Breaking News: Anthropic Settlement
Thomas: Welcome to Author Update! We have some breaking news for you, but first, I’m Thomas Umstattd Jr. And I’m Jonathan Shuerger. And what’s our breaking news?
Jonathan: Today we’re gonna be talking about, just came out 10 minutes ago, the details of the Anthropic settlement. According to Publisher’s Lunch, Anthropic settled its copyright lawsuit, which is brought by a class of authors for 1.5 billion dollars.
Jonathan: The settlement will be split among the right holders of all the books included in the class after administration and lawyer’s fees and expenses, and will pay out in four installments with a full settlement finally being paid in two years. The court for the Northern District of California says Anthropic will pay the class at least 1.5 billion dollars plus interest.
Jonathan: With around 500,000 works in this class, that’s gonna be about 3,000 dollars per class work. So are you eligible to receive that payout? Thomas, what do you think?
Thomas: Probably not, but 3,000 dollars is enough to check at least.
Eligibility and Registration Rules
Jonathan: The eligibility seems to be like the book must have been registered with the Copyright Office within five years of publication before being downloaded by enro. So you do need to have a copyright registered. Your book has to have been downloaded by Anthropic. Works published or registered after July 2022 are definitely outside of the class. Some works, the cutoff is June 2021, and you have to have an ISBN or an ASIN, which if you’re following Novel Marketing, you already have those.
Thomas: So you have to have been considered notable enough by Anthropic to train on. So there’s only about 500,000 books that they trained on. So you can assume that these are probably the 500,000 bestselling books, or most notable books based off of whatever metric that they were using.
Thomas: If your book is from before July 2022 or June 2021, you might be in between those, but if you’re before June 2021 and your book was prominent either back in the day or today, and the copyright was registered in a timely manner, and this is the real hum dinger as we would say here in Texas, because this leads us to our next story, which is, Jonathan,
Publishers Failing to Register Copyrights
Jonathan: The Jane Friedman from The Hot Sheet put it, and I already knew this, so like this was surprising to me that this was considered news. The judge ruled that a book must have been registered at the US Copyright Office within five years of publication. Okay, so we already talked about that. Authors are finding out that their publishers haven’t registered their books for copyrights, even though they’re contractually obligated to do that.
Jonathan: I thought everybody knew that. I mean, from my experience in working in traditional publishing, the author has to remind the publisher to do that. Hey, did you register for the copyright? Oh, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ll do that.
Thomas: Copyright law, often to get statutory damages, the registration of the copyright must be timely. It must be done in a timely manner. I think often it’s within three months. I’m not a lawyer, so don’t quote me on that. But if the publisher doesn’t register the copyright in a timely manner, which isn’t super expensive, but it does cost the publisher money every book, then the publisher isn’t eligible for statutory damages. It’s only eligible for actual damages.
Thomas: And this is a perfect example of why statutory damages are so critical, because if you don’t have that registration, you’re not in the class. You can’t even try to get your 3,000 dollars from Anthropic. And that’s 3,000 dollars, I believe, per book. Which means if you’ve got 10 books in the class, you might have 30,000 dollars coming your way.
Thomas: This actually could be quite the windfall for authors who had books that were hits back in the day, aren’t selling at all anymore. But now that book is giving them 3,000 dollars of class action money. Definitely worth researching.
Thomas: You can check to see if your copyright was registered by going to copyright.gov. There’s a free search there. Don’t use anything copyright related that’s not a .gov website.
Thomas: When there’s a class action page, eventually there’ll be a webpage for the class and we will cover that. We’re gonna cover the story very closely. So if you’ve been published for a while, keep watching Author Updates. We will let you know what the next steps are.
Thomas: This won’t pay out quickly. A billion dollars seems like a lot, but Anthropic just had a funding round, I think earlier this week where they raised like 10 or 15 billion dollars. And it doubled their valuation just since June or July. So Anthropic is very quickly becoming one of the most valuable companies in the world. And this billion dollars is gonna be an operating expense for them, a sizeable one, but especially if it’s one that they can pay off with tomorrow’s dollars, I think they’ll be fine.
Thomas: But now every author who’s been published for a while has a vested interest in making sure that the AI bubble doesn’t pop because you only get money if there’s money to get.
Can You Sue Your Publisher For Missing Registration?
Jonathan: Can authors sue their publisher if they didn’t do this for that 3,000 dollars? So say the publisher doesn’t register the copyright and now my book is not eligible for it, even though Anthropic did. First, could an author go after the publisher and then should they?
Thomas: That’s really interesting because it is potentially a breach of contract. I’m not a lawyer, so don’t take my word for it, but 3,000 dollars is a breach of contract.
Thomas: But 3,000 dollars is small enough to maybe be able to go to small claims court and you have clear contract. It’s all black and white. The reason you can’t get this claim is because they didn’t fulfill the contract. You just take your contract to small claims court.
Thomas: Your contract might have an arbitration clause, which would keep you from doing this, and it may have a you can only sue in certain state clause. And if you don’t live in that state, you may not be able to do small claims court.
Thomas: I do have a patron tool to help with this. It’s called Not a Literary Agent, and it’s really good at reviewing contracts. I would upload your contract. This would be a question I would ask.
Thomas: There also might be a potential for class action of enough authors in a publisher. Didn’t get the copyrights registered. They all get band together. This is gonna be interesting. This is breaking news. So I haven’t seen any legal analysis on this.
Thomas: Hopefully your publisher was on the ball. They registered your copyright. But this is an indication of how financially cash poor a lot of publishers are, that they’re cutting costs in this very simple blocking and tackling part of being a publisher. It might be 30 to 50 dollars a fee per book, probably that again in administrative costs. So let’s say it’s 100 dollars per book, you’re publishing 10 books a month, that’s a thousand dollars they’re saving. It’s not a lot of money, but if they’re cash poor, many publishers are just broke. They have no cash. That’s why they’re not paying big advances.
Jonathan: It’s also a time thing. You gotta remember to do it. You gotta fill out the form, you gotta do the stuff, and it’s just administrative.
Thomas: Yeah. If you’re a savvy publisher, you have a person whose job that is.
Jonathan: It’s the cost. But let me tell you, organizationally, publishers are not fantastic on the administrative side.
Who Gets Paid, and How Do Indies Check?
Jonathan: Does the publisher get the money if they registered the copyright and have rights to the book? So does the author get that money or does the publisher get the money?
Thomas: I don’t know. My guess would be the author gets the money.
Jonathan: Copyright should be to them, not the publisher. Correct.
Thomas: Yeah. So most books, the copyright is in the name of the author. We may need to bring on an actual lawyer to walk through this, or if we wait, there will be lawyers who will comment on this and we can report on what those lawyers are saying.
Thomas: When we say this is breaking news, this broke in between me sending out the email about this and when we went live. We knew that the settlement details were coming. I was not expecting 1.5 billion dollars though.
Thomas: Do any other questions on that before we go to the next story?
Jonathan: There was one other question. How do indie authors find out if their book was used? How do indie authors find out if their book has been used? Well, like Thomas said, they’re gonna throw up a webpage and it’ll have the listing of the books that are included in the class action. Once that page goes up, go and check it and you’ll see if you’re there.
Thomas: If I were the attorneys setting up this class, I would make the search based off of ISBN number. You just type in your ISBN number and you could look it up.
Thomas: That page doesn’t exist right now. The first step is to see if you even have a registered copyright. In my experience, almost no indies register their copyrights. So you probably aren’t gonna be able to take advantage of this. But if you did register your copyrights and it trained on your work, maybe you can.
Free Speech Arrests in the UK
Jonathan: Some news from Europe regarding what Americans call First Amendment. An Irish author has been arrested by British police for tweets he posted from America. On September 1, 2025, Graham Linnehan, the Irish creator of Father Ted and The IT Crowd, was arrested at London’s Heathrow airport after he got in from Arizona. Five armed officers detained him over three X posts that went afoul the UK regime speech codes.
Jonathan: He had a healthcare issue due to high blood pressure during custody. He was released on bail with one condition. You are not allowed to post on X anymore.
Jonathan: This is just kind of the highest profile arrest recently regarding social media use as it is practiced in Europe or UK is showing up the most here. Canada’s like really close behind on the UK. Russia does this all the time, but it’s Russia and no one’s surprised by this.
Thomas: The UK does it more. They are arresting 30 people a day for speech violations and Russia’s only arresting about 10 per day. I believe Russia has a larger population, so you’re far more likely to be arrested for violating government speech codes in the United Kingdom than you are to be arrested for violating government speech codes in Russia.
Thomas: It’s not just social media posts in the UK. Christians have been arrested for praying silently in their heads and for quoting Bible verses. British jails are filling up with Christians and political dissidents. For authors, this is a concern, particularly if you write about controversial topics. It’s not just your writings on social media. They can get you arrested. It’s your writings anywhere. If they think that you are in violation of their speech codes, they may try to arrest you.
Thomas: You don’t have to be a subject of the crown. This man who was arrested is not a subject of the crown. He is a citizen of a different country. He’s a citizen of the Republic of Ireland. He did his quote unquote illegal conduct in the United States, and it doesn’t matter. The United Kingdom sees their speech codes as governing the entire world. They arrested him because I think he was flying through Heathrow. I don’t even know if England was his destination.
Thomas: There’s some question of if you’re flying to Europe as an American author, could you be arrested in Heathrow? Maybe. I don’t think that you’re at risk if you have an American passport. But I’m not convinced of that and they very well may.
Thomas: I do not think that the British are willing to arrest an American, but I’m not convinced. Also if you have a UAE passport, the UAE owns a lot of England now economically. If you have that kind of passport, I think you’re also safe.
Thomas: The question is if you have a Canadian passport, especially if you have a Commonwealth passport, I would be very cautious.
Hate Speech, Emotions, and Writing Truth
Jonathan: There are performative actions where you’re demonstrating your morality by taking a huge, possibly illegal step. The question is, what’s the threat level to an American who exercises their First Amendment right in the United States and then travels to the UK? What is the actual likelihood of them being taken into custody? And this is something we should use to govern our activity here.
Thomas: This would be the very best thing to happen to your book marketing maybe. You know how many books you would sell if you got arrested by the UK police because of your books?
Thomas: There’s a more fundamental issue here. People will say, oh, it’s because of hate speech and we’re trying to crack down on hate speech. Hate is a natural human emotion. It’s a natural outgrowth of human emotions like love. I can’t say that I love justice if I don’t also hate injustice. I can’t say that I love my wife if I don’t also hate harm coming to my wife.
Thomas: Trying to suppress a natural human emotion is very unhealthy, especially at a societal level. The kind of people who are advocating for suppression of hate speech are often deeply depressed. Any kind of extreme emotion, especially a public display of that extreme emotion, makes them very uncomfortable.
Thomas: It’s important for us as individuals to be able to experience the full range of human emotion. Feeling an emotion and doing a bad thing are very different. Learning self-control where I’m not a slave to my emotions is really important.
Thomas: God hates. There are things that God hates. You read the Bible and God hates quite a few things. Trying to say that hate is bad, you should never hate, is basically insisting that everyone be depressed. By depressed, I mean that their emotions are just quenched, that people are not feeling the full feelings of being a human.
Thomas: This kind of totalitarian control is unhealthy. Pray for England, pray for Northern Ireland, pray for Scotland, pray for the United Kingdom. And don’t let them bully you.
Jonathan: I’m really happy about this because now I can say the Author Update channel endorses hate, hate more people.
Thomas: No, love more. Love more is the point. Love justice, love your fellow man, and that causes you to hate the inverse of those things. I’m making a joke here.
Thomas: As an author, incorporate the full range of human emotions in your book. Have the courage to also include a clear morality. There should be consequences for bad actions. The truer your book is to true reality, the more verisimilitude your novel will have and the more real it feels. When you read Lord of the Rings, it has a very clear morality and has a very high verisimilitude.
Star Wars, Anger, and Character Arcs
Jonathan: Star Wars made this mistake. Anger leads to the dark side always. But the most pivotal moment of Return of the Jedi is when Vader says, I’m gonna go after your sister. That’s when Luke loses his mind, and that’s when Vader gets taken out. He does hold back from killing him at the end, because seeing the monster that rage just turned him into.
Jonathan: Then you go into the prequel series where you see the stagnance of the repressed Jedi. They created this stagnant dead structure that was just about maintaining the status quo where we’re all gray and we’re all not feeling anything. A lot of the novel writers tried to fix this. They were like, the Jedi were already dead. Like Order 66 was not about killing the Jedi. It was about sweeping the trash away. It was about clearing the area so that life could come back.
Suffering, Growth, and Writing Stakes
Thomas: Suffering builds character. There’s a worldview that suffering is the worst possible thing. That’s not true. Suffering can bring good. People go to the gym to suffer. Jonathan joined the Marines knowing they were going to make him suffer. It will make you strong. It will make you better.
Thomas: As an author, your character’s suffering, how does that impact them? Saying that suffering is always bad is toxic. And it’s toxic in your writing and society. High stakes are relative. A child doesn’t care about what’s going on in other parts of the world. The child just cares about will daddy be home for dinner or not.
Novel Marketing Conference Checkout Bug
Thomas: If you’ve been trying to check out with the Novel Marketing Pro Conference and the price has not seemed right to you, there is a bug on the promo page at novelmarketingconference.com where it’s doing some kind of strange currency conversion and showing a wrong price for some people some of the time.
Thomas: We’re aware of the problem. If you go to checkout, you’ll see the correct price and you’ll check out with the correct price. Early bird pricing will end at the end of September. Go to novelmarketingconference.com to learn more.
11 Labs Launches 11 Reader Audiobook Marketplace
Thomas: 11 Labs has launched a new 11 Reader audiobook marketplace where you can, with like five clicks, make your audiobook available for readers to pay you for, and you get 60 percent of the money.
Jonathan: Announced on September 3. Create your free account at 11reader.io/publishing. You’ll upload your manuscript. It will split the file, process it, generate lifelike, contextually aware narration in over 32 languages with another 31 planned.
Jonathan: Narration is on demand. Users select their preferred voice to listen to and the audio is generated instantly without you choosing that. Upside and downside. If you care a lot about the artistic performance, you will not be choosing that on this book. However, if you care about that, you’re not going to 11 Labs.
Thomas: 11 Labs has by far the best AI voices. They’re almost indistinguishable. They’re trained off of real human voices. You can pay and use a clone of your voice. They have really good voice cloning technology.
Thomas: Because it’s non-exclusive and there are no strict contracts, let’s say you’re planning to get a professional narration of your audiobook, but it’s not gonna be done for four months. You could, for the next four months, put your book on 11 Reader so that there’s something for readers to have. Then later you can take your book down off of 11 Reader. People who bought it will still have access, but new people don’t buy it. Then you can have your professionally narrated version on Audible and you could still be exclusive with Audible.
Thomas: It takes EPUB, PDF, TXT, DOC, even HTML. If your book has not been an audiobook this whole time, there’s no excuse. You need to have an audiobook now. 11 Labs AI voices are not eligible for Audible. This is an either or situation.
Thomas: If you pay, they have an 11 dollars a month plan. You can add multicast narration. You can add music or sound effects, and you can download the MP3s to sell directly off of BookFunnel or on your Kickstarter. They can help with distribution to Spotify. You get the same 60 percent, minus a 10 percent fee as your distributor.
Jonathan: They’re not requiring exclusivity. If you can’t get a narrator or you can’t get an audiobook made, you really gotta take a look at this now. See what your readers are gonna do. It can be a stop gap. Having this doesn’t mean that you’re committing to this forever. You can take it away and switch to human down the road.
AuthorCraft.ai Manuscript Analysis
Thomas: AuthorCraft.ai is a really cool new manuscript analysis tool. I had a call with the founder. It’s way more powerful than I’ll ever be able to make with Not a Developmental Editor. It does a lot of the things I do in the toolbox, but it kind of does them all at once. It gives you a complete editorial analysis of your book from a bunch of different angles down to creating pictures of each of your characters. It’s really quite cool.
Jonathan: It gives AI driven insights into, like Frankenstein, highlighting how successful books balance elements like pacing and character arcs despite the fact that those characters have imperfections. Machines like things to be perfect. For them to account for imperfections is a huge deal.
Thomas: I do have a couple free memberships to give out. I’m gonna be giving these out to patrons. If you’re interested, email me. The only thing I ask is that you test it out and email me a report of what you think, whether you like it or not. I’m trying to decide if AuthorCraft.ai is how good it is to see if I should work with them more in the future.
Thomas: If you don’t know how to email me, you’re probably not a patron. You can become a patron at novelmarketing.com/patron.
Zeitgeist: Grim Bright vs Noble Dark
Thomas: Last time we talked about zeitgeist, we talked about this graphic. We talked about how as a culture we’re in the process of transitioning from grim dark to noble dark. We talked a little bit about noble bright and what’s coming. What we never talked about was grim bright.
Thomas: In grim bright, the outer world is at peace, but the inner world is in turmoil. Whereas in noble dark, the outer world is in turmoil, but the inner world is at peace.
Jonathan: I actually reverse those in my head. To me, the grim or the noble is within. In Lord of the Rings, the world is dark, but the characters are noble.
Thomas: The quintessential grim bright story is Mary Poppins. It came out as a smash hit right as the JFK assassination marked the shift into the awakening. The bright elements are silliness and a stable, happy world. The children run away and the world is so safe and stable that Mr. Banks isn’t even concerned. The police find the children and bring them home. Mary Poppins is actually the antagonist fighting against what Mr. Banks wants.
Thomas: It still ends happy. The stakes are low. The stakes are, will this father have a good relationship with his children. It is not the end of the world.
Thomas: The grim elements are the deep sadness and melancholy. Think of Feed the Birds. The brightness of the story is tinged with realism about human flaws and family blind spots. The lonely old lady. The beginnings of unhappiness with institutions.
Thomas: Feeding the birds versus investing in the future. The film presents feeding the birds as the better choice. The dad invites Michael to a world of manly sacrifice to build a better tomorrow. Mary Poppins invites Michael to spend his tuppence feeding the birds. The big conflict is when Michael rejects his father’s offer. It brings the great institution of the bank crumbling down.
Thomas: The whole story narratively is a tragedy because Mr. Banks doesn’t get anything he wants. He is content in his consistent, orderly life. Mary Poppins, the antagonist, wins in the end. Mr. Banks embraces the inconsistency, chaos, and disorder of his children. The story is about a man turning away from external greatness and toward domestic life. It’s the kind of turn that’s only possible during good times.
Thomas: Disney set the story at the peak of the British Empire and released it at the peak of the American Empire. This is a story about good times creating weak men. Mr. Banks trades his ambition to walk with giants. He breaks his cup. He is very sad. He is a weak man who has internal fulfillment because he’s flying kites with his children.
How Mary Poppins Might Look in Noble Dark
Thomas: To adapt Mary Poppins for today as noble dark, I would darken the setting. Present day London. Migrant gangs roaming. The cops dragging people away to jail for complaining online. Fear of the government and neighbors.
Thomas: Mrs. Banks stays a feminist, but she’s fighting for women’s spaces. She sings about her friends being arrested for misgendering. Mary Poppins is a noble dark angel of discipline. She trains more than she coddles. Thrift, first aid, courage, grit.
Thomas: Age up the children. Jane and Michael are teenagers. Bert becomes an underworld fixer who uses his connections for good. They violently rescue the bird lady from muggers. Jane and Mary Poppins use their first aid skills. Mary Poppins teaches them not to be victims.
Thomas: Keep Mr. Banks at the bank, but make the bank corrupt. They’re profiting off the migrant crisis. Mary Poppins helps Mr. Banks repent from profiting off societal collapse. He ruthlessly works to root out the corruption. He must act quickly before he gets pushed out. He works long hours. Those long hours keep him away from his children.
Thomas: The key plot change is that when Mr. Banks invites Michael to help him at the bank, Michael accepts the invitation. Mary Poppins has helped Michael realize that he can do more good with his dad to build a virtuous institution.
Thomas: The resolution shows the father and the children working together in the bank to advance the good, the true, and the beautiful. In the final scene, now that they’ve purged the corruption, they fund the railroads through Africa and restore their broken city. They build a new, beautiful world together as a family.
Reboots, Fit, and Matching the Zeitgeist
Jonathan: The original Mary Poppins was about wonder. Enjoy the world. Enjoy feeding the birds. Enjoy magic. Mary Poppins is a transcendent character.
Jonathan: In the reboot, she seemed harder. I like Emily Blunt, but her character was harder. She resisted silliness and did not enjoy it. My kids don’t like that reboot.
Thomas: The story you are telling has to be connected to the time in which you’re telling it in terms of where the zeitgeist is. When you adapt a story to a different zeitgeist, you are making a different story. People are frustrated with Hollywood because Hollywood doesn’t know how to tell a story for the current zeitgeist. They keep telling stories from previous zeitgeists with better computer graphics.
Noble Dark, Grim Dark, Narnia, and Heroes
Jonathan: Who does what action determines what turning you are in. Noble dark is the good is under siege and it’s losing. We are looking for a hero who will make the good not lose. Grim dark is there’s no good. We need someone to crack the evil so that good can grow again. Noble bright like Narnia is that there is good and it’s so good that even the innocence of children can help it grow, as long as the witch can be removed. They don’t destroy her. Aslan does.
Jonathan: If you try to tell a bright story to dark people, it feels like gaslighting. Why aren’t you happy. Smile more. You can’t say that to people who are suffering like that.
Jonathan: I wrote The Exorcism of Frosty the Snowman for Marines at Christmas. It was a dark time. Frosty was a cosmic dark character. It was about a hero who could destroy the dark. The message is be strong and overcome this overwhelming evil so that you can make it to the light.
Know Your Audience
Thomas: Remember your Timothy. While society moves through this collectively, we don’t all move through it at the same pace. Some people are already into noble bright and some people are still in grim dark. Where to place your story, targeting your specific audience, will affect decisions that you’re making.
Thomas: Mark Twain saw how differently people in the North and South remembered the Civil War. If you’re writing for two audiences in different places in the turning, what resonates is very different. You are giving readers a narrative framework to help make sense of the world.
Final Encouragement
Jonathan: If you’re going to serve the people that you’re writing for, look at what Jesus did. Jesus looked on the multitudes and had compassion. He spent time with them. He saw them. He experienced what they were going through. Then he turned to his disciples and said, fix it. Your whole mission is to fix this.
Jonathan: You need to look and see what your audience needs. I know what my Marines need. We are people out of time. We deploy to Iraq, we experience the worst things in the world, and then we come back and we are people out of time. We are working really hard to try to get back so that we can enjoy life again.
Jonathan: In American Sniper, he’s incapable of ever coming back because the evil still needs to be destroyed. He couldn’t destroy enough of the evil. He felt like he had deaths on his conscience of the people he couldn’t save. That is something it’s very difficult to understand about heroes.
Jonathan: This is something I need to explore with Superman. Who he can’t save fast enough. The things he has to do. I thought the end of Man of Steel was great, where he has to save those people and does something he would not normally do. He breaks Zod’s neck to save people. Go to The Mandalorian season two. He takes off his helmet to log into the system to find out where Baby Yoda is. He has to confess to it later on. They cast him out because of it. He has to earn his place back into his tribe because he violated his own code to save his family. That is powerful.
Thomas: Love your book. Love your reader. Write a better book. If you ring the bell, you’ll be notified when we go live. Next week hopefully I’ll be back in my regular studio. Thank you so much for watching. Live long and prosper.
