing. Taking a hard line in this market is a way of setting themselves apart. If you can claim that every book on your platform is written by humans, that’s a significant differentiator. It’s like the Cantina in Tatooine. No droids. We don’t accept their kind here.

The Pope Wants You to Finish Your Novel Already

According to the official @Pontifex X account on June 24, 2026, Pope Leo XIV posted a direct challenge to writers everywhere: “Dear writers, we need your imagination, your narrative creativity and your lively thinking. We need these to create spaces of freedom and authenticity, within which divine grace can make the promise of consolation and peace resound.”

Pope Leo XIV welcomed roughly 20 major international authors to the Vatican. The private audience marked the 100th anniversary of the Libreria Editrice Vaticana, the Holy See’s official publishing house founded in 1926. Among the guests sat Nobel laureate Jon Fosse, Pulitzer winners Marilynne Robinson and Elizabeth Strout, plus Jonathan Safran Foer, Colum McCann, and others.

What the Pope Actually Said

Writing is an act of truth that reveals who we are and the future we dream toward. It is an act of humanity because stories train readers in empathy, letting them “see through the eyes of others” (quoting C.S. Lewis). It even concerns God, because wrestling with love, justice, suffering, and death in fiction brings people closer to Christ. He repeated the exact words Saint Paul VI once spoke to artists, “We need you.”

The Internet’s Immediate Reaction

Writers did not miss the memo. Within hours the quote raced across author circles with jokes that the Pope himself had finally lost patience with unfinished drafts. Replies ranged from ” Alright, Your Holiness, I’ll work on my novel some more” to “Welp, it looks like I can’t slack anymore. Time to Divine Grind.” One user simply posted a picture of George R.R. Martin with the caption “The pope is tired of waiting on Winds of Winter.”

Why This Matters for Authors

A sitting pope publicly declared that stories and imagination are not optional extras but essential for human flourishing and even for making room for grace. The affirmation carries special weight for Christian and faith-adjacent writers who often wonder whether their fiction “counts.” It hands every stalled novelist a fresh, high-level excuse to open the document again. The leader of 1.4 billion Catholics just said the world needs what you’re writing.

So, if that manuscript has been sitting in a drawer collecting dust, consider this your official nudge from Rome. The Pope has spoken. Your characters are waiting.

Sources

Pope Leo XIV’s Full Address to Writers

@Pontifex original post

Vatican News coverage of the audience

National Catholic Reporter report on attendees

Thomas: Why did this go viral? The tweet itself was likely written with AI, and it’s full of abstract, vague platitudes encouraging writers to write. As someone who goes to a lot of Christian writers conferences, nothing the Pope said is something I haven’t already heard in a dozen keynotes. Active creation honors God, it advances the kingdom, all good, all true. But why does this tweet have 8 million views and all these replies?

Jonathan: Because every author was retweeting it. And then people started saying, “See, even the Pope wants George R.R. Martin to finish The Winds of Winter.” So now the Pope has said it. God wills it. Deus Vult. Finish the book.

Author Alerts

KDP Global Fund Jumps 11 Percent While Traditional Publishing Posts Nominal Gain

According to the Association of American Publishers April 2026 StatShot report released June 24, overall publishing industry revenue rose 4.4% year over year to $887.7 million for the month of April. Year-to-date revenues through April climbed 1.7% to $3.7 billion.

Key Details from the AAP Report

Trade consumer books, the largest category, increased 3.6% to $768.9 million in April. Within trade, paperbacks rose 10% to $281.4 million, digital audio jumped 11.9% to $97.5 million, hardbacks fell 3.1% to $265.8 million, and ebooks slipped 1.2% to $84.6 million. Education materials rose 5.5% to $74.1 million in April. Professional and scholarly publishing edged up 0.3% to $33.3 million. Religious presses gained 2.8% to $63.7 million. Year-to-date through April, trade revenues rose just 1.0% to $3 billion while education materials increased 3.5%.

Inflation Adjustment

US consumer prices rose 3.8% year over year in April 2026 according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. After inflation adjustment, overall AAP-reported industry growth shrinks to roughly 0.6% in real terms for the month. Trade books show near-flat real performance. Year-to-date real growth for traditional publishing turns negative.

KDP Global Fund Comparison as Indie Proxy

According to data compiled by Written Word Media from Amazon KDP announcements, the KDP Select Global Fund reached $64.3 million in April 2026, up from $57.9 million in April 2025. That marks an 11.05% increase in the core payout pool for Kindle Unlimited page reads. KDP authors earned a total of $67.7 million from Kindle Unlimited in April 2026 including All Stars bonuses.

The cumulative KDP Select Global Fund for January through April 2026 totaled $254.1 million compared with $222.3 million in the same four months of 2025, an increase of approximately 14.3%.

After subtracting 3.8% inflation, the KDP Global Fund delivered roughly 7.25% real growth in April. Year-to-date real growth in the fund pool reached approximately 10.5%. Both figures significantly outpace the inflation-adjusted performance of AAP-reported traditional publishing revenue. This pattern reinforces that the indie ecosystem continues to capture expanding reader attention and author dollars even when legacy publishers post headline-positive but inflation-adjusted flat results.

Sources

AAP April 2026 StatShot Report

Written Word Media KDP Global Fund Payouts List

KDP Community: KDP Select Global Fund and All Stars Bonus Update – April 2026

US Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI data via contemporaneous reporting (3.8% YoY for April 2026)

Thomas: What we always do with the StatShot numbers that the rest of the industry doesn’t is compare them to two things. First, the Consumer Price Index, because if you grow 4% but inflation is 5%, you actually shrank by 1%. Second, we compare it to the KDP Global Fund as a proxy for indie publishing. Obviously, there’s more to indie publishing than just the KDP fund, but it lets us do an apples-to-apples comparison any month against any preceding month.

Traditional publishing grew 4.4% and indie publishing grew 11%. Adjust both for inflation and trad pub drops to basically zero while indie is still growing at 7%. Indie is gaining market share again, little by little.

BookBub Launches “New in Kindle Unlimited” Promotion

According to BookBub, the company launched its New in Kindle Unlimited email promotion on June 25.

BookBub editors handpick titles in their first 90 days of Kindle Unlimited enrollment and send genre-targeted emails to hundreds of thousands of power readers who already subscribe to the service, linking them straight to the Amazon product page.

Authors now have a direct new lever to trigger immediate page read spikes and sustained ranking gains on Amazon right after enrollment, with early partners already reporting strong revenue lifts that continue well past the promotion date.

Sources

BookBub Partners Blog: Introducing New in Kindle Unlimited

Thomas: This is also a good tool for a book that doesn’t have many reviews yet. If it’s brand new and it’s new in Kindle Unlimited, the lower review count probably matters less. This is also a new enough email type that there isn’t much competition in the inbox yet. Worth checking out.

Shuerger Delivers Fully Voiced Devil Dog Audiobook Chapters on Patreon

According to a Patreon post by Jonathan Shuerger published June 27, the author continues weekly Devil Dog chapters on Royal Road while pivoting to a new release model. Backers now receive each chapter a week early and gain exclusive access to fully voiced audiobook chapters loaded with sound effects and music. Indie authors can copy this hybrid approach to reward dedicated fans with premium audio while generating revenue through early-access tiers on Patreon.

Sources

Patreon: Devil Dog Audiobook Intro by Jonathan Shuerger

Thomas: Jonathan does the primary read but uses AI for some of the voices, plus sound effects, and it creates a cinematic experience. It’s like listening to a movie that he made himself. He’s planning an Author Arsenal episode on his process once it’s more dialed in. If you like this kind of story, a Christian Marine who goes to hell by mistake and slays demons through a lit RPG, go back it. The creator of Doom and Quake is apparently already reading it on Kindle Unlimited, which is either validation or cause for concern.

New Author Arsenal Writing Challenge Starts in July

The third iteration of Jonathan’s Marine-themed drafting challenge starts in July. Sign up on this Google Form to see just how many words you can squeeze out.

Technology News

Apple Raises Mac Prices

According to reporting from Bloomberg and Reuters on June 25, 2026, Apple implemented broad price increases across its Mac and iPad lineup after CEO Tim Cook warned in a mid-June Wall Street Journal interview that such moves had become unavoidable.

This is historic. Computers normally get faster and cheaper. Now they are getting more expensive at the same speed.

The Price Increases

The base MacBook Air rose from $1,099 to $1,299. The entry-level MacBook Pro climbed from $1,699 to $1,999. The new MacBook Neo increased from $599 to $699. The iPad Air jumped from $599 to $749. The iPad Pro moved from $999 to $1,199. Additional hikes hit the iMac, Mac Studio, Vision Pro, and several HomePod and Apple TV models.

The AI Memory Shortage Behind the Hikes

Skyrocketing demand from AI data centers has created an unprecedented crunch for DRAM and NAND memory chips. Tim Cook told the Wall Street Journal that price increases were “unavoidable” because the situation had grown “unsustainable.” Apple had absorbed earlier cost spikes to shield customers, but component prices surged so sharply that the company could no longer hold the line. The same memory and storage components power both AI training clusters and the devices authors use every day for writing, editing, and running local AI features.

The Shadow of Taiwan

Apple designs its silicon in California, yet TSMC in Taiwan fabricates the advanced chips that go into every recent Mac and iPad. That concentration creates a single point of failure. China’s ongoing military buildup and repeated large-scale exercises around Taiwan have kept blockade and escalation scenarios front of mind for supply chain planners. Any serious disruption at TSMC would instantly amplify the memory shortages already pushing prices higher.

What the Latest Simulations Reveal

Taiwan conducted its own computer-assisted war games in April 2026 as part of the Han Kuang 42 exercises, testing a sudden pivot from gray-zone pressure into open conflict. The most detailed public analytical modeling of blockade outcomes comes from the Center for Strategic and International Studies report “Lights Out?” published in July 2025 after 26 iterations.

The key findings for chip production center on energy as the decisive vulnerability, with natural gas supplies lasting roughly 10 days, coal about seven weeks, and oil around 20 weeks without resupply. Electricity generation could fall to 15 to 35% of normal levels in severe scenarios. TSMC’s fabs are extremely power-intensive and cannot sustain high-volume output on backup generators for long, meaning production would face major cuts or shutdowns within days to weeks under sustained energy shortfalls. Even with US intervention and convoys, merchant shipping losses would reach 40% or higher without direct protection. High-value chips might move in limited quantities via protected routes or stockpiles in the early weeks, but sustained high-volume delivery to global markets would collapse.

Why This Matters for Authors

MacBooks and iPads serve as primary tools for countless indie authors, podcasters, and content creators. Higher prices raise the cost of entry and replacement for machines that now need more memory to run Apple Intelligence features effectively. A Taiwan crisis would not only spike component prices further but could trigger outright shortages and production halts at the world’s most advanced chip foundry. These developments signal that the AI boom carries direct costs for creators and exposes fragile chokepoints in the semiconductor supply chain concentrated in East Asia. Authors who rely on reliable, up-to-date hardware and cloud or local AI workflows now face both immediate price pressure and longer-term geopolitical risk.

Sources

Wall Street Journal: Tim Cook interview on unavoidable price increases

Bloomberg: Apple raises Mac and iPad prices to counter memory shortages

Reuters: Apple raises prices on Macs and iPads as memory costs skyrocket

Focus Taiwan: Han Kuang 2026 computer war games details

CSIS: Lights Out? Wargaming a Chinese Blockade of Taiwan (July 2025)

9to5Mac and additional reporting on June 25, 2026 price adjustments

Jonathan: If you’d been watching Author Update a year ago, we told you to buy before this happened.

Thomas: I actually predicted this. There’s a concept in computing called Moore’s Law, the idea that transistors shrink in size by roughly 50% every 18 months. It has followed an epic exponential curve for decades, meaning computers have consistently gotten faster without getting more expensive. The $2,000 computer of the 1990s is still basically the $2,000 computer of today in nominal terms, even after all that inflation.

The problem now is that demand for chips is outpacing Moore’s Law.

Normally companies like Apple can hedge against memory price spikes by buying chips way ahead of time, but the current demand is so high that TSMC fabs are being booked out years in advance. By 2025, TSMC had reportedly sold out its entire 2026 memory chip production. Companies were paying today for chips they wouldn’t receive for a year.

That kind of crunch can’t be solved by simply building another factory. The complexity of turning sand into a modern computer chip, using nearly every element on the periodic table, means fab capacity can’t be expanded quickly.

The geopolitical piece adds another layer. I covered the Taiwan chip risk in a past episode. If China were to blockade Taiwan, overnight you could lose the ability to buy a new iPhone at any price. China wants to seize TSMC, not destroy it, but getting chips out of a blockaded country would still be extraordinarily expensive, and the global shipping industry has no culture or infrastructure for blockade running. The combination of AI-driven demand and Taiwan risk is what’s driving these specific price increases, not standard inflation and not simple corporate greed.

Did the Fable Ban Freeze AI Development?

A couple of weeks ago the US Commerce Department issued an export control directive that barred access for any foreign national to use Fable AI. Anthropic complied by turning the models off for every customer.

Two weeks later, on June 26, OpenAI announced it would not release its new GPT-5.6 family to the public right away. The company is starting with a limited preview for a small group of trusted partners whose names it shared with the government. Broader availability comes later, in the coming weeks.

The question now facing the industry is whether these government interventions have frozen AI development.

The Case That Development Has Slowed

Government pressure is now directly shaping release schedules at the two leading US labs. Frontier models no longer drop to everyone the moment the weights are ready. Public access to the absolute latest capabilities carries new delays and gatekeeping. Authors and developers who built workflows around rapid model updates now face longer wait times and sudden access changes. The old cycle of monthly or even weekly leaps in public performance has broken.

Chinese labs continue shipping strong open-weights models without the same friction, which widens their relative speed advantage. The signal to every company building on closed frontier models is clear. Your best tool can disappear or get restricted with little notice. That uncertainty slows investment and experimentation.

The Case That Development Has Not Frozen

The underlying technology keeps advancing. OpenAI still built and tested the GPT-5.6 family, which includes three distinct models. Sol is the flagship, Terra is a balanced option at roughly half the cost of GPT-5.5 with competitive performance, and Luna is the fast and low-cost tier. The company did not cancel the work. It changed only the rollout method.

Other labs outside the immediate US government spotlight continue releasing models at a steady pace. Business activity around AI remains intense, with IPO filings, custom chip announcements, and new agent products moving forward. The interventions have not stopped training runs or research. They have changed how the finished frontier models reach ordinary users.

In the longer run, the pressure may push the ecosystem toward more resilient designs. Teams that diversify across multiple providers and open-weights options become harder to disrupt with any single government action. That architectural shift can ultimately make AI tools more reliable for authors even if individual model launches slow down.

Sources:

Anthropic Official Statement on Fable and Mythos Suspension

OpenAI Official Announcement: Previewing GPT-5.6 Sol (June 26, 2026)

TechCrunch reporting on White House request to OpenAI

Reuters coverage of OpenAI deferring public rollout

Multiple June 2026 reports linking the timing of the two events (The Hill, Wired, The Information)

Thomas: There are two reads on this. The first is that OpenAI wants the kind of press that Anthropic got by releasing a super scary model you weren’t allowed to have. Putting the velvet rope across the door and making people wait in line for it creates a frenzy, and it hacks people’s psychology. That could explain the delayed rollout.

The second read is that the Trump administration is finally doing what the Biden administration threatened to do, which is regulating AI, and using the export ban as a way to do it. It’s an incredibly powerful mechanism that, at least in the short term, gives the government unilateral control over this industry.

There’s currently no way for Anthropic to verify whether users are foreign nationals. That’s non-trivial to build and enforce. Until they do, all the Trump administration has to say is “this is a weapon, and you can’t export weapons.” Congress, the Supreme Court, and the federal government agree that the White House gets to act quickly in the national defense space.

The AI industry did itself no favors by bragging. Anthropic’s lawyers would presumably prefer they had never called Fable a cyber weapon.

Jonathan: Anthropic’s lawyers are still going, “Sir, repeat after me. I will not call our new product a cyber weapon.”

Thomas: They gave themselves no cover. They said, “We are a cyber weapon, we are very dangerous,” and the Trump administration said, “You’re a cyber weapon, you’re very dangerous, and now you’re banned,” and then they said, “No wait, we’re not that dangerous.” Too late.

One additional development worth noting is that OpenAI is fixing their model naming. The new family uses Luna for the fast and low-cost tier, Terra for the balanced mid-tier, and Sol as the flagship, moving in order of scale. It creates a clear hierarchy similar to Anthropic’s Haiku, Sonnet, Opus, Fable, and Mythos naming scheme. For anyone tracking model capabilities across providers, having a consistent naming architecture makes it dramatically easier to know what you’re working with.

Zeitgeist

Why Vigilante Fiction Is Topping the Charts Right Now

Something is surging in the cultural imagination, and it isn’t superheroes saving the world from alien invasions. Vigilante fiction, stories about individuals who dispense justice when the system refuses to, is climbing bestseller lists and streaming charts simultaneously. In June 2026, Larry Correia‘s American Paladin knocked romantasy titles off the top of Amazon’s urban fantasy charts immediately after a $300,000 Kickstarter campaign. The same week, low-budget film Citizen Vigilante starring Armie Hammer muscled into the top 10 on iTunes despite having no theatrical release and a production budget reported as low as $5 million, before grossing an estimated $65 million and counting.

These aren’t isolated data points. They’re a signal.

What does the vigilante surge look like in the market?

Jonathan: According to Apple TV chart trackers from FlixPatrol, Uwe Boll’s Citizen Vigilante muscled into the top 10 movies on iTunes in the United States within days of its June 19, 2026 release. The low-budget film stars Armie Hammer as an American who turns vigilante against criminals in a broken justice system.

Thomas: When we say low budget, we’re talking as little as $5 million, essentially indie film territory. Reports have it already grossing something like $65 million, with no theatrical release, and it’s still surging. That’s a huge deal. It’s something everyone writing fiction needs to pay attention to.

Jonathan: According to the European Conservative, German film authorities de facto banned Citizen Vigilante by refusing to assign it any age rating at all, despite its violence level matching John Wick or The Equalizer, both freely available in Germany.

The story draws partial inspiration from real German cases that ended with suspended sentences for violent attackers. American audiences responded to the German censorship by pushing the film up the charts anyway. If you’ve ever been frustrated by a story about someone who murdered or assaulted another person and received a suspended sentence because they looked remorseful in court, this movie was made for you.

The same week, Larry Correia’s American Paladin seized the number one position in urban fantasy categories and made strong placements across hardcover, e-book, and hot new releases, and those numbers don’t even include the true fans who backed the Kickstarter, which raised $300,000. These are people who just bought the book on Amazon.

The novel follows Mike Spears, a drifter vigilante who hunts monstrous incursions from thin places in the modern American West. He operates with a gun and a code, answering to no official authority.

Thomas: I started listening to this book yesterday, and I’m already halfway through it. It’s so good. It’s more a vigilante story than an urban fantasy. The character is a regular vigilante hunting human monsters while also trying to find supernatural ones. He’s keeping his ax sharp by practicing on garden-variety human monsters.

It almost seemed like the same character from Citizen Vigilante, especially at the beginning. The stories diverge quickly because Correia’s is supernatural, but we’re seeing what looks like a new archetype. Except it isn’t. It’s a time-tested archetype that has appealed to American readers for hundreds of years, and it keeps reemerging.

How old is this archetype?

Jonathan: This concept is ancient and we see it in the Bible. When there was no justice, God said, “Here’s a judge. You’re going to get justice.”

Thomas: Samson operated outside the legal framework. He was fighting against the powers that be. And Shamgar had a sharp stick. That’s what he operated with.

Vigilante fiction in America goes back at least to 1782, when the legislature indemnified Colonel Charles Lynch, who conducted extrajudicial tribunals against loyalist plotters during the Revolutionary War. He punished loyalists to the British with whippings, fines, and property seizures, operating entirely outside the legal framework.

It goes back even further to tarring and feathering. If you’ve seen the HBO series John Adams, it portrays a tarring and feathering based on a real account in the Boston Gazette, January 25, 1774. A tax collector trying to enforce a tax the colonists refused to pay had his clothes torn off, was covered in boiling pitch, and then had feathers thrown on the tar while it was still hot. The boiling pitch created second and third-degree burns. Some people died of tarring and feathering.

This act of the people taking justice into their own hands was called Lynch’s Law. When a judge failed to give justice, the people appealed to Lynch’s Law, and there would be a lynching, up to and including hanging. Lynchings later took on a racial connotation, but they were originally used against whoever the mob felt had escaped justice. Colonel Lynch himself was hanging loyalists, Englishmen loyal to the British Crown. There was no racial element at the start.

Which fictional character is the ancestor of Batman, Zorro, and the Punisher?

Thomas: The origin of the masked vigilante in literature traces to a book by Robert Montgomery Bird called Nick of the Woods. Nick was a Quaker, a pacifist, and a man of peace. His family was killed by Native Americans and his government did nothing. He had no particular set of skills, being a Quaker, so he had to cultivate them. He became Nick of the Woods, dispensing justice himself because the courts failed him, going on a killing rampage to bring justice for his dead family.

There’s a lot of scholarship connecting Nick of the Woods to Zorro, to Batman, to every masked vigilante that dominated 20th-century comics. They can all trace their literary lineage back to this one book. Since it’s been in the public domain for generations, you can read it for free and write your own vigilante stories without worrying about anyone’s copyright.

Nick of the Woods is the Punisher. Nick of the Woods is Batman. Nick of the Woods is Zorro. Nick of the Woods is Citizen Vigilante and the character from American Paladin. It’s the same story, the same primal fear that someone is out there in the dark making the bad guys afraid.

Batman tracks the zeitgeist pretty closely. Sometimes it’s a goofy show; sometimes it’s dark and brooding. You’ll notice Batman has been killing more people in recent years, because the zeitgeist demands it. Readers are longing for brutal justice because they don’t feel justice is being provided in real life, and they’re seeking it in fiction.

What’s different about vigilante stories today?

Thomas: For many readers, the first time they heard the word “vigilante” was J. Jonah Jameson raging about Spider-Man. Spider-Man was called a vigilante because he was fighting forces the police couldn’t fight, including gods, aliens, and scientific marvels that a cop with a pistol is completely incapable of stopping. The police were good. Spider-Man was working with them as much as outside them. His message was, “I can fight this alien; you can’t. Let me do what you can’t do.”

That is not what we’re seeing in this new wave.

The issue isn’t “can’t.” It’s “won’t.” Both American Paladin and Citizen Vigilante share the same core premise. The police won’t investigate this, won’t prosecute it, or will let the convicted walk. The people these characters go after are often people who were convicted and then released, and the vigilante’s message is, “You shouldn’t have been let off for raping or murdering someone, so I’m going to give you justice instead.”

In Citizen Vigilante, the American character goes to a victim, a battered woman, and asks, “Do you feel like you got justice?” She says no, because the rapist was released. So, he goes and kills him. That’s why the film was banned in Germany. You can kill Russians in a fictional story and German film authorities are fine with it, but you can’t kill migrants from anywhere else.

Jonathan: The film Law Abiding Citizen hit about 10 to 15 years ago with a similar premise. Gerard Butler plays a man whose family is raped and murdered, one of the killers makes a deal and gets off, so he hunts them down. It turns out he’s a former CIA assassin, and he starts working his way through everyone associated with the travesty of justice his family suffered, whether cops, a judge, or anyone else connected to it. When you’re watching the movie, you’re never entirely sure if he’s right.

What’s the difference between a revenge story and a vigilante story?

Thomas: I think fatherhood is what makes the difference. A revenge story and a vigilante story both start as a pursuit of satisfaction. Both often begin with harm done to the protagonist’s family. But the father in a vigilante story extends his fatherly protectiveness outward. There’s another young girl who looks like his daughter who’s been abused by the bad guys, and so he goes and kills those bad guys too. It’s like saying, “I couldn’t give my daughter justice, so I’m going to give this young lady justice.” He’s taking on the role of the oldest government, the family government that predates the state, and saying, “The state has failed you, but for right now, you can be my daughter, and I will bring you what a father can give.”

That’s different from John Wick getting revenge for his dog. Nobody sees John Wick as a vigilante story, even though he follows a very similar code and doesn’t shoot up everyone at the nightclub, only the bad guys. It doesn’t feel like vigilante justice because he’s giving satisfaction for himself, not for victims.

Jonathan: Once John Wick gets the satisfaction of killing the one that killed his dog and took his car, it becomes a survival story. Nobody thinks of it as “just a dog” because they did a good job of storytelling. The dog was a surrogate for his wife. It was her last expression of love to him, and that’s what was casually destroyed. But it’s about vengeance, not justice.

Thomas: Here’s the clean distinction. In both American Paladin and Citizen Vigilante, the vigilante is acting almost as a neutral judge. He’s not the victim. He’s following a code, an objective and transcendent standard of justice. That’s what makes readers say, “Okay, we can accept what you’re doing.” It’s like Judge Dredd. He follows the law. That’s his code.

Jonathan: When they follow that objective standard, readers are willing to accept it, because they’re replacing the justice system that should have been doing the job in the first place. It’s different from a Western where the sheriff comes in and calms the mob so the judge can hold a proper trial and restore an institutionalized process.

Thomas: Another distinction is that revenge is personal. It’s “I want this person to suffer.” Vigilante justice is about institutions. The policemen in Citizen Vigilante didn’t victimize the woman, but they stood aside, so they still get killed. The judge didn’t convict the rapists, so he dies. That’s not revenge. It’s institutional accountability. It would be revenge if the victim herself were the one doing it, which is the kind of story we saw a lot in the ’70s. That’s not what we’re seeing now.

Jonathan: Vengeance and justice sit in a Venn diagram. God established cities of refuge in the law not because he said “don’t kill the guy who just killed your brother,” but to say, “Here’s a place you can run to so it can be handled in process.” Vengeance done correctly requires someone who can handle all the factors that go into it.

And cycles of vengeance are why we built Western civilization. Neutral third-party justice is a core element of it. If a jury of your peers convicts you and a judge presides over the hearing and you’re executed, the victim’s family has no claim of vengeance on the community. Nobody is solely responsible, so there’s no cycle.

What makes a vigilante character work on the page?

Thomas: The protagonists in both American Paladin and Citizen Vigilante are very careful to execute only the guilty. The Paladin has a code. If you’re going to write a vigilante story, that carefulness has to be part of it. Otherwise readers experience a visceral revulsion. It stops feeling like justice and starts feeling like a mob. If somebody strikes you and you kill them, that’s a life for an eye. That’s out of balance the other way. Life for a life has to be balanced.

What we’re seeing in these stories is the hard times making hard men. American Paladin‘s world is darker and scarier than any of Correia’s previous books, partly because it’s less magical. But there’s this beacon of light, the Paladin violently bringing justice through a dark world. You write a dark setting so the light can shine brighter.

Jonathan: Some people are built for violence. There are personalities more tuned to be destroyers. I have that personality. It doesn’t hurt me to hurt people. The only thing I feel is my hands aching or the recoil hitting my shoulder, because I find satisfaction in dispensing justice, whether it’s sanctioned by the government, in a self-defense context, or in teaching others to do the same.

If you don’t have that personality, I’m not sure you can write that character convincingly. You tend to stereotype and get a shallow interpretation. I’ve studied the way I have because I’ve seen how bad humans get. I know what humans are capable of, and I’m not letting them do it to my daughters. Even in the Marine Corps they noted I was willing to go further than anyone else.

I’ve met very few people who have this personality, and even fewer who do it right. There’s a meaningful difference between this and sociopathy. A militant atheist I served with in the Marines was getting on me about something in the Bible, and I asked him, “What do you think I would be without the Bible?” He stopped, thought about it, and said, “Okay, that’s a point in your favor.”

Thomas: I read The Sociopath Next Door, and it had me seeing a sociopath behind every tree. The very next book I read was The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Reading Lewis right after that, I thought, “Oh, Edmund is clearly a sociopath. The way he torments his sister is very sociopathic.” It was important to be reminded that yes, sociopathy is real and common, but it can also be redeemed. Aslan saves Edmund. And in my experience, sociopaths who get saved have to let the Holy Spirit operate as their conscience, because they don’t really have their own. They have to walk by faith for basic social interactions in a way that people with a functioning conscience don’t.

There’s a binary between sheepdogs and wolves. But a sheepdog can turn and start eating the sheep, and all sheepdogs descended from wolves. White Fang is the story of a wolf that went further into darkness than anything else and was then redeemed by love.

Is there an angle here for writers who don’t want to write a vigilante story?

Thomas: For women in the audience who don’t want to write a straight vigilante story but want to work with this zeitgeist moment, write a Beauty and the Beast story where the beast is a vigilante. It’s an ancient story found across all civilizations, about women softening the edges off of men. You see it in the Bible. You can argue Ruth and Boaz is a Beauty and the Beast story. It’s a tale as old as time.

The nature of the beast can change. The Disney version gives us a monstrous-looking creature, but the deep civilizational version is simpler. It is the woman handing the man a bar of soap. “If you want to be married to me, you’re going to use this. I appreciate the protein from the hunt, but wash yourself before you come in the tent.” You have to expand it and make it cinematic, but it resonates because there were beastly elements in my own life as a bachelor that have been, shall we say, improved now that I’m married.

Jonathan: There’s a cinematic from League of Legends on YouTube called “Still Here” that captures this beautifully. It follows Tryndamere, a warrior hunted by Death itself, smashing arrows out of the air and fighting off the spirit Kindred with everything he has. Then two arrows fly past Kindred’s head and hit the enemies coming up behind him. It’s his wife, Ashe, running out of the forest. As she reaches him, the demon light fades from his eyes, and in her face you read forgiveness. She says, “You had to, to live.” I use that video a lot when talking with people about PTSD, about men desperately fighting off death, saved by someone who simply loves them.

Thomas: There’s something very alluring to women in having conquered a man who is dangerous to everyone else but has a soft spot for her. That’s part of what makes Beauty and the Beast work so well. Even Pride and Prejudice has that flavor to it. The interplay between justice and mercy opens up a lot of interesting fiction, and it’s an angle worth exploring.

How do Christian writers justify a vigilante protagonist?

Jonathan: This isn’t just an American secular concept. God is very clear in Scripture. He says, “Take care of the widows, the orphans, the defenseless, and the innocent, or something will come for you.” Romans does say you should obey the government. But the institution God put in place before the king was a theocracy where every man was responsible for his home and his ancestral lands.

Justice brought by fathers, enacted by fathers and sometimes groups of men. It’s an extremely old scriptural concept. In Judges, when a travesty happened in the tribe of Benjamin and they covered for it, the other tribes got together and addressed it. Justice is the most important thing. When it’s enacted where it’s supposed to be, everything is all right.

We see a turn in Westerns where mob justice is portrayed as wrong, and there’s a point where it is wrong. It can’t be feelings-focused or impulse-driven, which is largely how mobs operate. But sometimes the mob is right.

Thomas: The standard of justice is written on our hearts. You see it throughout history, in the Old Testament, in Hammurabi’s Code, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life. That’s the default standard. The modern view that “an eye for an eye leaves the world blind and toothless” is basically arguing against justice altogether, and that’s very scary.

There does need to be room for mercy. What you want is a government that wields the sword and provides justice so the mob doesn’t have to, and so fathers don’t need to feel the need to do it themselves. We have a check on that in the jury system.

There was a case in Texas where a father came upon a man abusing his 12-year-old daughter. He started beating the man and didn’t stop when the man ceased to be a threat, which is where self-defense law says you have to stop. This father continued and killed the man with his bare hands. They brought him in for manslaughter and put it before a Texas jury. The jury looked at what the abuser was doing, looked at the father, and said, “I don’t see a crime here.” The prosecutor left very sad that day. That’s that life-for-a-life standard.

Jonathan: The story of David is important here. When his city was burned, his wives taken captive, and all his men’s families taken captive, David went to the Lord and asked, “Do I go up?” And the Lord said, “Go up.” You’ll see that pattern throughout David’s vigilante period. He didn’t just assume. He got direct authority from the source, and then he went. If you just claim you got it direct from the source and do whatever you want, then yes, you’re a murderer. But if someone is after your family and you ask the Lord whether this is a circumstance to turn the other cheek or to imitate your shepherd and take care of those under your care, and the Lord says “Go up,” then go.

Thomas: One thing American Paladin and Citizen Vigilante share is that the vigilante accepts the full moral weight of what he’s doing. American Paladin returns to the same line several times. The only thing required for evil to flourish is for good men to be afraid of doing hard time. The Paladin fully accepts that he who lives by the sword dies by the sword. I’d be shocked if Correia ends the series with the Paladin retiring peacefully somewhere. Part of walking this path is accepting its destination. The hard men that make good times are not the men who enjoy the good times. They die in the making of them.

Jonathan: Jesus came down and told the keepers of the law that they were doing it wrong. He healed on the Sabbath. He went into the temple and drove out the merchants with violence because they were misusing the law and the temple. Any time the supposed keepers of the law had anything to say about it, he called them mean and nasty names.

Thomas: The whip in the temple is totally his vigilante era. And notice how they responded. They asked him, “By whose authority do you do this?” That’s exactly the question you ask a vigilante. “Who gave you the authority?” And Jesus didn’t tell them. He gave them a riddle instead.

Jonathan: When they brought him the adulterous woman and tried to trap him, saying, “By your law that you say you wrote, she’s supposed to be killed, so do we kill her?” He knelt and wrote in the dirt. Think about where he was. He was in the temple. There should not be dirt you can draw in with your finger in the command hallway of the holiest building in the world. The fact that Jesus could kneel down and doodle in dirt tells you how far the maintenance of the temple had fallen. And it says the oldest down to the youngest were stricken in their hearts. When he stood back up and they were all gone, he asked her, “Where are those that accuse you?” She said, “I don’t know.” He said, “I don’t accuse you either. Get out of here and don’t sin anymore.” Grace and justice at the same time.

Where’s the opportunity for independent authors right now?

Thomas: You’re not going to get your vigilante story published with a traditional publisher. A major Hollywood studio isn’t going to pick it up. But what you will get is resonance with readers.

Arc Press isn’t a big publisher, and they’ve blundered this launch. They have the e-book priced at $14.99 and it’s not in Kindle Unlimited, despite the fact that Correia already reached the premium market with his Kickstarter. The fact that he’s anywhere near this bestseller list at $14.99 is mind-boggling. I haven’t been impressed with Arc Press’s marketing, positioning, or pricing, though I think they’ve done well on the editing side, because the book is fantastic.

The opportunity for outsiders is that you can just write the kind of book readers are desperate for. There’s a real hunger for this fiction right now.

Vigilante fiction lends itself very well to episodic storytelling. Zorro was episodic as a pulp. Batman has been episodic for 80 years. The Punisher, episodic. The structure is simple. Open with the bad thing the bad guy did, show the justice system failing the victim, introduce your vigilante who gives justice anyway. Rinse and repeat. That story will sell.

Dylan Hunter is doing exactly this with a vigilante-style episodic story at patreon.com/dylanhunterteam.

Jonathan: The most popular versions of these are the ones with fathers as the vigilante. Taken wasn’t a new story, but it hit the market so hard because everyone said, “Yeah, I like this.” When the Mandalorian lost Baby Yoda in season two, he went and got him back, and everyone was with him every step. When that scout trooper punches Baby Yoda and you just hear that little squeak, and my kids visibly startled on the couch. They couldn’t believe someone punched Baby Yoda. It just created this “yes, go get ’em” energy.

Should vigilante stories end in tragedy?

Thomas: It’s okay to write morally bad characters doing bad things if you do it in a moral way, which means showing them suffering the consequences of their decisions. When the American Paladin series is over, the Paladin has to die. He has to die by the sword. He has to drink the full measure of the cup he’s poured for himself. And in that way, his death is its own justice. He chose to walk this path; this path has a particular destination.

We’ve lost the ability in Christian fiction to write a tragedy. Christians don’t write tragic tales, but there are tragic tales in the Bible, and there is particular moral power to a tragic story. The best Marvel film, in my opinion, is Infinity War. Its ending is a tragedy. Your favorite characters turn to dust. American audiences in many cases had never experienced a real tragedy. People left the theater quiet and shocked. That is a powerful emotional experience. Powerful emotional experiences are what cause readers to love books.

Jonathan: I would say a wholly tragic story won’t do very well right now. People need hope. But you can make tragedy a part of your story. Susan’s arc in Narnia ends in tragedy. The Last Battle is a tragedy, and that’s why it’s people’s least favorite.

Thomas: The way Marvel got away with Infinity War is that they technically made Thanos the protagonist. He won. And Endgame was coming to undo it. Where American Paladin needs to end with the Paladin dying and the princess living. The knight fighting to protect the princess, St. George, needs to die ultimately, but the princess needs to be saved. Not true tragedy where everyone is destroyed. Tragic elements as a tool in the toolbox.

This is where Christian fiction is really weak. It’s trying to be Hallmark, and Hallmark has a very broken moral system. The villains aren’t really villainous, the evil isn’t really evil, and the redemption isn’t very redeeming. Nobody goes through a real moral arc. Nobody changes. The Narnia books, by contrast, have characters who are morally flawed. The children sin and do terrible things and experience consequences. Aslan tears Aravis’ back open with his claws in The Horse and His Boy. It’s shocking to a modern audience. People keep trying to recreate Lewis, but none of them are willing to go there. If you can’t go there, you can’t be Lewis.

What happens if writers get this genre wrong?

Thomas: Writing is complicated. If you get it wrong, you can distort the worldviews and morality of your readers. There is a very real possibility that the rise of vigilante fiction will lead to a rise in actual vigilantism, not the discriminating kind but the revenge-killing kind, factional violence, cycles of vengeance. These stories are resonating with millions of angry young men, and that’s a civilizational question that China, America, and Europe are all having to face right now.

If you’re not going to write the virtuous vigilante story, the one with a redeeming element and a core truth, other people will scratch that itch. And they may do it with a less moral code, in a very polluted way.

As an author, you can step in and use tragic elements as a warning and say, “I’m going to show where this path leads. I’m going to have a protagonist who’s doing bad things for good reasons, a core moral system that’s good, and I’m going to explore that in a true and good and beautiful way.” There’s a lot of power there.

One difference between American Paladin and Citizen Vigilante is that there’s an extended brothel scene in Citizen Vigilante that’s quite explicit. The citizen vigilante is not nearly as wholesome a character as the American Paladin. We have a choice about what kind of stories to create. There’s room for an even more righteous version, a paladin who’s genuinely divinely directed, not just operating on a secular appeal to higher justice. That story hasn’t been written yet. Some of you should write it, and write it quickly.

Jonathan: The point of all this is nuance. Understand what people want and also what they need. You can incorporate tragedy without losing hope. Just find what people need and give it to them without fear. If something stops you, ask yourself whether it’s genuine conviction or whether it’s anxiety about what might happen. Somebody might need that story.

Sources:

• Jared Taylor on X, June 18, 2026
• European Conservative: Banned Before Release – Germany Rejects Migrant Crime Movie
• Massachusetts Historical Society: John Malcom Tarred and Feathered in Boston (includes Boston Gazette and Country Journal, February 14, 1774 account)
• Historical Marker Database: Origin of Lynch Law (includes 1782 Virginia General Assembly indemnification)
• Apple TV: Citizen Vigilante
• Amazon: American Paladin by Larry Correia
• FlixPatrol: TOP 10 on Apple TV Store in the United States, June 2026
• Robert Montgomery Bird, Nick of the Woods (1837)